It’s not AI that is the problem, it’s half baked insecure data harvesting products pushed by big corporations that are the problem.
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Also, CoPilot is going to be bundled with Office 365, a subscription service. You’re literally paying them to spy on you.
- be microsoft, a whole bunch of greedy user-hostile fucks
- make spyware
- tell users that spyware is really cool and useful
- make them pay for the spyware
- use the spyware to get their data
- sell their data
- profit
Capitalism almost perfected.
- create a monopoly on operating systems
- leverage your dominant market position and force everyone to use your spyware
- big profit
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I think the bigger joke is calling LLMs AI
I have to disagree.
Frankly, LLMs (which are based on neural networks) seem a Hell of a lot closer to how actual brains work than “classical AI” (which basically boils down to a gigantic pile of
ifstatements) does.I guess I could agree that LLMs are undeserving of the term “AI”, but only in the sense that nothing we’ve made so far is deserving of it.
seem a Hell of a lot closer
“seem” is the critical word there. Interacting with an LLM they do seem to be pretty clever.
I’m not talking about interacting with it. I’m talking about how it’s implemented, from my perspective as a computer scientist.
Let me say it more concretely: if even shitty expert systems, which are literally just flowcharts implemented in procedural code, are considered “AI” – and historically speaking, they are – then the bar is really fucking low. LLMs, which at least make an effort to kinda resemble the structure of biological intelligence, are certainly way, way above it.
I’m actually sad that the state of AI deserves the hate it gets. Neural networks are so sick, just going through the example of detecting a diagonal on a 2x2 grid was like magic to me. And they made me second guess simulation theory for quite a while lmao
Tangentially, blockchain was a similar phenomenon for me. Or at least trust networks. One idea was to just throw away Certificate Authorities. Basically federate all the things, and this was before we knew about the fediverse. It gets all the hate because of crypto, but it’s cool tech. The CA thing would probably lead to a bad place too, though.
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The fuck?
Let’s agree to disagree then. An LLM has no notion of semantics, it’s just outputting the most likely word to follow up to what it’s already written and the user’s input.
On the contrary, expert systems from back in the 90s for, say, predicting the atomic structure of an element, work like a human brain on steroids. It features an arbitrary large search tree that the software knows how to iterarively prune according to a well known set of chemical rules. We do the same when analyzing a set of options.
Debugging “current” AI models, on the other hand, is impossible because all we’re doing is prescripting a composition of functions and forcing it to minimize a loss function. That’s all we’re doing. How can you currently tell that a certain model is going to work? Unless the mathematical theory ever catches up with the technology, we’ll never know until we execute the code.
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Runs locally, mirrors remotely.
To ensure a seamless customer experience when their hardware isn’t capable of running the model locally or if there is a problem with the local instance.
microsoft, probably.
That is an accurate description of AI in common usage even if it isn’t an inherent aspect of AI.
Right, but AI is not the only way they’re doing the data collection.
Locally run AI could be great. But sending all your data to an external server for processing is really, really bad.
You wrote AI twice.
It’s not the “AI nightmare”, it’s a nightmare of capitalism, proprietary software and user-hostile behavior by a greedy, profit-extracting Big Tech corporation.
All true, and all a problem for which linux has been a solution (in the computing world) for decades now.
It’s not just Linux, but free & open source software in general. And it’s not just desktop PCs that are plagued by this corporate spyware, it’s much worse when looking at the mobile device landscape. The only real solution for mobile devices is GrapheneOS with FOSS software installed from the F-Droid marketplace. Browsers are also under attack by proprietary software corporations, Google just intentionally broke adblockers on all Chromium-based browsers, so they can generate more ad revenue. Last year, they tried to push a proposal that would have massively extended their monopoly on web browsers (WEI). All the streaming services are screwing their users over and increasing the subscription prices while making the content library smaller. It’s such a fucking scam, and it’s almost sad to see how many people are dumb enough to fall for it.
To your last point: I think a significant number of people these days are aware just how much corporations are bending us over, but most of us are just so exhausted at the end of the day to really make a huge stink about it when all we want to do is just vegitate on the couch for a few hours before we have to go to sleep, then wake up the next day and do it all over again. The current paradigm is horseshit, but the puppeteers make sure we work ourselves to the bone so that we’re too tired to really do anything about it aside from bitching online.
Are browsers not able to patch manifest v2 back into the browser?
Brave apparently wants to do that, but it’s not a great long term solution. The feature should actually be supported upstream, that’s why Firefox is a much better option, and a better base for a fork to create a new browser.
Praise Stallman
Why are some hands blue? Shouldn’t it just be whatever’s on the main body?
It’s a spin on the Hindu god Vishnu (I think there might be a few depicted with multiple arms, but that the first that comes to mind)
This is Kali but yeah she is blue all over, body and hands. also, so is Vishnu.
You’re not wrong. AI is just another tool to scrape cash to the top while eliminating jobs. Could it realize benefits like doing specialized research and testing? Sure…but again, the results of that work are lost human jobs and scraping money to the top. We can argue about advancing technology in a horse cart driver vs automobile thing (won’t anyone think about the poor farriers out of work?) but we’ve already done everything we can to eliminate blue collar jobs with as much automation as possible. Now AI is set to attack middle class jobs. Economically I don’t think that’s going to work out well.
I mean, the problem isn’t the existence/obviation of jobs, but what we do next when it happens. If the people whose jobs are automated away are left out with no money or employment, that’s a serious problem. If we as a society support them in learning something new that puts their skills to good use, and maybe even reduce the expected working hours of a full-time job to 35 or 32 hours a week, that’s an absolute win in my book.
Well that’s the point. We don’t support them as a society. From education to health care once you lose your job, you’re SOL, and in this hyper-capitalist dystopia we keep tipping towards I don’t see that changing.
Online shopping has removed a lot of retail jobs. Instead of seeing a transition to different jobs or fewer hours, today we see people working multiple jobs to get by.
The reason these things are making money is specifically because they increase efficiency (how much money a capitalist can make from existing capital) by removing human labor. Giving any portion of that to laborers is completely antithetical to its entire purpose.
Yea, this is because society system is lagging behind and we have not done the right changes fast enough to prevent suffering due to technological advancements, in my opinion
But as someone pointed out elsewhere…AI can already take over the job of company CEOs… decision making tools could make a group of technical people be more effective than a CEO as we know today.
Let’s see how many CEOs get replaced.
Don’t forget the BoD are still human. They still want to profit by putting the AI in place of the CEO.
I find the nightmare getting a lot more noticeably bad with LLMs, though. That’s not just correlation.
AI is a cool feature, which makes a great excuse for proprietary corporations to spy on their users. I’d say it’s one of the best opportunities for an excuse of the last few decades. Only 9/11 was a better excuse to put everyone under corporate/government surveillance.
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“The Year Of Linux on Desktops”. Been hearing this for decades, but it might actually be happening.
Been hearing this for decades.
And it won’t ever be true until you can pick up a PC running Linux in a big box store. I could see the Steam Deck (and Valve’s rumoured upcoming console) to make a dent in the PC gaming space, but it won’t make a difference to the purchasing decisions of your your aunt who uses her pc to check her emails.
Should corporate buyers ever get tired of MS’ shenanigans they might switch over to Ubuntu, but I’m not holding my breath for that.
At work, we have a strict ban on purchasing any laboratory equipment that requires Windows. After about a year, several of our suppliers have been pressured to offer Linux support, precisely because we don’t have time for windows shenanigans on a $100k piece of advanced benchtop hardware. We just got our first oscilloscope with Red Hat preinstalled.
Also, regular people aren’t buying PCs as much as they used to. The PC is now a workplace and enthusiast device. Everyone else uses mobile.
The oldest version of Win I used was 95 about 2 years ago on chromatography machine (I think hplc or gas).
It is to my knowledge still in use in the school because the software don’t run on newer machines. The teacher told me that he don’t know what will he do when it dies. It isn’t really an issue on Linux.
It might be worth trying it in Wine. It has great support for older software especially.
Within the past year I have compiled new software for Windows 98.
In a lab environment, it’s important to strictly control software versions and understand thoroughly what gets updated. We also want the ability to use the same version of software indefinitely if it meets our needs.
I think that there are more issues like archaic connectors and stuff like that. You can’t find new hardware with 30yo standard io.
O&G still uses a lot of old versions as well. I remember back in the Win 7 days when I had to set up a 95 virtual machine and register a bunch of DLLs by hand plus set up a fake A: drive because even the 95 version of the software was garbage. A friend of mine did something similar but he got it working on the Win 7 machine somehow. I never understood how, but he left a script behind at the company he worked for because it needed to be reinstalled every time someone did something stupid and he didn’t want to do it by hand.
We ship a $50k instrument product running Windows, and everyone hates it.
As the only EE on staff, I got to spend a portion of covid soldering TPM chips to motherboards. Fun times.
Wow, that sounds painful. Not so much because it’s technically difficult, but ridiculous that you have to do that.
Yeah, they were tssop, so not hard. It was only necessary because the parts shortage crunch had the vendor shipping them without the chips installed.
I find it unbelievable that anyone ever accepted lab equipment with a Windows requirement. I mean, I know it is true, but what the fuck? Glad your work is doing this.
I was not around at that time. Some of the systems I support are very long lived. At the time, having windows running on some of your equipment wasn’t seen as a liability. I guess you have to get bitten a few times before you understand that you need control of that system including the software.
several of our suppliers have been pressured to offer Linux support
We just got our first oscilloscope with Red Hat preinstalled.
This is so cool. Really great to hear. I wish more companies and other institutions would do this. They have to realize that using Microsoft software won’t benefit them in the long term, and actually start pressuring hardware vendors into pre-installing Linux.
Part of that job is supporting fielded hardware and ground systems, think like automated test or verification systems. I think we’ve learned our lesson that we can’t afford to have unserviceable software.
At least with Linux and generally with an open source baseline, there is the option of throwing engineers at your problem because you have access to the code, and you can strip down the system to the bare minimum of what you need, and in doing so, really understand it. We don’t want to get into a situation where our hands are tied and we can’t fix it because the problem lies in the proprietary software while the vendor has long since abandoned any hope of support… grumble…
That kinda reminds me of my job, except that we build the unserviceable hardware and install Windows, as well as our proprietary software. Then we charge our customers shitloads of money for technical support. We’re a government contractor btw
It’s actually a pretty nice company (from an employee standpoint), we use a lot of Linux internally, as well as other FOSS software. But porting our products to Linux is hopeless, we have decades of C++ code that either relies on Windows APIs directly, or on our custom libraries that rely on Windows-specific stuff.
Shit, the iPad pro is pretty damn close to a laptop these days with the keyboard and track pad (just lacking the OS). I had a conversation the other day where someone mentioned how OSX and Windows are locking down their OS’s to the point where it wouldn’t be farfetched to guess that many consumer devices will eventually use essentially a mobile device OS.
I had a conversation with a friend about iPads lately related to the „just lacking the OS“. The newer iPads with M-chips have all the computing power an average user could need but it’s crippled by the mobile-ish OS, so all the computing power is for nothing basically. An iPad running MacOS (with some adjustments for the Touchscreen) would be awesome. But we concluded it won’t happen anytime soon, because then basically no one would buy MacBooks anymore
The only regular people I can think of are gamers and my mom but I would like the idea of PC’s returning to techie and specialized use cases
I’d argue the year of the Linux desktop passed years ago and now it’s just a saturation game. Most serious SW development is now on Linux laptops/desktops, Android owns the mobile space and versions are starting to make huge inroads in the laptop space. You can buy gaming systems running it trivially now.
Conversely, casual users of windows are dying off, fewer non technical people are using desktops for anything at all. Only institutional users are buying Windows keys and they’re some of the easiest to get on Linux because of the cost savings, particularly if you run Linux server infrastructure, a fight we already won over a decade ago.
Most serious SW development is now on Linux laptops/desktops,
I’d love a source for this. To my knowledge, most people that build to Linux hosts still use OSX.
a good indication is Microsoft making WSL at all
Source: I’m a super pro serious developer and I use Linux. QED if you don’t also use Linux, you’re not serious.
Thanks to the Steamdeck Linux users on Steam now outnumber Mac users. Still a tiny percentage of total Steam users but if developers increase support we will hopefully see that number take off.
Also helps that Valve isn’t porting source to Apple silicon.
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I loathe to be the BestBuy employee who sells a Linux box to a customer who only cares about the price difference.
Lenovo ships some models with Mint FWIW.
Framework laptops also ship without Windows if you wish. Certainly nice to save the money for not purchasing an OS license I won’t use.
I don’t understand people who choose the Windows option, like wtf, make an install USB yourself and activate it using a $2 key from ebay or just crack it using massgrave.dev. Linux is still the best option tho.
Your average Joe Schmoe probably has no idea that different operating systems on a given device are even a thing, they just see them as MacBox™, WindowsBox™, etc, they don’t see it as the blank hardware canvas we do. While I’ll agree it’s trivially easy to install Windows in the way you suggested, that’ll completely fly over the average user’s head.
Your average Joe Schmoe probably has no idea that different operating systems
But I don’t think that these are the people buying a Framework Laptop
Most aunts I know primarily use an iPad or phone to manage email.
For me the hang up is still hardware compatibility and fuss factor. I still haven’t seen a windows app that will check all hardware and software and give a pain scale rating on what switching would involve. I have an Asus wifi 6 card, a stream deck, a Logitech trackball with Logitech customization software, a Logitech Webcam, a dygma keyboard running bazecor software. I’m sure there are some hidden headaches awaiting the transition. Once I finally get all that worked out, I will probably want to upgrade my surface and my ThinkPad as well and imagine even more headaches with these.
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Decades ago it was a funny joke. Now it’s the most popular handheld OS on the planet by a huge margin. Linux is damn EVERYWHERE except the desktop now, and it’s only a matter of time.
This is why (as per usual) Stallman was right: the “GNU/” part matters. Linux is already all over the desktop (or at least, the laptop) in schools, in the form of Chromebooks. That means the entire next generation is going to grow up using Linux.
The only trouble is, it’s locked-down Google/Linux that they’re using, not GNU/Linux. All the freedom and user empowerment has been neatly excised from it such that it only facilitates consumption, not creativity.
The only trouble is, it’s locked-down Google/Linux that they’re using, not GNU/Linux. All the freedom and user empowerment has been neatly excised from it such that it only facilitates consumption, not creativity.
And within that frame, I’d be very surprised if it ever breaks out into the mainstream. Google brought android to the world as a vessel to make money. You very rarely hear about GNU in the wider world, outside of tech circles, being promoted to the masses as a viable alternative specifically because no one stands to profit from it, and they can’t have that.
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Been hearing this for decades.
I’ve been hearing this about people hearing about people hearing that about Linux for decades.
We can dream 😔
Seems like we’ll get financially viable fusion power plants before that happens.
I don’t see a “year of the Linux desktop” happening, but rather its share growing slowly over the years. Windows would probably not have one big event that ends its dominance, but it can be a death of a thousand cuts.
Guess which OS won’t be recognized as a “trusted environment” to visit websites with down the line in Google’s upcoming Web DRM. For your own protection of course…
This I would actually want to see.
I would so laugh when their most of their profits go to EU Antitrust Fines.
Or they pull an Apple and only EU device owners get to choose their own browser.I really wouldn’t, because I wouldn’t want to risk them succeeding. It could be like Meta with WhatsApp, they just say “sure anyone can interoperate with us, they just have to use the Signal protocol because it’s the safest and what we use”. Google et al could say “any system could be considered trusted, as long as these security criteria are met” and the criteria are such that they go completely against the form of user control of the OS and software that Linux is all about. Technically a Linux distro could be made to meet the requirements, but pretty much no current day Linux user would ever want to use it because they’d be giving up the thing that made them switch to Linux in the first place - their control.
I can easily believe these types of continued enshittification will help drive more users to Linux desktop usage. But that will still be a small percent.
People have to know and care about the problem and then be willing to put in the effort to understand what to do. That combination is pretty limiting.
I’d love to be proven wrong, though.
I think it might. Demographics are changing to make PC users more technical overall. The casual user isn’t looking to purchase a desktop PC. Casual is now synonymous with mobile.
It used to be that you needed a desktop to do your taxes or make an insurance claim over the Internet. That’s just not true anymore.
The demographics are stratifying, more than anything. I work in child education and kids do not understand computers nowadays. They understand how to interface with their phones, but kids see any electronic that behaves outside the “app” paradigm – landlines, desktop computers, what have you, and immediately don’t understand. I do think that linux usership is going to go up, but there also needs to be an investment in increasing literacy in kids to make sure usership of linux stays up, otherwise the pendulum will swing back hard
The counterpoint are people like this, the feature they want is built on extreme data gathering. https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a8fec90b-c349-46c9-8592-5dbe17ea4c8c.jpeg
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People may not want it but most don’t know, care enough to adjust, or are just generally complacent. I mean, I DO care and find it hard to move to Linux due to lack of support for some of my work tasks.
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CAD work in Linux blows. I say this after trying multiple options.
I’m not so sure that the laypeople will, but I do expect a shift. Personally I’m still running Windows 10 next to Linux currently. Most of my time is still spent on Windows, because it’s generally a bit more stable and hassle free due to the Windows monopoly. Software is written for Windows, so sadly it’s usually just a better experience.
But so many things I read about Win 11 (and beyond) piss me off. It’s my computer, I don’t want them to decide things for me or farm my data. I’m mentally preparing for the transition to Linux-only. 90% of the software I use will work out of the box, and I think with some effort I can get like 8% of the rest to work. It’ll be a lot of effort, but Micro$oft has pushed so far that I’m really starting to consider.
Multiple friends and colleagues (all programmers) I spoke are feeling the same way. I think Linux may double in full-time desktop users in a few years of this goes on.
Firefox is like 2.8% of browser market share, so if that’s our baseline then Linux is already beating it by a mile.
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I like other Gecko browsers premises better. I use waterfox. Mozilla Corporation already tries to enshitify when they have 2.8%, imagine how bad they would be with more than 30%.
The combined ages of my children taken from 2024 would not equal the first year I heard that Ubuntu would take over the market.
For me the year of the Linux desktop was 2014 - it’s when I changed my desktop to Linux after using it on my laptop for a year. All the hardware on that machine has been replaced, but it’s still running the same install from back then.
People keep pointing the finger at AI, but miss the fact that the problem is corporate greed. AI has the possibility to help us solve problems, corporate greed will gate keep the solutions and cause us suffering.
Sure. But then, Linux may well be a solution against corporate greed.
Linux is a solution against corporate greed, it directly takes market share away from Microsoft, and is a viable competitive alternative with few drawbacks.
What drawbacks?
Photoshop is a birch to get running
Those trees always getting in the way…
How does Premiere Pro do?
Not sure, but Davinci Resolve works
I recently watched this video where the guy says it doesn’t work, or rather the whole Adobe suite doesn’t.
They switched to Kdenlive and seem to be happy with it, but it sounds like it was a bit of a project to learn the new editor.
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Not sure, but Davinci Resolve works
Mainly incompatibilities, manual setup requirements, heightened understanding of technology requirement. Not necessarily Linux’s fault, but still drawbacks.
I want all the cool Ai shit, but I want to be in charge of it 100%. I don’t want a data mining company with an OS side project spying on me for profit.
Enshittification is the result of the user not being in control: markets have a natural tendency to become dominated by a few companies (or even just a single one) if they have any significant barriers to entry (and said barriers to entry include things like networking effects), and once they consolidate control over a large enough share of the market those companies become less and less friendly and more and more extractive towards customers, simply because said customers don’t actually have any other options, which is what we now call enshittification.
At the same time Linux (and most Open Source software) is mainly about the owner being in control of their own stuff, not some corporate provider of software for your hardware or of a hardware + software “solution” (i.e. most modern electronics) provider.
So we’re getting to see more and more Linux-based full solutions to take control of one’s devices back from the corporations, not just Linux on the Desktop to wrestle control back from an increasingly anti-customer Microsoftw, but also, for example, stuff like OpenELEC (for TV boxes) and OPNSense (for firewalls/router).
LLMs in particular are unlikely to solve really any problems, much less a measurable number of the problems it is currently being thrown at.
Tell that to the code I have it write and debug daily. I was skeptical at first, but it’s been a huge help for that, as well s learning new (development) languages.
I do not agree with @[email protected]’s take. LLMs as these are used today, at the very least, reduces the number of steps required to consume any previously documented information. So these are solving at least one problem, especially with today’s Internet where one has to navigate a cruft of irrelevant paragraphs and annoying pop ups to reach the actual nugget of information.
Having said that, since you have shared an anecdote, I would like to share a counter(?) anecdote.
Ever since our workplace allowed the use of LLM-based chatbots, I have never seen those actually help debug any undocumented error or non-traditional environments/configurations. It has always hallucinated incorrectly while I used it to debug such errors.
In fact, I am now so sceptical about the responses, that I just avoid these chatbots entirely, and debug errors using the “old school” way involving traditional search engines.
Similarly, while using it to learn new programming languages or technologies, I always got incorrect responses to indirect questions. I learn that it has incorrectly hallucinated only after verifying the response through implementation. This makes the entire purpose futile.
I do try out the latest launches and improvements as I know the responses will eventually become better. Most recently, I tried out GPT-4o when it got announced. But I still don’t find them useful for the mentioned purposes.
That’s an interesting anecdote. Usually my code sorta works and I just have to debug it a little bit, and it’s way faster to get to a viable starting point that starting from scratch.
Often times my issue is unknown by it when debugging though, but sometimes it helps to find stupid mistakes.
I’d probably give it a 50% success rate, but I’ll take the help.
Seems like you agreed with everything I said, tho.
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Mate, all it does is predict the next word or phrase. It doesn’t know what you’re trying to do or have any ethics. When it fucks up it’s going to be your fuckup and since you relied on the bot rather than learned to do it yourself you’re not going to be able to fix it.
I understand how it works, but that’s irrelevant if it does work as a tool in my toolkit. I’m also not relying on the LLM, I’m taking it with a massive grain of salt. It usually gets most of the way there, and I have to fix issues or have it revise the code. For simple stuff that’d be busy work for me, it does pretty well.
It would be my fuck up if it fucks up, and I don’t catch it. I’m not putting code it writes directly into production, I’m not stupid.
I think they do have their help, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as some companies earning money from it want us to think. It’s just a tool that helps just like a good IDE has helped in the past.
Oh absolutely, I agree with that comparison. That said, I’d take an IDE over AI 11 times out of 10.
I mean, if LLMs really make software engineering easier, we should also expect Linux apps to improve dramatically. But I’m not betting on it.
It’s not greed - it’s masqueraded violence being allowed, centralization, impunity, and general corruption, all supported by various IP, patent and “child protection” laws.
No separate component is necessary, it’s a redundant system built very slowly and carefully.
Referencing that quote about blood of patriots, and another about difference between journalism and public relations being in outrage and offense, or difference between a protest and a demonstration being in obviously breaking rules.
EDIT: I meant - it’s a general tendency. But IT today is as important as police station, post office and telegraph were in 1917. One can also refer to that “means of production” controversy.
People keep pointing the finger at AI, but miss the fact that the problem is
corporate greedcapitalism. AI has the possibility to help us solve problems,corporate greedcapitalism will gate keep the solutions and cause us suffering.No need to thank me.
AI can’t solve problems. This should be abundantly clear by now from the number of laughable and even dangerous “solutions” it gives while stealing content, destroying privacy, and sucking up tons of power to do so. Just ban AI.
Just take some time to look up the benefits of AI and what it is being used to solve. It’s easy to focus on how corporations are abusing the technology for profit, but it’s a bland weak perspective to think that AI can’t solve problems.
It can’t even solve simple queries correctly half the time. Exactly what “benefits” can come from such a flawed system that steals its information, destroys privacy, and uses tons of resources?
Grow up and admit you’re fascinated by some sci-fi bullshit poorly implemented by garbage corporations.
It can’t even solve simple queries correctly half the time.
implemented by garbage corporations
Lie and lie again, neither do you realize there are open source LLMs. You keep yelling to ban it when nothing you write even matters.
Have you seen how many garbage query returns people get? It’s completely ineffectual unless you just treat it like a simple non “AI” search engine query, in which case, why bother wasting time with AI?
And do you realize how much power and time is needed to create a local LLM? The reason AI is generally implemented online is because it’s so incredibly complex and computationally heavy to do it locally for any decent amount of data. So unless you’re a fucking pervert with 20 overpowered PCs paying thousands a month on electricity generating AI porn art, what’s the point?
You really need to specify what you mean by “AI”. AI has been used in tons of applications for decades. Do you mean LLMs? Because not all AI is LLMs.
At this point there’s barely a difference in practical use. And both are the same amount of stupid, sucking up tons of power, destroying privacy, and stealing information. It’s all bullshit and should be banned.
How is this not something that is a common sense, widely accepted worldview? Are people this dense?
Because you clearly do not have any technical understanding of the field, or what machine learning even is, or how it can be useful, and the dozen of different things also called AI.
Says the person with zero understanding of the terrible problems with AI. It’s just rampant, ignorant fanboyism at this point. Ban it.
Ah yes. Let’s ban AI so the cartels take over the market for AI. What a great plan.
The living fuck are you on about? What cartels? What?
You people are so brainwashed by the AI bullshit being spouted by these rich corporations that you can’t see its huge problems.
I choose to privately self-host open source AI models and stuff on Linux. It’s almost like technology is a tool and corps are the ones fucking things up. Hmmm, imagine that.
Agreed
GPT4ALL ftw
It’s so fun to play with offline AI. It doesn’t have the creepy underpinnings of knowing art and journalism as well as musings from social media was blatantly stolen from the internet and sold as a service for profit.
Edit: I hate theft and if you think theft is ok for training llms go ahead and dislike this comment. I don’t feel bad about what I said, local offline AI is just better because it doesn’t work on the premise of backroom deals and blatant theft. I will never use an AI like DALL.E when there is a talented artist trying to put food on the table with a skill they honed for years. If you condone stealing you are a cheap, heartless, coward.
I hate to break it to you, but if you’re running an LLM based on (for example) Llama the training data (corpus) that went into it was still large parts of the Internet.
The fact that you’re running the prompts locally doesn’t change the fact that it was still trained on data that could be considered protected under copyright law.
It’s going to be interesting to see how the law shakes out on this one, because an artist going to an art museum and doing studies of those works (and let’s say it’s a contemporary art museum where the works wouldn’t be in the public domain) for educational purposes is likely fair use - and possibly encouraged to help artists develop their talents. Musicians practicing (or even performing) other artists’ songs is expected during their development. Consider some high school band practicing in a garage, playing some song to improve their skills.
I know the big difference is that it’s people training vs a machine/LLM training, but that seems to come down to not so much a copyright issue (which it is in an immediate sense) as a “should an algorithm be entitled to the same protections as a person? If not, what if real AI (not just an LLM) is developed? Should those entities be entitled to personhood?”
I hate to break it to you but not all machine learning is llms based. I’ve been messing with neural based tts from a small project called piper. I’m looking into an image recognition neural network to write software for and train myself. I might try writing it myself for fun 🤔
I’m not interested in anything that uses stolen data like that so my options are limited and relegated to incredibly focused single purpose tools or things I make myself with the tools available.
I’d love to play with image generation and large language models but until all the legal stuff is worked out and individuals get paid for their work I’m not touching it.
To me it’s as cut and dry as this. If it’s the difference between an individual becoming their own boss/making a better living and a corporation growing their market cap I’ll always choose the individual. I know there’s a possibility of that growth resulting in more jobs but I’d rather have an environment where small businesses open breed competition and overall improve everyone’s life. Let’s not give the keys over to companies like Microsoft and close more doors.
I don’t care about the discussion of true AI having rights. It’s only going to be used to make the wealthy wealthier.
All LLMs are based on neural networks. Furthermore, all neural networks need training, regardless of whether they’re an LLM or some other form of machine learning. If you want to ensure there’s no stolen material used in the neural net then you have to train it yourself with material that you have the copyright to.
Boy I love it when people don’t read.
I was expanding on your point, you twat. But hey, just be a snarky cunt. I’m sure that’ll get you far.
Sorry I thought you were being a smartass and just skimmed through it. Truly my bad.
Edit: it’s hard to tell intention sometimes and I really do appreciate you summarizing what I said. It’s true and a more approachable answer than what I gave.
Sorry I feel strongly about this. Play with it all you want it’s really cool shit! But please don’t pay for access to it and if you need some art or a professional write-up please just pay someone to do it.
It’ll mean so much to your fellow man in these uncertain times and the quality will be so much better.
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I’m on his side, I don’t get the dislike. Maybe he likes massive corporations stealing people’s data putting artist and journalist out of work.
I think it’s important to note that Linux can be a way to avoid AI, but doesn’t have to be. If you flip the headline around it almost implies that people who do want AI would be missing out by using Linux, but that’s not true at all: instead, the reality is that Linux is still better for them, too, because you could install all the same kind of functionality if you wanted, but it would be wholly under your control, not Microsoft’s.
Self hosted AI seems like an intriguing option for those capable of running it. Naturally this will always be more complex than paying someone else to host it for you but it seems like that’s that only way if you care about privacy
Check out Jan AI. It’s open source and extremely easy to install and run. I run it locally on a 2017 laptop without a dedicated GPU and it works, just takes longer to generate responses compared to something like ChatGPT.
Beautifully stated. Owning the AI personally as I own my personal computer if not more is the key.
That sounds very cool. I’m totally ignorant of the hardware requirements. What sort of minimum setup would such an install take?
It really depends on what model you want to run and how much training is bundled with it. You can pretty much run any model if you have enough disk space but of course GPU + VRAM is preferred for a ChatGPT like fast response. Otherwise, running on an older CPU and RAM is going to be noticeably slower, especially with complex models with a lot of training data to trawl through.
There are some pretty lite models out there but the responses will be more barebones and probably seem ‘less informed’.
Give GPT4All a try for your first time. It makes install, configuration and usage point-and-click while being fairly straight forward. For the presented/featured models, it presents a small summary and VRAM recommended, though there are many, many other models available from inside the UI.
Will my dell latitude from 2006 work?
Linux may be the best way to avoid the <insert dystopian corporate feature> nightmare
Always has been
I’m convinced that Linux’ mere presence has already stymied the development of the worst possible technocractic nightmare. I shudder to think of the thick tech-chains that would bind us if there was not an anchor/reference point… or if there was not even the small contingent that knows what it is like to use a liberating platform.
I agree with this. We already have a situation where we don’t have feasible alternatives to the primary method, Google search comes to mind. With Linux, even if every company in the world goes down, nerds will still want to play with the technology.
All the AI garbage from M$ is what made me finally make the swap a couple weeks ago to Linux Mint on my personal desktop. I only use my PC for gaming/entertainment, so the switch was super easy. Can’t recommend it enough if you’re wanting to get away from Windows!
One of us! One of us! One of us!
For real though, good on ya. It takes a little getting used to, but is so worth it in the long run to not have to fight against the profit-driven whims of a megacorp. It’s also so much more customizable if you want to put together a really specific workflow for yourself.
It’s advertising more than AI for me. Everything you do in Windows is monetized by selling your preferences to advertisers. Shameful.
I’ve been running Ubuntu desktop for years. YEARS and recently switched to Linux Mint. It’s very polished.
My laptop is the last holdout.
I went with Q4OS since I wanted no bloat and a debian based distro that was linux newbie friendly
I finally switched to Linux and I couldn’t be happier. I can’t believe I put up with microsofts garbage for so damn long.
Congratulations and welcome to the club!
Me too. Years ago I dabbled with Debian and Gentoo. Ubuntu was just up and coming then.
Now I went from Mint to Fedora KDE to Fedora Silverblue (nuked my disk and removed windows)
Gnome took a day to get used to but loving the workflow once I warmed up to it. Can’t believe how polished and rock solid the whole system is.
Gnome when you first use it feels like a stupid system, then once it “clicks”, you feel like the devs were goddamn geniuses for creating a workflow like it.
And yeah, the polish is nuts considering for a long time and assumption about FOSS was that all the apps are ugly and unpolished.
then once it “clicks”, you feel like the devs were goddamn geniuses for creating a workflow like it.
… Unless you have ADHD. What differentiates it is that purely on the surface it looks kinda ADHD-friendly, until you go to that launcher or try to find a setting. That’s better than with KDE (I like KDE, but can’t use it), but worse than just using FVWM or WindowMaker.
I have ADHD. How is it worse? I find window managers interesting in theory but absolutely dreadful in actual use.
None are even close to feeling usable for anything other than showing off terminal windows
E: jfc, I obviously meant tiling window managers, since that’s what you were talking about. I’m not advocating for desktops to have literally no ability to manage windows.
A window manager is part of what you use, unless you run one program in its dedicated X session or don’t use X at all, or use Wayland, in which case you use a Wayland compositor.
If by “window manager” you mean only standalone window managers that are not part of KDE or Gnome - then just as usable as those that are.
If you mean that catching someone with a terminal emulator open disqualifies its author as a showoff - many of us actually do use CLI and TUI programs, and for that we need terminal emulators.
If you think that “window manager” means only tiling WMs from r/unixporn on Reddit - the choice is kinda bigger, there are a few hundreds of them.
I obviously meant tiling window manager setups, like you described.
And no I didn’t say using the terminal means you’re a showoff, I have it open all throughout my workday.
I was saying that TWM setups are poor in terms of usability. The Gnome workflow is perfect for people with ADHD. I can’t really think of anything better.
OK. FVWM is a stacking WM. Btw, TWM is too a specific stacking WM and not an abbreviation for tiling WMs, some people even use it.
I have used tiling WMs in the past, DWM and WMII were nice.
Still I’ve mentioned FVWM and maybe WindowMaker (answering from mobile, not sure), both are stacking WMs, so no, not as I’ve described.
I did as well for my daily driver school laptop and I’ve been loving it so much. I’m considering switching my desktop to Linux as well over the summer, or dual booting at the very least
I don’t want to avoid it. I just want it locally
So… Heu… How to say that… Linux still the solution for this.
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At least with the more advanced LLM’s (and I’d assume as well for stuff like image processing and generation), it requires a pretty considerable amount of GPU just to get the thing to run at all, and then even more to spit something out. Some people have enough to run the basics, but most laptops would simply be incapable. And very few people would have resources to get the kind of outputs that the more advanced AI’s produce.
Now, that’s not to say it shouldn’t be an option, or that they force you to have some remote AI baked into your proprietary OS that you can’t remove without breaking user license agreements, just saying that it’s unfortunately harder to implement locally than we both probably wish it was.
https://jan.ai/ Jan works fine on W11
internet pollution is the real nightmare and your laptop os doesn’t fix that sorry
you can’t fix everything, therefore it’s pointless to fix anything
If something like Fossil fuel companies are influencing environmental legislation and poisoning our planet while blaming us for the state of global warming. Isn’t it worth fighting for a better future. It might feel futile now but as congregation we have more power than many of us realize. They tell you stop it, it’s too late but what they’re really saying is stop it your scaring us.
Its going to start fixing shit if the market share of anything popular starts dropping.
For everything else, there’s Mastercard.
Linux has been great for me. I switched during Windows 10 forced updates and never been unhappy since. I hope more people at least give a try. If you have a computer that can’t meet Windows 11 requirements, it is worth a shot.
“The year of Linux on the Desktop” is in the article. This again? Been reading this for decades and it’s still not true.
Linux is close, but has some core flaws that will forever keep it out of mainstream acceptance by your average user.
I can’t read the article because of a full screen Cookie Choices pop-up that I can’t dismiss. ☠️
Ublock origin has cookie banner filters. I didn’t have this problem, I assume that’s why.
Edit: autocorrect
Or you can import the “I don’t care about cookies” list: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/
Try consent-o-matic
Combine with above and rarely see those prompts
Stallman was always right
When it comes to software, certainly.
But it’s also important not to fanboy over people too much or assume they’re right about literally everything. I doubt most people here would share Stallman’s views on paedophilia, for example.
Didn’t he kind of pull a 180 on those VERY questionable views? Not even trying to refute that he is not right about everything, as that’s just silly, but I’m pretty sure he pulled back on that particular extremely dumb opinion.
As always a source of some kind is appreciated.
Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it," Stallman wrote. "Through personal conversations in recent years, I’ve learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per [sic] psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.
Took me a bit to find, but also he talks about how the Minsky scandal was a-okay in that same article. So maybe I should say he mildly changed course instead of pulling a 180. Still a strange opinion to hold.
Thank you for finding the source. Well, at least he backed down on the pedophilia thing.
Only two days after his job became on the line.
Call me a pessimist, but that timing seems suspect to me.
He did. But also not really.
He’s held the view that there’s nothing wrong with adults having sex with children for decades (and even championed it using his workplace email address)
He then said he’s changed his mind… two days after people were calling for his resignation and his job was on the line.
Now, maybe I’m just a pessimist, but I personally think that was more of a last-ditch attempt at saving his job than a genuine sudden epiphany that maybe having sex with children is wrong that just happened to happen at the time that it did.
IDK, I agree with Stallman in a philosophical, pedantic sense on some of his gross views, but I reject it from a policy perspective.
On pedophilia, Stallman went on the assumption that a child can consent to an adult, and I agree with the conclusion that, if they consent, it’s totally okay, regardless of age. But he missed the most important bit: children can’t consent. So I agree with the conclusion philosophically, I just disagree with the assumed premise. He didn’t seem to understand the age of consent and why it exists. When he made that statement, I understood where he was coming from, and I also understood that it would be a bad look and that he shouldn’t have opened his mouth.
I disagree with him a lot too, especially politically. But I feel like I understand his reasoning, and in many cases we just disagree on some fundamental assumptions. I like that he’s a very logical person, but being highly logical can end very poorly when you’re dealing with shaky assumptions.
I just can’t even begin to reckon that view. I know he pulled back on it (see his quote I posted elsewhere), but aside from a child’s inability to consent, there’s a gigantic power disparity between an adult and a child. I just don’t get the logic on its very face. There’s no child out there that has the world experience to understand what is happening in that sort of situation.
If anything it’s just a gross oversimplification akin to a spherical cow in a vacuum (ie Assume a child with an adult brain, with world experience of an adult, and has the same relationship power as the adult. Also assume the adult that that is perfectly altruistic, has no alternative motives, and truly cares for the child on the same level as an adult relationship). It’s just so far beyond any real world scenario that I struggle to see how you could even logically come to the conclusion that it’s okay.
The hypothetical here is that the child sought out the adult, not the other way around, and the child is near legal age and presents as if legal age. Given that set of assumptions, how much liability does the adult have?
That is the philosophical part of it. But reality isn’t that neat. Here are some questions that need to be asked:
- how did the child get there?
- how much did the adults know? How much should they have assumed?
- what kind of pressure, implied or otherwise, was the child under?
I don’t think Stallman considered that, I think he only considered the hypothetical.
