Yeah, seems we’re on the same page, then. Because I occasionally get into that situation. People ask me stuff and I’ll tell them, there is software XY or Linux distribution XY which does exactly what you’re looking for, but it’s owned by a company which is known for making problematic business decisions, so wouldn’t recommend using it before giving it a good thought if that’s going to impede with your application… Or I’ll tell them about some software project and simultaneously say, I can’t endorse it due to the political stance or behaviour of the devs/maintainers… Happened a few times to me with niche projects, Android distributions and Fediverse projects. I’ll then not walk around and advertise for them, but instead only give a complete picture of the situation on request.

And I’ll do it in other parts of my life as well… Try to boycott clothes from a particularly bad sweatshop, even if they fit and suit me well… Not buy tasty food if it’s from Nesté or the Coca Cola company… Though those are on a different level of “bad” as this one. Just saying toxic things on the internet isn’t exactly the same as supporting child labor, slavery and stealing poor people’s water supply.

My current device is a Dell laptop I got second hand.

I believe I saw some other single board computers with some cheap Rockchip CPU /Allwinner and regular HDMI and two USB and an Ethernet port for around $10 on Aliexpress. You wouldn’t need the adapters from the Pi Zero with those. And there are some generic Android TV-Boxes for $8-15…

How about we just tell the truth as is? I mean in your analogy… Would you recommend a faulty car with the same words you’d choose for a very nice one? Would you hide that the manufacturer does problematic things? I think the way you phrase it, has indeed some things in common for example with recommending a Tesla car these days. Generally, people don’t keep their mouth shut about who manufactures them. So yeah, I don’t think speaking the truth is babysitting at all… But of course you also don’t hide the fact that Hyperland exists and if it’s any good. I’d advocate for just stating the facts. As an added bonus, everyone can then go ahead and make that desicion themselves. I mean I personally wouldn’t buy a Swasticar. I have less objections using Hyprland. But I always try to give these kind of info out as well, if someone asks me about software. Because I think it’s kind of important if a project is healthy, has a nice community etc. I think the comparison with driving cars falls a bit short, since we don’t recommend people shouldn’t use any desktop. It’s fine to use one. And it’s also fine to drive a car. You should just be aware of the consequences. And in fact I think it’d be beneficial if we were to drive less cars, for several reasons.

Uh, I just type ssh or rsync into the terminal and that’s it. It’s a manageable amount of computers/servers I connect to, so I can remeber their names. Regular ssh stores all the keys or custom ports / IPs in its config. What’s the advantage of using some manager?

I think that’d be VNC or Remote Desktop these days. Wayland deliberately did away with the networking stuff.

Hmmh. And it’s not even a linear progression. They take inspiration all the time. I remember gnome 2 being very different from what it is today. And they tend to look at MacOS.

Uh, I don’t have a good answer for that, but I’d give them something like Linux Mint anyways. That way they can look up stuff, watch tutorials and don’t have a super niche thing running. Or give them one of the popular gaming distros, if it’s that.

Idk. Gnome feels very much like Android to me. And KDE follows similar design patterns to Windows. And kids and teenagers tend to figure out all the things they want. If they have the motivation to do so.

And in addition to that: It’s also kind of a big thing that they get an audience. The more people use the projects, the bigger the audience. They’ll get a Discord and people will join because of the project, people will start reading their blog because of the attention via the software… People will maintain and package their software, or use it, or contribute to it… Directly resulting in interactions with the group which develops a project. That’s a direct consequence of the project getting attention. And “promoting” is a way to draw attention.

I guess you’re completely right with that. It lowers the entry barrier. And it’s kind of self-reinforcing. And we have other unhealty dynamics with other technology as well, like social media, which also can radicalize people or get them in a downwards spiral…

Oh wow. In the old times, self-proclaimed messiahs used to do that without assistance from a chatbot. But why would you think the “truth” and path to enlightenment is hidden within a service of a big tech company?

I don’t think it is about that. The information collection is an added bonus they happily accept and make use of. I think it’s mainly about power and money, though. They get rid of everyone who isn’t completely in line and subservient. That’s from the playbook on how to become an autocratic regime. And they’re oviously interested in the money as well. Cut off everyone and everything they don’t like. Like weak people, poor people, your grandma and children. That money can then be funneled towards other people. Guess whom. I think the power and control aspect is the original idea though. And money has power as well. So does information and data, so it’s more a combination of things.

But the way they act, I’d say they had a look at other oligarchies and corrupt regimes and wanted in, too. Saw you need to replace all the people in any color of power and replace them with your own henchmen. Then they also hate a lot of people and always wanted to take their money. The AI and data thing looks more to me like something they discovered while at it. And I don’t believe the traditional MAGA people are smart enough to have anticipated that. But naturally, information is power. And AI can be used as a mindless slave to someone. I’d say it’s worth trying to foster it instead rely on human clerks and officials. It’ll be a new form of administration. One that does away with a lot of middle-men like the corrupt government workers other regimes have to pay.

And Musk looks like he has his own motivation, which might or might not be aligned with the “grand plan” I can’t really see there is. He is (was) free to combine the useful with what’s enjoyable to him. Currently the tactics is mostly to break a lot of stuff. Doesn’t really matter how or what. So that’s what they’re doing right now. I think the struggle and in-fighting on who gets to replace what with exactly what kind of things hasn’t really started yet. It’s already there, but not the main concern as of now. So we can’t tell the exact dynamics we’re bound to see in the near future. I’d say mass surveillance plus yet more AI is likely a formula to success, though.

If the author had looked at the quality of generative AI chatbots in 2023, it wouldn’t have come as a surprise to them that they didn’t really replace a lot of humans. Big question is: What’s going to happen today and in the near future?

Sure, that’s the basic idea of targeted advertising. And it works well. Google, Meta etc are making billions that way. I believe this can be translated into AI. And as a bonus they can exploit a few more psychological effects. Like make it sond like a recommendation from a friend (your AI companion), or have it nudge you so you’ll think buying it was your idea…

Thanks for your perspective. Sure, AI is here to stay and flood the internet with slop and arbitrary (mis)information phrased like a factual wikipedia article, journalism, a genuine user review or whatever its master chose. And the negative sides of the internet have been there long before we had AI to the current extent. I think it is extremely unlikely that the internet is going to move away from being powered by advertisements, though. That’s the main business model as of today, and I think it is going to continue that way. Maybe dressed in some new clothes, but social media platforms, Google etc still need their income. I wonder how it’ll turn out for the AI companies, though. To my knowledge, they’re currently all powered by hype and investor money. And they’re going to have to find some way to make profit at some point. Whether that’s going to be ads or having their users pay properly, and not like today where the majority of people I know use the free tier.

Oh, wow. What’s your estimate on how it’s going to turn out? Is it a vastly different thing? I mean SEO also requires quite an amount of technical knowledge about how proprietary algoritms work. Experience… You always need to be super up to date with everything. And we have a lot of snake-oil salesmen. I believe “AIO” would be a shift and some new things to learn, but not be too different or an entirely new thing?

That sounds fun, SEO so it’s also ingested by AI… Maybe I should check my spam folder to see if all the people who send me spam to optimize my homepage already picked up on that.

Sure. But we need to see pics, or it didn’t happen.

The abstract doesn’t mention them re-gaining their old capacity. It only says they shrink. And something about voltage. So I have my doubts. I mean it’s nice if my spicy pillow shrinks a bit. But what does that help if it continues to stay nearly dead? And an application in products would be hard to accomplish. At that temperature, all the plastic etc is going to melt. Maybe the solder as well.

Wasn’t “error-free” one of the undecidable problems in maths / computer science? But I like how they also pay attention to semantics and didn’t choose a clickbaity title. Maybe I should read the paper, see how they did it and whether it’s more than an AI agent at the same intelligence level guessing whether it’s correct. I mean surprisingly enough, the current AI models usually do a good job generating syntactically correct code one-shot. My issues with AI coding usually start to arise once it gets a bit more complex. Then it often feels like poking at things and copy-pasting various stuff from StackOverflow without really knowing why it doesn’t deal with the real-world data or fails entirely.

I’ve also had that. And I’m not even sure whether I want to hold it against them. For some reason it’s an industry-wide effort to muddy the waters and slap open source on their products. From the largest company who chose to have “Open” in their name but oppose transparency with every fibre of their body, to Meta, the curren pioneer(?) of “open sourcing” LLMs, to the smaller underdogs who pride themselves with publishing their models that way… They’ve all homed in on the term.

And lots of the journalists and bloggers also pick up on it. I personally think, terms should be well-defined. And open-source had a well-defined meaning. I get that it’s complicated with the transformative nature of AI, copyright… But I don’t think reproducibility is a question here at all. Of course we need that, that’s core to something being open. And I don’t even understand why the OSI claims it doesn’t exist… Didn’t we have datasets available until LLaMA1 along with an extensive scientific paper that made people able to reproduce the model? And LLMs aside, we sometimes have that with other kinds of machine learning…

(And by the way, this is an old article, from end of october last year.)

Oh, wow. Should be pretty obvious that something isn’t open source, …well… unless the source is open…