Also, CoPilot is going to be bundled with Office 365, a subscription service. You’re literally paying them to spy on you.

Exactly. And if I use or even pay for an external LLM service then that’s also my decision. But they force this scheme onto every user, whether they want it or not. It’s like the worst out of all possible scenarios.

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 if statements) 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.

Oh I agree. I typically put “AI” in quotation marks when using that term regarding LLMs, because to me they simply are not intelligent in anyway. In my mind an AI would need an actual level of consciousness of sorts, the ability to form actual thoughts and learn things freely based on whatever senses it has. But AI is a term that’s good for marketing as well as fear mongering, which we see a lot of in current news cycles and on social media. The problem is that most people do not even understand the basic principles of how LLMs work, which lead to a lot of misconceptions about its uses & misuses and what we should do about it. Weirdly enough this makes LLMs both completely overhyped as a product and completely stigmatized as some nefarious tool as well. But I guess it fits into our today’s societies that kinda seem to have lost all nuance and reason.

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?

Why are some hands blue? Shouldn’t it just be whatever’s on the main body?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All the larger PC manufacturers do offer Ubuntu at least. There was a time when Best Buy was selling them from Dell and Lenovo, but I’m sure the staff couldn’t sufficiently explain the “why”, and it was also at a time when more technology illiterate folks were the purchasers. That’s not the case anymore, but I guess we will see how/if it shifts at all.

Lenovo ships some models with Mint FWIW.

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.

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.

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.

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

CAD work in Linux blows. I say this after trying multiple options.

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%.

What drawbacks?

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.

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 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.

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.