HaraldvonBlauzahn

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HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 15h ago

Ron Popeil

"Popeil received the Ig Nobel Prize in Consumer Engineering in 1993."

For sure.

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HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 15h ago

They are simply not in the same league as Einstein, Oppenheimer and Russel.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 15h ago

@bekkaboo@girlcock.club Linux itself is heavily using AI models.

For security analysis and uncovering bugs.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 3d ago

There is also Knoppix, designed for rescue purposes.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 4d ago

Onlookers fear ....

I like that kind of fine British understatement. It is like the BBC diffuses that MS Titanic appears to have had a minor collision with something floating on the surface and there might even exist risk that she cannot reach her destination harbour on time.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 4d ago

Personally, I also think that much of the hate which one would find e.g. on reddit or the orange site against copyleft licenses in general, and the GPL specifically was probably astroturfing from corporations for which it was just an obstacle to appropiate more unpaid volunteer work for the commons for free.

For the Linux kernel - and for GNU/Linux as an OS - the GPL was never a problem. On the contrary: Without it, the kernel would not be what it is (the historic Torvalds - Tanenbaum debate shows the reasons quite clearly).

The same is true, by the way for the GNU Guix project: Very few arguments against it are logical or really hold water. It is, for example, perfectly possile to publish a Guix channel for a commercial game or proprietary software on ones own web site - just as you can do with a docker image. And the way Guix takes care of dependencies and updates makes it probably the easiest way to do such. Because you can use Guix as a package manager on most distros - I use it both on Debian and Arch - I find it more reasonable than using snaps, docker, or flatpaks.

The reason for the hate is likely something else: That you can't commercialise and embrace the whole, source-based ecosystem. And also, in a primarily source-based system, you have less control over other peoples computers: You can still offer binary packages similar to Ubuntu ppas, but you will need to explain to people why you want them to install binary stuff from you, which can take control of their computer. Do you have any experience with a relationship where one side wanted complete control and it turned out good for you?

For example, you also can't use the Guix infrastructure (e.g. their mailing list or download server) to promote or advertise commercial, non-free stuff.

But expecting or demanding to be able to do that is just ridiculous: Nobody expects from Microsoft or Apple that they feel obliged to promote or market Adobe or Oracle products. Alone the idea that companies could demand that shows how entitled the corporations behave in respect to free software.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 4d ago

Be ready to supply your fingerprints using Microsoft Authenticator app and your free source access subscription for only 49 USD per month! /s

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HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 4d ago

Like for example selecting Linux distro, downloading it and saving on an USB.

Using an USB thing is the somewhat decadent newfangled way to do things. The more classy way was to download the whole distro to an 1.44 MB floppy drive. \installation was by dd .... of=/dev/fd0. Yeah, it required 16 megabytes of RAM. It was possible to boot it on an 386 PC. Though kernel compiles were a bit lengthy.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 4d ago

64GB of RAM to use it.

Does that mean it does not run on my beloved Thinkpad X220 with 4GB?

Looks like I am stuck with running Debian 13 on it.

Fun fact, at $currentwork there are two true believers in AI and somehow they managed to procure me a laptop for home office which weights in roughly 9 kilograms - a bit more than six times as heavy as my 12 year old X220. Must be the battery which is needed to power the NVidia graphics card.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 4d ago

As far as I know I'm the only person who uses the term "vibe bobsled" and, well, I doubt it's a term that's particularly likely to catch on, but I find it personally useful.
Bobsledding, if you are unaware, is a particularly strange and interesting sport. It's a lot of fun, but you don't have a lot of agency in it. You sit in a bobsled, you go down an icy track, and really, there is only one way to go.
[...]
The vehicle is the LLM, you are the passenger. And I think the amount of agency people have over their journey is greatly reduced from what they feel like it is. More than just a slippery slope, it is a pre-crafted journey.
At the top of the chute, people tell themselves they're going to use these tools as a kind of fancy autocomplete. As they descend, they say they'll spin up some agents to explore ideas, but they'll write the code themselves. Next their agents are generating the code for them, but don't worry, but they'll review all the output. Soon they're plummeting downward and well, they don't actually review the code being spat out much anymore, but they trust the agents, heck maybe the agents are actually better coders than they are they say. And where does it go from there? From "I don't even code anymore" to "I don't even prompt anymore"?
At every stage of the process, the coder in question removes themselves from the process of producing code, and gives in towards a faith-based initiative of code production, that the LLM knows and does a good job of what it's doing. But what is the source of gravity pulling the sled along this icy chute?
It's simple. Generation is not the slow part of coding. Theory-building and review are. And plausible-enough things are extremely hard to debug and understand. But the machines are so fast at producing things. If you are going to review their work, you aren't really taking advantage of their most powerful property, which is speed. But theory-building and review are also the programmer's most important role.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 4d ago

As far as I know I'm the only person who uses the term "vibe bobsled" and, well, I doubt it's a term that's particularly likely to catch on, but I find it personally useful.
Bobsledding, if you are unaware, is a particularly strange and interesting sport. It's a lot of fun, but you don't have a lot of agency in it. You sit in a bobsled, you go down an icy track, and really, there is only one way to go.
[...]
The vehicle is the LLM, you are the passenger. And I think the amount of agency people have over their journey is greatly reduced from what they feel like it is. More than just a slippery slope, it is a pre-crafted journey.
At the top of the chute, people tell themselves they're going to use these tools as a kind of fancy autocomplete. As they descend, they say they'll spin up some agents to explore ideas, but they'll write the code themselves. Next their agents are generating the code for them, but don't worry, but they'll review all the output. Soon they're plummeting downward and well, they don't actually review the code being spat out much anymore, but they trust the agents, heck maybe the agents are actually better coders than they are they say. And where does it go from there? From "I don't even code anymore" to "I don't even prompt anymore"?
At every stage of the process, the coder in question removes themselves from the process of producing code, and gives in towards a faith-based initiative of code production, that the LLM knows and does a good job of what it's doing. But what is the source of gravity pulling the sled along this icy chute?
It's simple. Generation is not the slow part of coding. Theory-building and review are. And plausible-enough things are extremely hard to debug and understand. But the machines are so fast at producing things. If you are going to review their work, you aren't really taking advantage of their most powerful property, which is speed. But theory-building and review are also the programmer's most important role.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 1w ago

Why would people want to make it less efficient.

Slower speeds are more efficient.

This is because at higher speeds, far more safety distance is needed. Because it is dominated by the braking distance, the safety distance increases roughly quadratic with speed. The transport capacity of a steet is however defined by speed divided by safety distance times its lanes. Which means that at higher speed, fewer vehicles per second can pass a point. And small, slow city streets can easily, and safely, transport more vehicles per second than a highway.

That's also why at an airport, a plane needs a runway with kilometers of free space for a single plane. It is the speed, which requires lots and lots of longitudinal space to retain safe control.

And this is also why bike paths can generally transport far more vehicles per second than streets for cars. For example, Copenhagen has a bicycle bridge that spans the harbour, which is called Cykelslangen. It has only two lanes, and at rush hour times, it transports over two vehicles per second.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 1w ago

Thankfully, it takes still zero cloud services to make my breakfast, ride my bike, and open my door.

And you can bet on that I'll keep it that way.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 2w ago

i don’t like non-standard software for use-cases where existing software can already do the job well.

Well, then there the normal web is for you, which certainly does its job well to flood you with ads and track you at every step.

HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 2w ago

if the protocol allows data transfer, then it also allows distribution of ads.

You do not know what you are talking about.

Ads are almost never displayed by choice of the reader. People have limited resources of attention, they know attention is precious, and they are not fond of things leeching it.

To see an ad in Geminispace, you would need to deliberately open a page with an ad. This is by implementation. There are no embedded ads. There is also no support for tracking in the Gemini protocol, and no JavaScript and such. You don't need ad-infested libraries, the Gemini space is not centralized so that big corporations can't inject ads into it, and running a Gemini server is so cheap that you don't need ads to pay it - costing a few dozens Euro cents per month, if you count the cost of a Raspberry Pi B and perhaps 9 kWh of electricity per year.

But to make it more concrete and practical:

Here is a Gemini-to-HTTP Gateway which shows a page which lists, in section 2.2.1, Gemini aggregators. As an entry point to geminispace:

https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq-section-2.gmi

You can start there and search.

Gemini has maybe ten thousand pages.

Now, show me a single Gemini page with an ad.

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HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org 2w ago

so i need to download a custom client or a browser plug-in, and i don’t like it.

The slight technical ceremony is, a bit tongue-in-cheek, needed to keep the umwashed masses away.

And the technical and media limitations are - and here I am totally serious - needed to keep boundless greedy corporarions away which sooner or later destroy every living or creative thing they touch.