Is there any platform or medium where I can buy locally stored and DRM-free software?

Steam, but you’ll have to manually search around the forums to see which games does it and which doesn’t. It’s not exactly a well advertised feature, but integration of Steamworks copy protection is optional. Most of the games that are DRM-free on GOG are DRM-free on Steam too.

If the content is not stored locally and DRM free, then you don’t own it.

Have fun managing tens of TB of backups. I have given up on that quite a while ago, DRM-free is just not a practical for the amount of digital content you collect over the years. It’s a nice to have thing that comes in really handy sometimes (e.g. watching movies on unsupported device like VR headsets), but it’s not a solution for digital ownership. In some ways it’s actually worse, as you can’t practically resell DRM-free copies, as you don’t have a proof of ownership. You’ll also miss out on updates for new technologies (codecs, OS versions, etc.).

This needs a legislative solution or some NFT-like thing that gives you a certificate like “You own this, feel free to pirate if we go out of business”(digital signed by company).

Bing Image Creator if you just want to create some images quick (free, Microsoft account required). It’s using DALLE3 behind the scenes, so it’s pretty much state-of-the-art, but rather limited in terms of features otherwise and rather heavy on the censorship.

If you wanna generate something local on your PC with more flexibility, Automatic1111 along with one of the models from CivitAI, needs a reasonably modern graphics card and enough VRAM (8GB+) to be enjoyable and installation can be a bit fiddly (check Youtube & Co. for tutorials). But once past that you can create some pretty wild stuff.

Problem here is that “Open source platform” is a meaningless term. Open Source is a type of license that regulates how to redistribute source code. None of those principles apply to services and platforms, which are about data and control. If the Uber app would be Open Source, but still had to connect to the Uber server and play by its rules, nothing would change. Meanwhile if it played by its own rules, what rules would that be? There are no established rules for an “open” service platform, especially not when it comes to platform that have review and reputation systems build in.

Simply put, it’s really not clear how you can be “open” yet at the same time provide any level of protection against fraud and abuse.

Aren’t there NSFW filters after the generation? Bing Image Creator for example will frequently generate images with a borderline-NSFW[1] prompts, but only show you a subset of the four it generated, not all. Some prompts will also be rejected before any generation takes place at all. But I don’t see how this would help you getting through the filter that happens after the generation.

[1] “borderline-NSFW” really just means anything involving woman or violence, the filter on that thing can be extremely prude and often times a bit nonsensical (e.g. “woman in bikini” is blocked, “woman in 1950 bikini” that’s ok).

Warning! You will never be in a relationship with this model.

It’s AI generated, there is a good chance of them selling relationship-as-a-service in the near future. In a way, your chances with an AI model are way bigger than with a real one.

How do they ensure the same looking person is generated each time?

You can generate consistent faces simply by using random non-existent names. Which in turn you can use to train a custom LORA with Dreambooth (needs about 20 images) or use ROOP (a single one can be enough). And of course you can just mix and match it as you please, mix multiple real faces together into a new one, use dedicated face generators like https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ and so on.

This barely even takes effort anymore, e.g. quick ROOP FaceSwap with the photo from the article, which doesn’t look quite the same due to only a single input image, gets better with more, but that’s just shows how easy it is to generate a new face, which will than be consistent with itself.

The hard part is getting an interesting pose, expression and haircut into this, as well as sponsored products and stuff. Generating realistic images with AI is pretty easy, but getting variation into them so they don’t end up all looking the same can get tricky.

Edit: Five more minutes of effort and it starts to look a little closer.

Horses were never “employed”.

They did a job and got paid for it (in food and housing). Sounds like employment to me. You can call it slavery if you prefer. But that doesn’t change the fact that there were jobs that used to be done by a horse, that is done by a machine now. Meanwhile the resulting increase in productivity and market growth didn’t create new jobs for horses, they were simply no longer needed in the job market. Machines where used for all the new jobs that appeared right from the start. The horsepower the horse provided could be provided easier and cheaper by a machine.

What jobs are left for the human once AI can replace their brainpower? Blue collar jobs might be safe for a while longer until robotics catches up. But a job that is mostly shifting information around, be it spreadsheets, phone calls or art, all of that is slowly getting into reach of being done by AI.

Body images that are so unobtainable that we literally made them up.

Don’t worry, we already have plenty of beauty filters that can run in real time and make everybody pretty on the Internet.

Seriously, I think people still vastly underestimate how much of everything you see today is already fake. “AI is bad”-news kind of hides the fact that none of this was real to begin with.

Hasn’t everything been fictional since the invention of Photoshop some decades ago? And even before that people have been faking photos by analog means. Photos, especially in the context of advertisement, have never been non-fictional.

How many horses are still in employment outside of entertainment?

Crux is that Facebook/Meta has now been almost a decade in the VR space and they still have no idea what to do with it. They are just stumbling in the dark wasting tens of billions of dollar with little to show for. They sure have the money and will to build the next big thing, but only a very vague idea of what that thing might even be to begin with. It doesn’t help that they basically fired everybody of the original Oculus crew that got the VR space up and running again in the first place. Even their Metaverse that they spend so much effort hyping up is a complete nothingburger, it’s not just that nobody cares, it’s that they haven’t even managed to build anything worth calling that, they are still playing catch up with features from PlayStationHome 15 years ago (or Habitat from over 37 years ago).

depth is reliable

What if one of them is dirty? What if you are driving with the sun right in front of you? What on a foggy winter day? The big problem here isn’t even what the cameras are or aren’t capable of, but that there is little to no information on all the situations Tesla’s autopilot will fail in. We are only really learning that one deadly accident at a time. The documentation of the autopilots capabilities is extremely lacking, it’s little more than “trust me bro” and “keep your hands on the wheel”.

The fact that it can’t even handle railroad crossing and thinks trains are a series of trucks and buses that blink in and out of existence and randomly change directions does not make me wanna blindly trust it.

Humans don’t have the best track record when it comes to safe driving, might not be the best idea to imitate them when there is better tech around.

It’s a general problem with ChatGPT(free), the more obscure the topic, the more useless the answers will be. It works pretty good for Wikipedia-style general knowledge, but everything that goes even a little deeper is a mess. This is true even when it comes to things that shouldn’t be that obscure, e.g. pop-culture things like movies. It can give you a summary of StarWars, but anything even a little more outside the mainstream it makes up on the spot.

How much better is ChatGPT-Pro when it comes to this? Can it answer /r/tipofmytongue/ style question?

That depends heavily on the framing. AI right now is overrated, it can do a ton of stuff, but rarely anything useful. AI in the (near) future however will eat all our jobs and everything else.

It’s always worth keeping in mind under what restrictions current AI still operates. ChatGPT never saw a compiler or a shell, never could test its code. It’s pure book-knowledge without any practical experience. Yet it still can produce quite good code, at least for small problems. What it might be capable of once it has access to a compiler and runtime environment could far surpass what we have today. But it’s speculation, since we don’t have that yet.

We could absolutely do it

Every exploration into hostile environments heavily relies on goods and services imported from the rest of Earth. Biosphere 2 is as far as I know still the only time we ever tried to actually build a completely independent ecological system, but that was 30 years ago, in a non-hostile environment, only run for a short amount of time, still had tons of problems and would still be missing a lot of stuff to be truly self sustaining for long time periods (e.g. no industrial facilities).

They store it encrypted on your device such that you can’t access it yourself, only their app can access it.

they don’t keep your data.

They don’t allow you to export your chat history, it’s locked in the app:

https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/t5m666/exporting_a_single_signal_chat_history/

That’s not only crappy app design, that outright violates European law:

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/

Ain’t perfect, but close enough for now: https://imgur.com/a/mHHeJyn