On Wednesday, Stability AI announced it would allow artists to remove their work from the training dataset for an upcoming Stable Diffusion 3.0 release. The move comes as an artist advocacy group called Spawning tweeted that Stability AI would honor opt-out requests collected on its Have I Been Trained website. The details of how the plan will be implemented remain incomplete and unclear, however.

This seems like a step in the right direction, but it appears that artists will have to proactively register and manually flag matched images in the database. Ain’t nobody got time for that!

Long past are the days when I’d upgrade my production OS on day/week one, but I do try to read at least one or two reviews of the latest macOS to see how much of my FOMO is well-placed. And if you’re going to read just one review, it might as well be Ars Technica’s…

I haven’t waded into the depth of this review yet, but the opener has me underwhelmed:

The throughline for all these features is about making the Mac more welcoming and comfortable for people who come to it through one of Apple’s mobile platforms…

But when was the last time that the Finder, the Dock, or the Menu Bar was given a substantial, non-cosmetic rethink? When did Apple last make major improvements to the way that windows coexist on a given screen? The Mac does get new under-the-hood features that are specific to it, but the headline features are mostly iOS and iPadOS imports, especially this year.

I would absolutely love for Apple to rethink Finder! Having said that, the fact that this reviewer is down with Stage Manager on macOS despite how terrible I’ve heard it is on iOS is intriguing…

Stage Manager differs from standard macOS multitasking by offering a column of recently used apps on the side of your screen (it’s the left-hand side by default, but it will switch if you’ve got your Dock set to use the left-hand side of your screen instead). But unlike minimizing or maximizing an app from the Dock, each “stage” can contain multiple app windows from multiple apps; switch from one stage to another, and every window on that stage will pop back up on your screen in exactly the arrangement you were using before.

It’s off by default, thank goodness, but I would like to give this a try and see how it maps to my way of window/app management. Have you tried Stage Manager on macOS? What do you think? How does it compare to iOS?

Ars Technica takes an epic stroll down memory lane:

In their moment, minicomputers were used in a variety of applications. They served as communications controllers, instrument controllers, large system pre-processors, desk calculators, and real-time data acquisition handlers. But they also laid the foundation for significant hardware architecture advances and contributed greatly to modern operating systems, programming languages, and interactive computing as we know them today.

We were just discussing this machine on our upcoming episode with Brian Kernighan.

Linux users on Tuesday got a major dose of bad news—a 12-year-old vulnerability in a system tool called Polkit gives attackers unfettered root privileges on machines running any major distribution of the open source operating system.

Previously called PolicyKit, Polkit manages system-wide privileges in Unix-like OSes. It provides a mechanism for nonprivileged processes to safely interact with privileged processes. It also allows users to execute commands with high privileges by using a component called pkexec, followed by the command.

Oh my. It requires local access first, which is the only good news here.

Jim Salter writing for Ars Technica:

In our main Windows 11 review posted earlier this week, we covered the majority of new features and design decisions in Microsoft’s newest consumer OS—and it feels reasonable to characterize the overall impression given there as “lukewarm.” The good news is that we still hadn’t covered the best part of Windows 11: Linux.

If you could travel back in time and read this headline to college-me… I would’ve laughed you out of the room. Also, why didn’t you tell me about Bitcoin, ya jerk?! 😆

Ars Technica gave some of our favorite command-line tools the deep-dive they deserve:

Instead of giving you encyclopedic listings of every possible argument and use case for each of these ubiquitous commands, we’re going to teach you how to think about them—and how to easily, productively incorporate them in your own daily command-line use.

SerenityOS looks like a nostalgia-focused Linux distro, but it ain’t. All I have to say about this project (for now) is: wow

According to founding SerenityOS developer Andreas Kling, there is absolutely no third-party code in SerenityOS. “When we started,” Kling told Ars, “we imported four or five C standard library functions from NetBSD or something like that. But those were gotten rid of over time. We’re free of third-party code now, with the exception of the build process.”

Ars Technica goes long form for this (abridged) history of the C programming language.

In one form or another, C has influenced the shape of almost every programming language developed since the 1980s. Some languages like C++, C#, and objective C are intended to be direct successors to the language, while other languages have merely adopted and adapted C’s syntax. A programmer conversant in Java, PHP, Ruby, Python or Perl will have little difficulty understanding simple C programs, and in that sense, C may be thought of almost as a lingua franca among programmers.

But C did not emerge fully formed out of thin air as some programming monolith. The story of C begins in England, with a colleague of Alan Turing and a program that played checkers.

If you have some downtime this week[end]… find a comfy spot, a hot drink, and enjoy a history lesson on one of the most influential and still extant programming languages of all times.

People (mostly Scientists, but not only) are excited about Julia. Like, really excited. Why? A few reasons that might not be obvious to run of the mill software developers.

The Julia community is unified by something else, as well: a shared delight in the magical (this word cropped up more than once) power of Julia to facilitate collaboration and code reuse.

This Ars piece is a great read if you’re curious about Julia or if you simply dig programming languages and learning about new/interesting ones.

An in-progress series by the Ars Technica team looking at all the implications, limitations, and current realities of the much-hyped next generation in cellular networking. There are 3 articles thus far:

1. 5G in rural areas bridges a gap that 4G doesn’t, especially low- and mid-band
2. Taking 5G to work, in offices, and on the factory floor—will it help?
3. What the advent of 5G—mmWave and otherwise—will mean for online gaming

The future of work is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. The folks at Ars have been living it (to one degree or another) for two decades. In this epic post, Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson walks us through how they do what they do.

This story comes from Ars Technica, not The Onion:

In June 2017, Adams drove Hopkins to the domain-name owner’s house “and provided Hopkins with a demand note, which contained instructions for transferring the domain to Adams’ GoDaddy account,” the DOJ said. The heist didn’t go as planned, and both the domain-name owner and Hopkins ended up suffering gunshot wounds.

Can you imagine transferring a domain name at gun point?

Peter Bright writes for Ars Technica:

Microsoft adopting Chromium puts the Web in a perilous place. […] With Microsoft’s decision to end development of its own Web rendering engine and switch to Chromium, control over the Web has functionally been ceded to Google. That’s a worrying turn of events, given the company’s past behavior.

This post was mentioned in Slack by James Lovato about a former Microsoft Edge intern claiming Google callously broke rival web browsers. Then, Nick Nisi chimed in to mention this post by Jeremy Noring as “an interesting rebuttal/defense of what they’re doing.”