I’m pretty sure those things are trained on content which was obtained without paying royalties to the creators, hence by definition pirated content - so that would count as “piracy around them”.

On the opposite side, as far as I know the things created with Generative AI so far can’t be copyrighted, hence by definition can’t be pirated as they’ve always belonged to the Public Domain.

As for the engines themselves, there are good fully open source options out there which can be locally installed (if you have enough memory in your graphics card) and there seem to be thriving communities around it (at least it looks like it from what bit I dipped into that stuff so far). I’m not sure if it’s at all possible to pirate the closed source engines since I expect those things are designed to be deployed to very specific server farm architectures.

I did get the idea you were just quoting their excuse and meant it the same as in my post.

I just wanted to really hammer down the point beyond any doubt.

More like “not making as much money as they want”.

Thank the gods you put an /S at the end.

The expression “back to baseline” comes from Science and Engineering and literally means that something has gone back to the previous average flat level (for example: “the power line noise level spiked when your turned the machine on but is now back to baseline”)

Edit: not average, but actually specifically the original flat level below which things would not fall. Sorry, it’s kinda hard to explain in words but very easy to point out in a graph or a scope were it’s just this flat line to which things always return.

That expression makes sense if you’re talking about the rate of growth itself (i.e. the Lemmy rate of growth spiked at the time of the Reddit changes and eventually went back to baseline, since Lemmy is not growing any faster now than before the Reddit changes) but it doesn’t make sense if you’re talking about user numbers since the number of Lemmy users grew a lot with the Reddit changes and never went back to the average before them, not even close.

Your original post is not clear on which of those things you’re talking about when you wrote “back to baseline” and your subsequent posts are mainly talking about user numbers, giving the idea that that’s what your “back to baseline” is refering to, in which case you’re using that expression incorrectly.

It’s funny that without actually spotting the mistake I just read it as the op expecting multiple criticisms to and basically telling people bringing them to get in line.

Look for a processor for the same socket that supports more RAM and make sure the Motherboard can handle it - maybe you’re lucky and it’s not a limit of that architecture.

If that won’t work, breakup your self-hosting needs into multiple machines and add another second hand or cheap machine to the pile.

I’ve worked in designing computer systems to handle tons of data and requests and often the only reasonable solution is to break up the load and throw more machines at it (for example, when serving millions of requests on a website, just put a load balancer in front of it that assigns user sessions and associated requests to multiple machines, so the load balancer pretty much just routes request by user session whilst the heavy processing stuff is done by multiple machines in such a way the you can just expand the whole thing by adding more machines).

In a self-hosting scenario I suspect you’ll have a lot of margin for expansion by splitting services into multiple hosts and using stuff like network shared drives in the background for shared data, before you have to fully upgrade a host machine because you hit that architecture’s maximum memory.

Granted, if a single service whose load can’t be broken down so that you can run it as a cluster, needs more memory than you can put in any of your machines, then you’re stuck having to get a new machine, but even then by splitting services you can get a machine with a newer architecture that can handle more memory but is still cheap (such as a cheap mini-PC) and just move that memory-heavy service to it whilst leaving CPU intensive services in the old but more powerful machine.

In my own personal experience, as a gamer and having switched my main machine at home to Pop!OS some months ago, it’s more like “need Windows to run nearly 5% of games” thanks to Wine and Proton which work as adaption layers to let Windows programs (not just games) run in Linux.

(Curiously I use a lot more Wine with Lutris than Proton and Steam, so my success rate is even down to how far the main Wine project got, rather than any special juice that Steam might have added on their Proton branch of Wine - you don’t really need Steam or Proton to run most games in Linux and the success rate for just running games from GoG or even pirated ones is just as good and from some games it’s even the case that the Steam version won’t run but a pirated version runs just fine, probably because it was the DRM that the pirates cracked that caused the problems).

Mind you, at least in my games collection only maybe 1 in 20 have native Linux versions (which is still better than 99% of games being Windows only), but because of adaption layers like Wine and Proton, for most games you can run the Windows version of it in Linux.

Absolutelly, in the old days it definitelly was the case that Windows was needed for nearly 99% of games (I should know: I’ve been trying to switch my gaming to Linux since the late 90s), but that’s not at all the case anymore.

Your idea of how hard it is to game on Linux is at least 1 decade out of date.

I have a cheap N100 mini-PC with Lubuntu on it with Kodi alongside a wireless remote as my TV box, and use my TV as a dumb screen.

Mind you, you can do it even more easily with LibreELEC instead of Lubuntu and more cheaply with one of its supported cheap SBCs plus a box instead of a mini PC.

That said, even the simplest solution is beyond the ability of most people to set up, and once you go up to the next level of easiness to setup - a dedicated Android TV Box - you’re hit with enshittification (at the very least preconfigured apps like Netflix with matching buttons in your remote) even if you avoid big brands.

Things are really bad nowadays unless you’re a well informed tech expert with the patience to dive into those things when you’re home.

Beats getting a hoodie for Christmas!

(Don’t ask me how I know)

I use a pretty basic one (with an N100 microprocessor and intel integrated graphics) as a TV box + home server combo and its excellent for that.

It’s totally unsuitable for gaming unless we’re talking about stuff running in DOSEmu or similar and even then I’m using it with a wireless remote rather than a keyboard + mouse, which isn’t exactly suitable for PC gaming.

Mind you, there are configurations with dedicated graphics but they’re about 4x the price of the one I got (which cost me about €120) and at that point you’re starting to enter into the same domain as small form factor desktop PCs using things like standard motherboards, which are probably better for PC gaming simply because you can upgrade just about anything in those whilst hardware upgradeability of mini PCs is limited to only some things (like SDD and RAM).