There’s a meme image in this style, of a deadpan guy in the corner at a party, talking to noone, and the caption is his thoughts.

I’m that guy, and I’m thinking, “The license-filtering capabilities of AI code have made this debate pointless… unless we deal with Capitalism.”

I don’t think it’s topical in the sense of “this joke riffs on a current news cycle event,” which is how I think of “topical humour”. But it kind of is, in that this debate over licenses is ongoing since RMS invented the GPL.

Those are some wildly feels-based choices.

This whole internet could run on a tiny fraction of what it current consumes, with no drop in service levels… if the extraction of profit from every single interaction was not prioritized.

That being said, I was addressing someone who refused to believe that local inference was even possible on CPU; this tells me that the efforts to present the current grift as the only and inevitable AI outcome is working, on minds that do not fundamentally grasp what the technology is, nor what it’s doing. I think the tech is great, and highly useful - the way they are implementing has perverse incentives and existential outcomes, and it does not have to be that way, but it is, because capitalism.

Was scrolling my account history and came upon this old post, in which many people, yourself included, expressed disbelief that Meta was knowingly taking money to foment genocide, which we learned when Careless People was released, was absolutely the case. And we learned just this week, Meta been paying Nazis to post on Facebook.

I wonder what the line is, for people in general.

Listen, everything that they are doing by scorching the planet and turning the tap water brown, could be achieved on CPU or much smaller GPUs on local machines - it’s a question of focused, tight training. What they’re doing instead is literally attempting to build gigantic models that take in absolutely everything (burning real books in the process because fuck history we got money to make) and attempting to sell the idea that this brute force, one-thing-does-it-all approach, which requires us to give up everything else that is good in the world, is the only way forward, and yes, we must build the roko basilisk now.

It’s a big, big grift.

I have always felt surrounded by right wing bullshit, on previous socials and in life.

This is the only place where I look around, and believe that it is people further to the left of me that are maybe taking things a bit far. I do NOT, for the record, agree with the apologists who want us to let more fash in, I like being in a place where I am, for once, the moderate.

I like the overall thing, but, how do you explain the loss of cultural memory?

I guess at some point, the false humans could/would program their “global” firmwares to forget, but, at that point they are completely at the mercy of the technology’s ability to self-perpetuate; if it develops problems, they will not even know that it exists (so presumably nanotech) and therefore not know how to fix.

One could posit some group of hidden technologists of indeterminate size, who maintain the systems. Perhaps they are even AI nanomachines that walk around with the very sophisticated automatons.

Biggest question/doubt on my part is, why the hell would any being so advanced as to build a Cylon, ever want to be human?

Sometime in the last two years, the number of people consider themselves to be programmers has at least doubled. We have a giant contingent of people who have never gone through the hell of actually developing a skill but are now “developers” in much the same way that typing “make me a song like ______” now makes you a musician. No theory, no chords, no building of callouses, just load up our AutoPlagio and dance the night away!

And these sudden Developers and such are all very upset at having their legitimacy questioned by a bunch of… of… NERDS.

I’m probably repeating what others are saying, but you, friend, are the people who will bring Linux to the world, not us nerds. Your post reflects that you haven’t learned a few things you’re definitely gonna learn, but you are on the right track, like a bloodhound (ie. a thinking person) with a strong scent (something is rotten in silicon valley).

First off, you don’t have to deal with the command line at all, 99% of the time, even on Arch. But Arch is not your only nor your best choice, if that is a specific thing that worries you. Being on the bleeding edge is not what you think - you will get up-to-date GPU drivers on any decent distro, but Arch’s approach means you will have more instances of your graphical desktop breaking in various and weird ways, necessitating a trip to the console on the regular.

Me in particular giving you advice: you should install Debian, because it aims for stability as its primary virtue, sacrificing speed of package updates to get that - they make sure that everything that is being updated continues to work flawlessly together, before it arrives in the regular release cycle. I run it because it never breaks, and if you use the KDE Plasma Desktop you get a full-featured OS that will work the same way other KDE desktops on other distros work. You can even look into Debian Sid, which is their “rolling release” version that tracks pretty closely with Arch’s package updates.

Only caveat with Debian: by default, it will install the Gnome desktop, and you need to select KDE Plasma when you get to a screen where you select your Desktop Environment (DE) during the install process. You can uncheck “Debian Desktop Environment” and “Gnome” which are both selected by default, but you can select which DE you want to use at the login screen, so it won’t hurt you to leave Gnome installed as well - it is more Mac-like and has strong opinions about things like what colour you should be able to use as your desktop background, so I’m not a fan, but I do like their general approach. But KDE Plasma is the one that feels very much like Windows. Others do as well, there are some distros that are actually tooled to look exactly like various Windoze versions.

Others will recommend Linux Mint, and while I used to have reservations based on their lack of work on Wayland support, they seem to be catching up there, and as much as the devs will tell you Wayland is coming no matter what (and unlike the AI slopmerchants, they are correct), but it’s not ready today for quite a lot of things, so it’s not something you need to worry about. Even if you didn’t understand this paragraph, don’t let it get you bunghed up in your head.

Even if you are certain you’re gonna want the up-to-date version of some software, you can still do that on Debian, one way or another - Steam, for instance, I don’t remember what I did when installing it, but it was effortless and I have the same Steam as anyone, far as I know. I certainly have no problem playing my games.

You will be doing stuff in the console no matter what, but vanilla Arch is basically S&M for people who love that kind of pain, and could well put you off of the GNU/Linux OS entirely if being dragged through that slog is not your thing. There are also distros that use Arch as the underlying base, much as Ubuntu and many, many other distros use Debian as the base of theirs.

In other news, Windows has Linux built-in now, so you don’t need to ever install it yourself!

Canadian here. Usians: make sure everyone you know understands that this is no joke. I live rural, I’m a socialist pinko but I live surrounded by rednecks, and we have conversations about insurgency on the regular. We have many, many Ukrainian refugees here.

Don Tchak never! The dude is completely corrupt, and I hear he has some very nasty sexual proclivities.

edit: whoooooosh

I also didn’t know what it was when I discovered their forum, which is a combination of kool-aid addled VCbrains and tech geeks having normal, informed conversations about tech stuff. I was hanging out there for a while, until I realized.

The fiction of the last 30 years is revealed to those with eyes to see.

All this time the capital class and their lackeys have been saying “Russia is a our superfriend now and China wants to be democratic so we are helping them by using their slave labour and don’t you feel guilty for questioning our supremely good intentions here!”

And meanwhile it’s the same old global power struggle, but you can make SO MUCH using slave labour, it was just too tempting to send every bit of our labour - even our high tech - over to their factories.

I will be one of many saying this: if you want to self-host you need to learn Linux. It can be done, but this is not like taking a pottery class and you don’t really get to show anyone, the only people who will understand are people who are also able to do what you do. It’s rewarding on many levels, but pleasure and sociality are not among those rewards. :>

Oh dear, you have creeped my history and identified that I am neurodivergent, and therefore have identified the pretext to reject my thesis without bothering to really engage with its implications. Well played, you sure got that sucker.

I am afraid you are off base though, I have put bipolar in front of my various practitioners many times, and they tell me that while they do see things that resemble a cycle in the things I say to them, the problem seems to be that neither my manic phases nor my depressed phases (last one was about ten years ago and lasted twenty years or so) were sufficiently destructive to my functioning to be diagnosable.

That said, I am halfway through clearing a ~300m forest path on my property today, and intend to have a fence up a week from now, so who knows, maybe you and I are both correct and the doctors are wrong.

edit, 3 years later: I finished the fence.

When the first NES came out I was over there with my C64 and my shoebox full of disks with games I hadn’t tried yet like, lol suckers.

I wish I had seen this, there might have been a moment when we could’ve shifted some parental money from Nintendo to Commodore with the right campaign, and kept the Amiga going…