donuts

Microsoft basically tied with Apple for the title of richest company in the world, by the way.

• AI “content” is trivial to make and will soon be everywhere.

• Nobody wants to read, watch or listen to AI generated “content”

Infinite supply, zero demand. Sounds pretty devoid of value to me.

Just in time for nobody to care.

Introducing the new Apple MagicRAM©™!

When your entire existence relies on exploiting the work of the people who are “under you”, of course you want them to work harder, faster and more. They’d crack out the whip if they’d get away with it.

These rotten billionaires don’t care about our little lives or how much we enjoy or very short time on this planet, they only care about maximizing share prices and filling their pockets with bonuses that the workers are earning for them.

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I like Flatpaks and AppImages for application delivery and here’s why:

1. Software doesn’t just magically appear in various distros’ repositories. There is a considerable amount of work (time/effort/energy/thought) that goes into including and maintaining any given program in a single distro’s repo, and then very similar work must be done by the maintainers of other independent repositories. To make matters worse, some programs are not straight-forward to compile and/or may use customized dependencies. In those cases, package maintainers for each distro will have to do even more work and pay close attention to deliver the application as intended, or risk shipping a version that works differently in subtle ways and possibly with rare bugs. (Needing to ship custom versions of deps for a certain program also totally eliminates a lot of the benefits of shared libraries; namely reduced storage space and shared functionality or security.) That’s part of the reality of managing packages, and the fact is that there’s a lot of wasted effort and repeated work that goes into putting this or that application into a distro repository. I have a ton of respect for distro package maintainers, but I would prefer that their talents and energy could be used on making the user experience and polish of their distro better, or developing new/better software, than wrestling with every new version of every package over and over again multiple times per year.

2. As a developer it’s very nice to know exactly what is being “shipped” to your users, and that most of your users are running the same code in a very similar environment. In my opinion, it’s simply better for users and developers of a piece of software to have a more direct path, instead of running through a third party middle-man. Developers ship it, users use it, if there’s a bug the users report it, developers fix it and add features and then ship again. It’s simple, it’s effective, and there’s very little reason to add a bunch of extra steps to this process.

3. The more time I spend using immutable, atomic Linux distros like Silverblue, the more I value a strong separation between system and applications. I want my base system to be solid as a rock, and ideally pretty fucking hard to accidentally break (either on the user end or the distro end). At the same time I also want to be able to use the latest and greatest applications as soon as humanly possible. Well, Silverblue has shown that there’s a viable model to do that in the form of an immutable and atomic base system combined with containerized applications and dev environment. What Silverblue does may not be the only way of achieving a separation between system and applications, but I’ve never been more certain that it’s the right direction for creating a more stable and predictable Linux experience without many compromises. I don’t necessarily want to update my whole system to get the newest version of an application, and I certainly don’t want my system to break due to dependency hell in the process.

4. The advantages of the old way of distributing applications on Linux are way overblown compared to the advantages of Flatpak. Do flatpaks take up more drive space than traditionally packaged apps? Maybe, I don’t even know. But even if they do, who the hell cares? Linux systems and applications are mostly pretty tiny, and a 1TB nvme ssd is like $50 these days. Does using shared library create less potential for security flaws going unfixed? Possibly, but again, sometimes it just isn’t possible or practical for applications to share libraries, Flatpaks can technically share libraries too, and the containerized nature of Flatpaks mean that security vulnerabilities in specific applications are mitigated somewhat. I’m not a security guy, but I’d guess that Flatpaks are generally pretty safe.

Well, that’s all I can think of right now. I really like Flatpaks and to some extent AppImages too. I still think that most “system-level” stuff is fine to do with traditional packaging (or something like ostree), but for “application-level” stuff, I think Flatpaks are the current king. They’re very up-to-date, sandboxed, often packaged by the developers themselves, consistent across many distros, save distro maintainers effort that could be better used elsewhere, easy for users to update, integrate with software centers, are very very unlikely to cause your system to break, and so on.

It would be really hard for me to want to switch back to a traditional distro using only repo packages.

Using copyrighted material for research is fair use. Any model produced by such research is not itself a derivative work of the training material.

You’re conflating AI research and the AI business. Training an AI is not “research” in a general sense, especially in the context of an AI that can be used to create assets for commercial applications.

All I want to know is if they are going to pillage people’s private data and steal their creative IP or not.

Ethical AI starts and ends with open, transparent, legitimate and ethically sourced training data sets.

You’re making two, big incorrect assumptions:

1. Simply seeing something on the internet does not give you any legal or moral rights to use that thing in any way other than things which are, or have previously been, deemed to be “fair use” by a court of law. Individuals have personal rights over their likeness and persona, and copyright holders have rights over their works, whether they are on the internet or not. In other words, there is a big difference between “visible in public” and “public domain”.
2. More importantly, something that might be considered “fair use” for a human being do to is not necessary “fair use” when a computer or “AI” does it. Judgements of what is and is not fair use are made on a case by case basis as a legal defense against copyright infringement claims, and multiple factors (purpose of use, nature of original work, degree and sustainability of use, market effect, etc.) are often taken into consideration. At the very least, AI use has serious implications on sustainability and markets, especially compared to examples of human use.

I know these are really tough pills for AI fans to swallow, but you know what they say… “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

I’m simply referring to things like this, which I believe (but can’t really prove, so I could be wrong) happens more often than we’d like.

I’m probably wrong. I’m not claiming to be an expert, and I’m not trying to equate Taiwan with China.

If we pay China and Taiwan to manufacture all of our stuff they probably don’t even need to buy it from us as they can easily just copy it.

I think you’re missing my point. I’m not saying WSL is a con, I’m saying that the reason Microsoft ships a Linux subsystem is that there are useful programs and things that can be done with Linux.

Kind of hard to believe people still say stuff like this…

There is plenty of stuff that Linux does much better than Windows, for example containerized service and applications, which is why Windows needs a Linux subsystem at all. It’s possible that the main reason you think Linux is bad is that you aren’t as familiar with it.

The biggest downside to Linux remains official hardware and software support, though that’s a business economics issue and not a technical limitation.

I honestly could not imagine a circumstance in which I go back to using Windows or switch over to Mac, because Linux does basically everything I want and then some.

As someone who grew up around doctors and knew a brain surgeon, I can say with 100% confidence that everybody who rides a bike should wear a helmet. I feel like the average person has very little idea of how fragile we are, how easy it can be to get a traumatic brain injury, and how much of a nightmare your life can become. (This applies even more if you need to ride on the street or if you plan to ride at high speeds.)

I think you’re being needlessly judgy, ebikes are great and it’s never been about whether you “need” one or not.

They’re faster than regular bikes, allowing you to cover a larger distance in the same amount of time, especially if you’re fit. They’re very fun to ride in general, and they can take some of the misery out of climbing hills or otherwise challenging/tedious parts of your commute. Cargo ebikes can carry a decent amount of stuff and even one or two small passengers in some cases, and in other cases they can replace your need for a car (like quickly getting to a store for something small). And they give you the ability to balance exercise vs convenience as the situation or your personalty demands (you get to decide how much work your body does and how much the motor does).

Finally, ebikes open the door for people to get into using active transportation instead of cars for people who normally wouldn’t want to, whether they need help because of fitness, want help because of living in a hilly environment, or because they just want to get from point A to B in a reasonable amount of time. Riding my ebike in an urban environment, I find that I can actually get around just as fast as in a car, if not faster due to traffic.

Because I’m not super fit and live in a very unforgiving and hilly American neighborhood (where I also have to ride on curvy roads where people drive too damn fast) I would have never ever considered getting a regular bike. I’m now riding a bike somewhat regularly, getting a bit of exercise (or not, depending on the circumstances), and having a great time riding on roads, bike lanes, sidewalks, through parks (at a reasonable speed for pedestrians), etc.

Yes, they’re more expensive than a regular bike.
Yes, they’re heavier than a regular bike.
Yes, having to worry about battery charge is inconvenient.
Yes, it can be dangerous to ride any bike at >20mph.

But as the old saying goes “don’t knock it until you try it”. Even if you think you’re a cycling purist, I recommend at least giving ebikes a try before judging others for using them. I think if you did you’d find that ebikes are an ally of and complement to normal bikes, and just like an electric guitar amplifies your strings, ebikes are amplifying your legs and not rendering them obsolete.

We need a license model such that AI is only allowed to be trained on content were the license explicitly permits it and that no mention is equal to it being disallowed.

That is the default model behind copyright, which basically says that the only things people can use your copyrighted work for without a license are those which are determined to be “fair use”.

I don’t see any way in which today’s AI ought to be considered fair use of other people’s writings, artwork, etc.

But this weird, almost religious devotion to some promise of AI and the weird white knighting I see folks do for it is just baffling to watch.

When you look at it through the lens of the latest get-rich-quick-off-some-tech-that-few- people-understand grift, it makes perfect sense.

They naively see AI as a magic box that can make infinite “content” (which of course belongs to them for some reason, and is fair use of other people’s copyrighted data for some reason), and infinite content = infinite money, just as long as you can ignore the fundamentals of economics and intellectual property.

People have invested a lot of their money and emotional energy into AI because they think it’ll make them a return on investment.

Is it just me or is mastodon.art the source of almost all of the drama on the fediverse?