as alive as you need me to be
I see any use of GenAI as support and endorsement of the technology, and I see the technology as a systemic attack on creative work by real people.
I mean personally, I do as well.
But... it's Pandora's box.
You can't uninvent it, basically.
We could theoretically limit or heavily regulate its further development, but again realistically, with how much money and power tech corporations have, how much influence they have over lawmakers...
... unless you're gonna go find an 'AI' datacenter and put salt or sulfuric acid or something into the cooling loops, no you probably can't really do much to effectively impede it.
I do block dedicated GenAI communities, but it's more widespread than that, showing up in unrelated comms, being used to generate community icons and banners.
I've also seen a bit of this, and I also find it annoying... though 99% of the time that I see something like this, its some kind of like cryptobro, when lambo, diamond hands, type person.
I don't know that it like, stems or comes from GenAI comms on db0.
but IIRC the host of db0 is supportive of GenAI, which is what I primarily referred to, and what steers the direction the instance is taking.
Well I don't know precisely what db0's (the admin) exact stance on GenAI is, but I do know that db0 the instance and community has a highly involved and active goverance model for instance rules and associations. There are fairly often major discussions and votes on a good deal of issues... as opposed to many other instances that basically just come down to the whims of the admin + a clique of powermods.
db0 themself has done more than any other instance admin I am aware of to make it so that if the community itself opposes their own personal opinion, they'll adopt the community's opinion and simply be an executor/facilitator of it.
... says the one week old account that only exists to pick fights and do nothing other than argue ideology.
Come on buddy, its possible to say something and reference an example of a controversial/touchy topic, as an example of being a controversial/touchy topic, without wanting to engage in that controversy.
sigh
I'm not going to have this discussion, again.
I'm tired.
Thank you for proving my point that some .ml users get very very touchy about these two topics.
Oh dear god.
Welp, I tried.
But at this point I'm convinced that the Windows implementation of secureboot just basically is a direct to FBI/NSA/CIA backdoor/wiretap so uh...
Like, come on.
What other software just regularly directly rewrites the BIOS/UEFI when you try to fight it? Or just, when a Windows update happens?
Its a bootkit, as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah that's a bit of a tough problem to crack, lol.
Great head admin, good variety of local communities, great users?
Debian is a rock solid choice.
I dock mine, hook it up to a TV.
I run a local LLM on it.
I do modelling/animating in Blender.
I do game dev in Godot.
I do video editing in ShotCut.
I do image manipulation in Krita, mostly.
I do these things far more often than I actually just play games on it.
Lol yeah.
I mean, I run Bazzite on my mine, but yeah, SteamDecks run SteamOS by default... which is linux.
Run a webbrowser inside of a Windows environment, on Linux?
WINE/Proton?
SteamOS is open source.
Proton is open source.
Steam the game platform is closed source.
Hopefully it is obvious why open sourcing a payment processing application with **tens of millions of user and bank accounts tied into it**would be highly problematic.
You might as well be demanding PayPal or Epic Games Store to be open source.
There are 0 games I have that do not work on Proton.
This is because I don't play games with rootkits.
You may have heard these referred to as 'Kernel Level Anticheats'.
They're rootkits, and nearly every single major anti-cheat system that exists has at least one game where its been made to work with/on linux.
All game devs that say its too hard or impossible to make AC work on linux are incompetent or lying.
I have absolutely no idea how you managed to screw up Waterfox, I've been using it for like a year + with 0 problems.
I've never encountered any behavior from it like what you describe as a default setting.
I have never had to write any code to get ... I don't think any version of linux I've ever used, to work, as an OS.
... what... specifically, is the 'functionality' of both Linux Mint and Bazzite that you apparently only get out of one or the other?
Like genuinely, what does that even mean?
I play games on Bazzite, and I've also compiled 03DE from scratch on Bazzite, I tinker around in Godot and Blender and various other dev tool type things regularly.
It is entirely possible to work and play on either Linux Mint or Bazzite.
With LibreOffice, yeah, you don't get all of the proprietary Windows fonts directly out of the box, but uh, Bottles is a neat flatpak that rapidly sets up a Windows environment, with a GUI, and its a few clicks to add the 'all fonts' dependency, snd then voila, you have your proprietary fonts.
What you almost certainly are is a jaded Windows poweruser who expects non Windows operating systems to function and be tweaked and follow the same paradigms as Windows.
They don't.
They are different operating systems.
They work differently.
Applying your Windows based intuition will lead you to break things.
Whole lotta MacOS recommendations here, so I'm gonna say:
Bazzite.
... you can actually play games on it, and its an OS too!
More technically:
Its a Linux distro, an atomic version of Fedora, with many tweaks and pre built in utilities to make gaming work better and more easily.
If you have no idea what that means, it means that its fairly cutting edge but also very stable version of linux, where the core OS yells at you if you try to muck with it, and highly encourages you to use the various sandboxed containers it helps you use you run all sorts of applications.
The simple version of the above is: Just use the app store, Bazaar, and things will pretty much 'just work'.
You can do more intense / power user / expert type stuff if you like, and it does take a few extra steps compared to just like, straight Fedora or Debian, but, Bazzite is much, much more noob friendly and much harder to break.
I mean, I'm an 'anarkiddie' according to actual tankies, but I don't broadly discriminate against .ml users, most of them are great!
... but, a lot of .ml powermods do things like declare the Xi Poohbear meme to be inherently racist, even though it was literally created by Chinese netizens.
Or, god help you if you attempt to discuss the Holodomor.
You can do what I do and just block the genAI art comms.
No harm, no foul, I just am not interested in the content.
While I can't say for certain, I would strongly suspect that a lot of the people in those comms are self hosting their LLMs/Image generators, if that makes you feel any better.
But uh, there are a variety of nuanced stances on LLMs and such, amongst the other m@teys I've talked with.
Its... not like we're all super duper no holds barred put AI in everything advocates.
A lot of us are... quite a lot closer to 'Butlerian Jihad NOW', lol.
Zip is awesome! I switched over to db0, but simply because of a technical glitch on .zip like a year ago now, which was rapidly fixed by the admin.... and I was too impatient to withstand not being able to post, lol.
A+ instance imo.
Not too long ago, I saw at least 8 F16s leave the Sioux Falls airport, headed south, in a single day.
More than that in total over several other days, blackhawks, chinooks, more f16s, etc.
This was not too long before the snatch and grab of Maduro.
My total guess would be we've got a lot more airframes than normal positioned at or near the southern border.
Beyond that... uh, aluminum foil type balloons basically show up quite brightly on radar screens and such... they're a lot like chaff.
So, if the computer systems attached to the radar system failed to flag it as 'probably a balloon or something', well, it could have just been blown along by the wind at approximately drone speeds, at approximately a drone altitude, on a trajectory that I guess looked hostile or suspicious.
And if it was a bunch of aluminum foil balloons, that could look like a drone formation or swarm, if they more or less got picked up by the same air current.
Apparently the explanation is 'we thought it was a cartel drone swarm'
“The FAA and [Department of War] acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion. The threat has been neutralized, and there is no danger to commercial travel in the region. The restrictions have been lifted and normal flights are resuming,” Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said in a statement.
So... yeah, itchy trigger finger, and it means aluminum foil party balloons are apparently, in at least some conditions, not able to be filtered out as party balloons by the involved radar/computer systems and/or whatever humans are in charge of making a call.
Or, who knows, maybe at this point it was fucking Grok that made the call, after all, Hegseth made a big show of incorperating xAI into as many military systems as possible.
For example, I am the treasurer for my regional timebank, and among my offered services are financial literacy, budgeting, and household bookkeeping. This won't surprise you at all: it's my most used offer (>100 hours used) and the number of people lacking these skills... it's almost like this system is designed for a certain scope and scale of financial ignorance.
Well hey, you're actually doing some effective harm mitigation and working to provide a framework of alternatives!
That is actually commendable, I tip my proverbial hat to that.
I used to work at a nonprofit serving the homeless and at risk of becoming homeless... after enough years inside a few Fortune 500 companies showed me the true extent of the horror.
Sadly I got badly maimed and am almost a year into full time at home physical therapy... progress is real, but slow.
Had to move to the middle of nowhere to find somewhere I could afford to rent off of just SSDI.
But anyway, yes, it is very much obviously intentional that we have a lack of financial literacy and at this point just general literacy:
The Republicans have been doing everything they can for my entire lifetime thus far to destroy public education, and it is working.
I’m not sure what else could be done here.
Reform or overthrow the system instead of participating in it to the detriment of others.
Start or join a housing co-op.
Do something to alleviate the harm, or provide an alternative system.
If you have enough assets/credit to consider getting a home mortgage, you have enough assets/credit to make a meaningful difference.
No more excuses.
In a broken system, doing good, being moral, has costs, is difficult.
Instead of leveraging your privelege to increase or sustain your privilege, leverage it toward effective change.
"I don't know what else you're supposed to do" is why the machine keeps grinding everyone to death, is why more and more people become homeless, is ultimately why the planet's climate is now fucked beyond repair and we can now only attempt to cope with the now unstoppable changes that are coming.
You understand what you are doing by participating in the system, therfore, you either condone it, or you're a hypocrite.
Predatory lending in the vast majority of developed economies other than the US:
Adjustable rate home mortgages being issued to financially illeterate people without extremely clear and emphasized risks and disclosures.
Same thing with HELOCs.
Vehicles loans with rates over 15%.
... subprime lending basically just is predatory lending that we don't legally call predatory lending.
Oh and then of course there is the entire system of Private Credit Shadow Banks who issue trillions in loans to all kinds of business entities, who basically aren't required to do anywhere near the level of accounting rigor or transparency that actual banks do.
We just basically don't regulate them.
Financing also literally causes or just is monetary inflation, in a debt-based fiat currency system.
Those with access to credit leverage it and prosper roughly proportional to their level of credit access, those without access to it pay the inflation tax and suffer.
This is why capitalism has bubble/pop cycles, inherently, systemically, unavoidably.
When your home is functionally your own personal bank, you want home values to keep going up... which necessarily causes less people to be able to afford homes, and in a society based on access to credit being necessary to 'buy' a home, this creates and exacerbates a class divide.
(You really haven't 'bought' your home untill you've fully paid off the mortgage, untill then you're more or less doing a complex rent-to-own from the bank.)
Its also why you get 'too big to fail' banks and other entities... they have a bunch of bad debt, and if they are forced to actually account for it, well that would mean so many write offs that it would massively decrease the money supply, which is a recession/depression.
The same dynamic is at play with college costs.
More financialized, more loans? Prices go up. Less people can afford college, or in our lovely system where student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy, more people become literal debt slaves.
Same dynamic is also at play with vehicles, cars.
... real estate is only a hedge against inflation in a society that is stratifying, becoming more inequitable.
If that's your inflation hedge strategy, you must understand that mass broad usage of this strategy actively causes the impoverishment of those who can't afford super-inflating home prices.
Super-inflating home values is the Boomers climbing a ladder, and then once they're on top of it, constantly pulling that ladder higher, further and further away from the ground, from all their kids.
EDIT:
Median age of a new home buyer, as of latest data, is now 40 years old.
It was ~28 through most of the 80s.
Holy shit you need to calm down.
Uh.
No.
If you fully open source an entire payment processor app, a competent coder can rather rapidly figure out how to reverse engineer its security mechanisms and then develop exploits and then do fraud and identity theft and money laundering.
Sure, there is 'open source banking/finance' as a movement to open source and standardize various APIs to increase integration of certain segments of banking, but... you can't have a fully open source financial system that goes all the way through all of its security and accounts and such, 100% of it, unless you switch everything over to some kind of crypto currency.
... which has a lot of its own complications and problems.
Well that's a very silly thing to say, which further showcases that you don't really understand the things you are complaining about / frustrated with.
Which ones?
Whats your hardware?
What even is your actual OS/system setup?
Maybe we could try to troubleshoot them, instead of screaming?
I didn't say any of that, but ok.
I again didn't say that.
I said I've never had a problem with it, I have not encountered the problem you encountered.
You maybe wanna ... link to bug?
There are lots of programs with lots of ongoing or closed issues and bugs with lots of software.
I can't tell whats going on with your setup and your problem because you're sceaming like a lunatic.
So again, chill the fuck out, I never said its not happening or didn't happen.
Realize that you're angry and confused and enraged and lashing out at people making neutral statements, because you're attributing meaning to them that is not present.
Like, you're the reason why IT support people have PTSD.
No, I didn't.
I said I am using Bazzite right now.
I've been using some kind or another of linux for almost 15 years.
I am by no means an absolute expert on all things linux, but I do have a fair deal of general linux knowledge as well as more specific knowledge with the linux distros and applications I've spent more time using.
I just asked you to actually identify, describe the things that you want to be able to do, that you think are only doable on either Mint or Bazzite.
Maybe there legitimately are some things that are much easier or more difficult to do on one or the other!
I don't know which though, because you are again, extremely hostile, confused, and screaming like a madman.
... ok... then... don't expect to be able to run too much Windows programs/features/content on linux.
You realize that WINE or Proton... are windows environments, on linux, right?
Badically no .exe or .msi or Windows specific program will run on linux natively.
You... have to set up a windows environment, a set of translation layers, like WINE and Proton or the Soda variant that Bottles uses... to do that.
No... I am emphasizing that because it is a highly relevant factor in explaining why/how open source software legally cannot freely bundle and distribute other kinds of code that they don't have the IP/Copyright/Patent/Trademark rights to.
Evidently your law firm doesn't do much work around software IP law.
I also never said the fonts were bad, you just made that up.
Like... yes, what you are describing here, not having out of the box support, in LibreOffice, to open a .docx file and have all the supported fonts, yep, that is a legitimate problem for apparently your intended use case.
Generally, in an office/productivity context, its a good idea to make sure all the stuff you are going to be using frequently is compatible with each other... before you make a significant change over to a different program for a core part of the workflow.
People get paid 6 or 7 figures to determine the best way to go about doing that... I guess you just thought that such due dilligence wasn't a relevant factor for your personal situation.
I would attempt to find a solution for you, but you've already said that it needs to just work natively, or its worthless, and I'm not aware of any solutions to your scenario that just work natively, given the other preferences and constraints you've indicated.
They do, but you're confused and uniformed and very angry, and:
You do not want to have to humble yourself and realize how much fundamental, core 'knowledge' you have that is either wrong or missing.
... Yes... I am the seething one here.
Not the extremely the extremely hostile and confused person.
For a person who works in a law firm, you're shockingly bad at communication and image management.