Totally random observation, but this site, Windows Central (I think it belongs to a company named Future PLC), is bloated as hell. So it was somewhat ironic seeing them publishing about how Microsoft should make Windows less shitty for its users
I heard Seedance is also full of restrictions now, although the model seems to be better at that sort of “cinematic” look, which might allow it to compete with Veo 3 and the like.
The issue is that Sora ended up getting the short end of the stick: by generating the footage, it became the primary target of complaints. Meanwhile, they were forced to remove the videos, but people simply took those videos and uploaded them to random social media platforms like Twitter, TikTok, or YouTube, which ended up hosting the content while being much less of a target, since the content wasn’t generated there.
Honestly, I think the only way forward will be to wait for local models to become good enough so that you can run something like Sora locally and generate whatever you want.
Seedance has a lot more restrictions now, but still arguably not as much, it's probably cheaper for ByteDance to run, and as you said, it at least looks good enough to be worth paying for.
Sora had all of the downsides, and attracted all of the scrutiny. Local-first is definitely the way.
i think it's clear cloud hosted is the actual future, which people have predicted for decades. it will never make financial sense to duplicate what you can get for cheap, because it's oversubscribed, with economies of scale and "if we let this run idle it's losing us money" pressure, for hardware found in a datacenter.
this has been the case for a long while now, and will increasingly be so as data centers buy up all the everything.
local first usually means extreme compromise so it can, practically, be run locally, because the cost of owning high end hardware is prohibitive. there are also companies providing locally deployed closed source models, that meet certain security requirements.
I'm reading this discussion, and allow me to give you my two cents. It's not a matter of being impossible, but rather how much the rest of society is willing to pay to maintain such infrastructure (either through higher taxes when dealing with the government, or through more expensive goods/services when dealing with corporations, since companies need to maintain old infrastructure that most people don't use).
For example, I read that Switzerland voted to guarantee the use of physical cash, even enshrining it in the constitution, which clearly points toward preserving older infrastructure. However, if you have cash but no one accepts it, it becomes useless. So it would probably require more—something like requiring businesses and the government to accept that form of payment.
As many things in life, not impossible: but is society willing to pay for that?
Regardless of what the company publicly says, I'm somewhat skeptical Chinese companies will block Chinese users from generating copyrighted characters in China out of love for US intellectual property..
> if the server operator was malicious, they could just push different client-side JavaScript
Same as with OS updates, browser updates, dependencies used by the OS, dependencies used by the browser. Also you can run malicious software such as keyloggers and you're compromised.
That argument doesn't mean E2E (even web based) is snake oil. Browsers just give you more points of failure.
The difference is: in web based cryptography, you get the cipher text and the code to decrypt it from the same source. Hijacking OS updates is arguably much harder than hijacking one particular web server, and there is pretty much no effective defense against malicious OS updates.
Agree, but a significant point missed in the article is that of data vulnerability. with E2EE the company db is useless to an external attacker.
For some companies (eg facebook, google, tiktok) i would be mostly worried about the company itself being untrustworthy. For others I would be mostly worried about the company being vulnerable.
> It is worth noting that this law also applies to non-web applications where the service provider supposedly being secured against is also the client software distributor; thus, the “end-to-end encryption” offered by Whatsapp and Signal, amongst other proprietary services, is equally bogus. (Both Whatsapp and Signal ban use of third party clients, and enforce this policy.)
the specificity of between web apps that is highlighted by the article is that you receive a bundled code of software every time you open or use the app, as opposed to say, the operating system or desktop apps, which are less frequently updated. (Native) mobile apps are like web apps in that they release updates almost every day.
As a windows power user myself, many of my workflows don't translate that easily. If you are an experienced Windows user, you probably have programs that you use on Windows and that aren't available for Linux. It's not that you couldn't theoretically translate that workflow into Linux, but boy, it would be a headache.
To give an example: I use AutoHotkey, it's a scripting language for Windows that allows you to do a bunch of things. You can customize the keyboard, mouse, you can create menus and toolboxes, you can target specific applications inside. It's a fantastic tool. But it isn't available for Linux for obvious reasons; Linux is much more fragmented. You need like 3 or 5 different programs to achieve the same result in some cases, depending on your given script.
In other words: debloating Windows and customizing it is considerably easier than installing Linux. Let alone some really good software you end up finding along the way: Everything, which is an amazing search program that allows you to create custom categories and the like. EmEditor, which is really good software to open and visualize really large text files, like it can open a 4GB txt with no problems.
About the last sentence:
>If customisability is important
People value both things: customisability but also they value their time (of not having to come up with a new workflow), they value the programs and workflow they already learned to use through the years, and so on and so forth.
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