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mrmaplebar

@ mrmaplebar @fedia.io

Posts
5
Comments
353
Joined
11 mo. ago

  • How are you getting free from tech bro influence?

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  • Linux, fediverse, signal, matrix, self-hosting services like Jellyfin and Gittea, minimizing subscription services as much as possible, embrace physical media and retro gaming, touch grass, etc.

    You would be amazed how much free and open technology you personally have access to, even on modest used hardware running out of your home.

  • What's an online service you happily pay for?

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  • I don't actually pay for this, because the free tier is good enough for my personal needs, but Tailscale is amazing and has totally changed my relationship with self-hosting and web services.

    I know that you can roll your own VPN WAN using wireguard or whatever, but honestly Tailscale makes it pretty foolproof, and that's allowed me to access all of my self-hosted stuff from anywhere with minimal screwing around. The first time I logged into my Jellyfin and Finamp from outside the house, I was pretty much hooked. If I could easily and safely host public game servers for my wider group of friends I would be even more into it and would definitely pay for a higher tier.

  • What is the point of Linux updates?

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  • A Linux distribution is a collection of software packages that live inside a repository. You can think of this kind of like an app store, that houses a bunch of different pieces of software for you to download if you want them.

    Also like an app store, each piece of software in the repository is (hopefully) being developed and maintained to some degree by one or more software developers who are adding new features, fixing bugs, improving performance, etc. Some open source projects have decent budgets and many active developers, and change quickly, others are propped up by just one or two people and move a little slower.

    Regardless... When one of pieces of software releases a new update, it is up to the distro maintainers to package it into the distro repository so that it can be downloaded by the users of the distro. Effectively this means that with each new version of a distro you're going to get access to a smattering of new software releases that will both update the software on your system, and also make new versions of other software available to you on the repo side.

    (Keep in mind that some distros, like Arch, use a rolling release model that upgrades things one at a time as they arrive, and other distros like Bluefin, use an atomic model which basically swaps out your entire OS each time you update. So they don't ALL work like this.)

    In other words, assuming your updating correctly, stuff is certainly changing each time you update to a new version. Those changes might be very noticeable (PopOS recently swapped out their entire desktop from Gnome to Cosmic!), somewhat subtle, or totally under-the-hood (like a Linux kernel/driver improvement). But they are happening.

  • Lutris is AI slop now

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  • I think that, considering the goal of ensuring the LLM doesn't directly reproduce the training data, it really doesn't matter. I don't think trillions of characters arranged into words so something can spit out the most likely combination of those words back at me really has anything to do with how those words are sourced.

    To me it's a question of "fair use", is it fair for the richest for-profit tech corporations on Earth to scrape every book, painting and song from the internet without so much as basic consent or compensation for the benefit of their shareholders, or not?

    You have to concede that all of these companies, be it OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, etc., wouldn't have an LLM product at all without a massive quantity of high-quality training data. Even OpenAI themselves have admitted this fact in court, claiming that it would be impossible for them to achieve the desired result without infringing on other people's works.

    Are you the type of person who believes that "profit is exploitation" by any chance? Marxism is popular on here, right?

    So let's forget about copyright and start talking about "exploitation"...

    By far the most influential theory of exploitation ever set forth is that of Karl Marx, who held that workers in a capitalist society are exploited insofar as they are forced to sell their labor power to capitalists for less than the full value of the commodities they produce with their labor. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/exploitation/#MarxTheoExpl

    They have no product without our labor.

    There is no "OpenAI Studio Ghibli filter" for Altman to profit off of, without the artwork of Hayao Miyazaki, Kazuo Oga, and multitudes of other lower-level workers who are certainly not as well off as the tech billionaires.

    What the "AI" industry all comes down to is an unprecedented exploitation of other people's intellectual labor for profit. It's not some great talent equalizer as some delusional people seem to think it is. It is a vehicle by which the richest members of the corporate ownership class are taking the work of the creative class, and have now created an investment bubble in which just about all of the money flows up to the top.

    Over the last few years of this bubble are we seeing any real benefit to society or humanity? No.

    Oligarchs like Altman, Zuckerberg and Musk are the only people reaping the financial benefits of everyone else's work.

    Your moral compass is probably fine. But like the person above who compared LLMs to pirating photoshop, I think you're just not seeing the forest for the trees. We can agree to disagree, but I'm not happy about what is effectively modern day robber barons.

  • Lutris is AI slop now

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  • I do support FOSS, in fact I have written FOSS code as part of my job in the non-profit space for almost a decade. I'm thankful for all of the people who write code whether it's copyleft GPL or permissive MIT. But I still recognize that it's their code and that they are simply granting me a license to use it under certain conditions.

    Generative AI takes those conditions and wipe their ass with them. I have a problem with that.

  • Lutris is AI slop now

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  • Well, then I guess you're not such a fan of "open source" as the developer of Lutris is, because he has chosen to maintain the copyright of his work and license his code under the GPLv3.

    As a believer in FOSS myself, I think it's hypocritical that he expects people to respect the license attached to his code when he is choosing not to respect the licenses of others.

  • Lutris is AI slop now

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  • Why? You really don't see any difference between training an AI model off of public domain, creative commons and licensed data, and corporations like Meta and Anthropic pirating millions of books without even so much as consent from the original authors?

    I wouldn't have a problem with AI if it was trained legitimately, but sadly working people are being ripped off by massive corporations on an unprecedented scale.

  • Trump Allegedly Told GOP Leader “No One Gives a [Bleep] About Housing”

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  • As if the GOP would ever do anything good for housing anyway...

  • Lutris is AI slop now

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  • As is FOSS licensed software... Copyright and license notices at the top of every source file.

    So, why should anyone respect the GPL or even the MIT license when they can simply ignore it and exploit the work of the open source community?

  • Lutris is AI slop now

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  • Do you create, or just consume?

    A world without copyright would be significantly worse for the people who makes things, like writers, artists, musicians, etc.

    In the real world, with the current laws, nobody should be entitled to exploit other people's physical or intellectual labor. If profit is exploitation, then why wouldn't AI be?

  • Lutris is AI slop now

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  • If this is the best argument the pro-AI crowd has left at this point then you've lost all ability to reason...

    Pirating Photoshop is, at worst, taking advantage of Adobe, a multi-billion dollar corporation. They are still very profitable and their employees still got paid to do the work. We can debate the ethics of software piracy all day, and I would argue you're better off investing your mental energy in FOSS, but in the end I think the social impact of people pirating Photoshop is quite small.

    Compare this to generative AI which is built on the unprecedented exploitation of all human arts, culture and intellectual labor without any form of consent or compensation. All for the benefit of the richest tech oligarchs who are more than happy to sell you a subscription to a product that they stole from the creative class.

    Who is benefitting the most from the AI bubble, the starving artist or the wealthy investor? The thoughtful engineer or the slop slinger? The workers or the suits?

    No matter what way you slice it, you're not "sticking it to the man", you are the man. He shouldn't embarrass himself by blaming "capitalism" when he has shown that he is just as willing to exploit other people's labor as the next guy--hes just stupid enough to do it for pennies to the AI billionaires dollar.

  • Lutris is AI slop now

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  • There are massive issues with AI tech, but those are caused by our current capitalist culture, not the tools themselves. In many ways, it couldn't have been implemented in a worse way but it was AI that bought all the RAM, it was OpenAI. It was not AI that stole copyrighted content, it was Facebook. It wasn't AI that laid off thousands of employees, it's deluded executives who don't understand that this tool is an augmentation, not a replacement for humans.

    I'm not a big fan of having to pay a monthly sub to Anthropic, I don't like depending on cloud services. But a few months ago (and I was pretty much at my lowest back then, barely able to do anything), I realized that this stuff was starting to do a competent job and was very valuable. And at least I'm not paying Google, Facebook, OpenAI or some company that cooperates with the US army.

    He might have had a leg to stand on here if this was an AI that he had trained himself on ethically-sourced data, but personally I don't want to be lectured by anyone about "our current capitalist culture" who is intentionally playing right into it by financially supporting the companies at the center of the AI bubble. The very corporations that are known to have scraped countless terabytes of unlicensed data for their own for-profit exploitation, by the way.

    If you discard your self-proclaimed values the second that it becomes convenient or "valuable", you never had any values to begin with.

    Practice what you preach, or don't preach at all.

  • Lutris is AI slop now

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  • I have multiple years of experience maintaining and reviewing code for a medium sized open source project, and in my experience we have no seen any meaningful increase of good contributions since the AI investment bubble kicked off a couple years ago.

    On the flip side, I know that dealing with a glut of low-quality AI-generated slop merge requests has been a real problem for other large open source projects. https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/open-source-game-engine-godot-is-drowning-in-ai-slop-code-contributions-i-dont-know-how-long-we-can-keep-it-up/

    In my personal view, AI is really not suitable for actual programming, just typing. Programming requires thought and logic--something LLMs do not actually possess and are not capable of. Furthermore, without an authentic understanding of the code that is being generated, the human being who are ultimately responsible for maintaining the code, fixing errors and making improvements, will only be hurting themselves in the long wrong when they can't follow the "logic" of what was written. You're just creating more problems for yourself in the future.

    Personification of probability doesn't do us any good, open source projects require thoughtful contributions from thinking entities.

    To make matters worse, I think that AI is also not at all suitable for "open source" development, as it obfuscates authorship and completely obliterates the concept for FOSS licensing.

    Were AI models trained on FOSS code including GPL-licensed code? Does this make the output of AI models GPL too, or are LLMs magical machines that can launder GPL code into something proprietary? How do you know that the code produced by your LLM is legally safe and not ripped verbatim from someone else's scraped proprietary codebase? Finally, who is the author and copyright holder of AI generated code?

    Ultimately, right now in 2026 we are seeing a lot of use of generative AI being forced by the corporate world, but we are not seeing that result in any meaningful improvement to worker productivity or product quality. (Windows 11 has never been in worse shape than it is today, and I can only assume that is because it is being programmed with much less human intelligence behind it.)

  • Bluesky CEO Jay Graber Is Stepping Down

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  • You do sound a little batty, as a matter of style.

  • Did you drink alcohol when you were younger than me?

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  • I tried weed and alcohol a couple of times. Didn't really care about them much though and never got into them. I started enjoying weed occasionally in my mid 30s. 😂 I still don't care about alcohol much, though I'll drink on occasion.

    To be totally honest, it wouldn't kill you to try light drugs like alcohol, THC or nicotine, and you won't get instantly addicted to them or anything. But they are not healthy for you or your brain, and in the long term the potential for addiction is there. I personally feel that nicotine is the most addictive and THC. Is the least.

    I would strongly recommend against even trying hard drugs, like opioids, heroin, meth or fentanyl, as those things can ruin your life or kill you quickly. Not all "drugs" are the same.

  • Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade tells oil tankers to go through the Strait of Hormuz: "Show some guts and go through that strait and do it"

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  • I'm not sure I really want my tax dollars to be insuring oil tankers traveling through a war zone.

    I'd rather my tax dollars insure sick people.

    Plus, who would be dumb enough to believe that Trump would ever hold up his end of a bargain like that?

  • LTT does another Linux Challenge

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  • System76 makes PopOS and ships it on their Linux-friendly laptops and desktops.

    Framework, a company that Linus is heavily invested in, also makes Linux-friendly laptops.

    I'm not saying he's doing it intentionally, or that his criticisms are invalid, but there is a basic conflict of interest there.

  • LTT does another Linux Challenge

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  • PopOS has been a good recommendation in the past, that doesn't mean it's a good recommendation right now.

    The same thing is true when Linus reviews one generation of Intel CPUs well, and another generation ends up having catastrophic flaws.

    The world isn't static, things change over time.

    If he had consulted a human being with a brain, instead of an LLM without one, he would probably quickly find out that PopOS just replaced their entire desktop environment and toolkit with new ones (Cosmic and Iced, all written in a relatively young programming language in terms of GUI, Rust). I'm the first one to blame PopOS for shipping Cosmic in such as rough state as version 1.0, but Linus is absolutely playing dumb to the point of contrivance here by ignoring the community and relying on ChatGPT to advice.

    Any criticism ends up with hate and silent downvotes.

    I think I've been pretty vocal and I'm not hating. I think my opinion is pretty nuanced.

    I don't blame him for trying PopOS because it has been recommended to him before. I do blame him for using LLMs and "listicles" for his research.

    PopOS clearly is in a bad state right now and that is on them.

  • LTT does another Linux Challenge

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  • Sorry but, what you you on about?

    Being free and open source is literally the entire premise and the most important "feature" of the Linux ecosystem: it will almost always be free (as in beer), and there will always be a lot of good choices. You're probably never going to convince me that computers would be better off if we had to spend more money with fewer options.

    People keep making this point, but to be perfectly honest it's a dumb one because it's the nature of the beast. OK, let's say for the sake of argument that there's too many distros out there, so now what?

    None of this changes the fact that going to ChatGPT for advice (on pretty much any topic) is a bad idea. It doesn't have thoughts or opinions, it doesn't know that (for better or worse) Cosmic just shipped 1.0 a few months ago. It recommended him PopOS because it does nothing other than regurgitate old information scraped from the internet.

    Its' like... If I use an LLM for investment advice and I lose all of your money, who's the idiot? I am.

  • Oil surges above $100 a barrel; Trump says ‘small price to pay’ for defeating Iran

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  • Anyone got any "I did that!!" stickers with Trump's dumb face on them?