Aye, as an American, I have only a limited view of the big picture, but my understanding of it is that while it was definitely a politicized issue across the globe, a lot of the far right extremists were emboldened to make it such a big issue by the actions of Trump and the Republican party in the US.

Like that convoy of Canadian Trump rioters who can’t even vote for him if they wanted to because they live in Canada. Trump’s been a poster-boy for crazies all across the globe.

Trump made masks political, so wearing one is a political statement to these people.

They have made their political beliefs their entire personality to compensate for their low self confidence and so have to aggressively display their beliefs like a peacock anytime they think somebody is challenging those beliefs, regardless of how benign or irrelevant it is.

Big Carrot is coming for your stew

I’ve seen this reported in other countries as well, and it makes perfect sense. If you’re already at risk of being deported just for existing, why would you do anything to put yourself at higher risk.

The worst I have to do is use a different proton version or add in a launch option.

And therein lies the problem that keeps most people from switching to Linux. It’s a super simple thing to do, but Linux users fall into the same fallacy that experts in any field do: just how little the average person knows about the subject. The fact that something doesn’t just work when you try to open it would leave many people stumped. Especially with tech literacy rates declining thanks to kids growing up using mostly cell phones as their daily driver rather than an actual computer and the plug and play nature of Windows and Macs. Asking your average gamer to add command line arguments to a launcher would probably be like telling them they just have to hot wire their car if it doesn’t start when you turn the key.

The other side of the coin is that AI currently uses more power than is produced by all renewables across the globe annually. So at least they’ll be offsetting that, which would be a net positive.

And it seems like Google’s funding will help advance safer and more modern nuclear plant designs, which is another win that could lead to replacing coal plants in many countries with small scale reactors that don’t run on uranium.

It already is as far as I know. I’ve heard before that ChatGPT is strictly trained on data from before, like 2018 or so for this reason.

By “abrupt,” I mean that Windows 7 ended service updates just last year, and Windows 10 will end next year. And by “current,” I mean that Windows 11 overtook 7 as the second most used version of Windows in 2022.

We’ve known that they’re ending support for 10 next year for a few years, but that end of life timeline is very short compared to previous versions of Windows. If 10 had the same end of life timeline as 7, we’d be seeing service updates for 10 ending in 2030. And 11 may be the newest version of Windows, but it is by all means not the most used version and is most likely not the version currently being used by most people that this article is relevant to.

Fixed it for you:

Company renders 60%+ of computers running current software incapable of running new software due to niche hardware requirement, abruptly ends support for current version next year, and tells users to throw away their computers and buy new ones.

Oh, and they’re promoting their cloud storage option. Which may or may not have anything to do with their data harvesting? I don’t really know on that one.

They’ll be useful for gamers, at least. With the increasing trend of companies caring less about properly optimizing the size of game installs and expecting gamers to have SSDs for texture loading on the fly, these drives will definitely see use. I currently have a 4TB HDD that has over 2.3TB of Steam games installed on it right now (roughly 100 games from tiny indie games to big AAA releases that are 40-80 gigs in size), and several newer games have an SSD listed as one of their minimum requirements.

See the rest of my post: the people who are making it and why they’re making it.

I have no complaints about the people making LLMs that can spot tumors better than humans can, but I 100% agree with every single one of your points. The grifters and the AI fad of venture capitalism are ruining a useful technology and ruining the world and society along with it for a quick buck.

The underlying point misses why people have problems with the current AI bubble. I’ll cheer when they replace CEOs with AI - it seems like the best job to be replaced with LLMs and would save companies billions of dollars that could be used to improve the lives of workers. There’s tons of AI being used for all kinds of cool things already like spotting cancer in MRIs.

The issue people have with AI isn’t the tech. It’s who’s making it and why. It’s not being used to make life easier and better, it’s being used to cut decent paying jobs and commodify part of the human experience, all while making big profits without paying the people whose work was stolen to make those profits.

It’s just a different flavor of the fast fashion industry stealing high fashion designs and churning out their cheap knockoffs from factories in China where they don’t have to worry about things like safety standards or paying their workers a living wage.

Fun fact: After the adoption of electric lighting in homes became common, there was a massive increase in the demand for maids and cleaning services because people simply couldn’t see just how dirty their houses were when everybody was using candles.

Another fun fact: With the introduction of the computer and similar technology into many jobs, productivity skyrocketed, but wages didn’t rise to match the increase in company profits. However, it was still viable for the average American household to live off of the wages of one 40 hour per week job. Today, the average American household requires at least 2 full-time salaries in order to survive, despite technology continuing to push productivity even higher and companies continuously reporting their most profitable year ever, year over year. Despite technology, the amount of work per household has effectively doubled or more over the past 60 years.

I’m well aware of switchboard operators. Computers were originally a profession as well.

Secretaries are still all that, both using digital tools as well as physical. They weren’t replaced by any of those programs. They just changed how they do their job. They schedule your meetings for you now in their cell phone instead of on a desk-sized paper calendar mat.

“When I was young, they told me that one day, AI would do the menial labor so that we would have more time to do what we love - like art, music, and poetry. Today, the AI does art, music, and poetry so that I can work longer hours at my menial labor job for lower wages.”

Also, on point one, I still see a lot of job hirings for personal secretaries and people for data entry and to take minutes at meetings, and plenty of people complaining about not being able to actually talk to somebody on the phone to get their problem solved.

A lot of this started in the US because the big telecom companies were paid a lot of money by the government to roll out broadband in the middle of the country, where customers are spread out enough that they didn’t want to bother building the infrastructure, but they took the money and did none of the work. So, these communities did it themselves. Some of them literally burying fiber optics cables by hand through their farm fields.

I remember reading somewhere a few years ago about how this is feasible on the neighborhood level now at potentially better speeds and cheaper than the telecom companies with a satellite connection that people can use via a wi-fi network across the neighborhood.

I think it’s a boiling frog/straw on the camel’s back situation.

I’ve heard people say both that Microsoft releases a good version of Windows every third time, and that the way Windows works is that Microsoft releases the new one, it’s slightly worse/different from the previous and everybody hates it, then they get used to it by the time Microsoft releases the next version, starting the cycle of outrage all over again.

To me, it seems that the average user experience changes a little between different Windows versions, oftentimes making the experience a little more clumsy (have they finished migrating everything from the Control Panel to whatever the new settings panel is called yet? They started that back in like Windows 7), and the “power users” are the ones who get shafted worse.

For me, 10 will most likely be the last version of Windows that I use. I’ve reached a point in my life where I will happily stop using services/doing business with companies based on some of the stuff Microsoft is doing, like the ad integration, AI nonsense, forced Microsoft account and data harvesting, and the awful security threat that Recall was (and probably will be again when they repackage it and try it again). I’d honestly still be using 7 if it was still supported because I liked it much more than I do 10.

Besides the ones that they listed, I’ve also heard complaints about a lack of multi-monitor support and ads in the Start menu and login screen, though I believe the ads are only in certain versions of 11 (the home/personal editions, but not the more expensive company editions). I think the ads have also been limited to Microsoft products and apps from the Microsoft store - stuff like Word and Edge - but it’s a really bad path that they’re going down and it’s only a matter of time until that becomes targeted ads to go along with their tracking and selling data.

Companies have done this on purpose. They all want you to stay in their walled garden, their “ecosystem” of various products. So they make it easy to get into and get connected to people and things, and then make it hard to leave because you’re “invested.”

I really don’t understand how people use Instagram. I’ve tried, but it’s about 45% ads, 10-15% posts by people I don’t follow, it’s not in chronological order (or any sense of order for that matter), and regardless of whether I was on there yesterday or 2 months ago, it’ll show me about 40 posts before saying “You’re all caught up from the past 3 days!” and then refuse to show me any more.

I guess this is why I’m here on Lemmy and went crawling back to Tumblr, one of the last vestiges of the old internet. At this point, I’d rather watch a platform die than become marketable to advertisers and shareholders.