There’s certainly no conflict of interest there…

Google gets a cut from the Google Ads click, which takes the user directly to the Play Store (or, if on desktop, the Chrome extension store).

If it’s some free shovelware app, they get a cut from the ads spammed onto the user’s screen. If it’s a sham subscription app, they get a cut of that. I see this a lot test clicking ads these days.

If its legit phishing, that’s a fair point; they don’t get a direct cut of the scam, other than the attention it drives towards their app stores and the data they collect for the user’s profile. But the point I’m trying to make is that it’s incredibly hypocritical to paint 3rd party apps (and indeed any competing app store) as a danger when they do such a poor job policing their own store. They may have a point, but it doesn’t really tackle scamware unless they change their moderation habits.

I mean, I think the point is that any bot asking for advice is a total lie.

So is a human being disingenuous.

The gratifying part of this kind of community is helping people with feedback. You don’t get that if you’re talking to a black hole.

Point I’m making is… if you wanted a simulated asklemmy, some specialized LLM agents could actually emulate that very well and give convincingly emotional conversation. But what’s the point? Its not about the text being AI generated or not, its about being earnest.

+1

‘Fuckwit’ or ‘spambot’ is not a synonym for LLM slop. There are plenty of human or sweatshop posts.

Yeah. I would massively emphasize this too.

Don’t mess around.

Especially don’t mess around with AUR. Discrete apps and such are fine, but AUR ‘tweaks’ that mess with the system are asking for trouble, as they have no guarantee of staying in sync with base Arch packages.

Ease of use.

I’ve run the same CachyOS partition for 2 (3?) years, and I don’t do a freaking thing to it anymore. No fixes, no tweaking. It just works.

…Because the tweaks and rapid updates are constantly coming down the pipe for me. I pay attention to them and any errors, but it’s all just done for me! Whenever I run into an issue, a system update fixes it 90% of the time, and if it doesn’t it’s either coming or my own stupid mistake.

On Ubuntu and some other “slow” distros I was constantly:

• Fighting bugs in old packages

• Fighting and maintaining all the manual fixes for them

• Fighting the system which does not like me rolling packages forward.

• And breaking all that for a major system update, instead of incremental ones where breakage is (as it turns out) more manageable.

• I’d often be consulting the Arch wiki, but it wasn’t really applicable to my system.

I could go on and on, but it was miserable and high maintenance.

I avoided Fedora because of the 3rd party Nvidia support, given how much trouble I already had with Nvidia.

…It seems like a misconception that it’s always “a la carte” too. The big distros like Endeavor and Cachy and such pick the subsystems for you. And there are big application groups like KDE that install a bunch of stuff at once.

We are designing this flow specifically to resist coercion, ensuring that users aren’t tricked into bypassing these safety checks while under pressure from a scammer.

Translation: if they want scamware, it better be from Google Play, where Google gets a 30% cut. On top of the cut they got for the phishing link in Google Ads.

And if anything thinks I’m being hyperbolic, go on Google Play and search for pretty much anything. Or turn off your adblocker.

Uh oh.

Hence, Zuckerberg has just recently fired most of the LLAMA staff, the lab’s leader is rumored to be leaving for their own startup, and the new lab where all the funding’s going is a bunch of tech bro egos that are pro-closed models.

…And I suspect PyTorch is too “utilitarian” for Facebook’s leadership to draw enshittification attention.

Llama was an anomaly, and it seems they’re done with that. Which is quite sad. But on the plus side, it could be a death knell for Meta (as all that ego in the new lab will be a catastrophe).

…Oh. I see, I misread the generation.

Yeah, that’s a huge caveat, one that would get me to reconsider the whole box, as FSR4 is way better than 3. I wonder if there’s a chance for AMD (or Valve) to backport it?

AMD must feel good about this, given their (apparent) alarmingly small desktop GPU marketshare.

…They really just need OEMs to ship the things, and now they got a great one.

I’d be neat if Steam offered an Intel Arc variant too. The B series is massively underrated.

Yeah.

I was with family, on an RTX 2060 laptop and a nice TV. I fed it 1080P for the TV to upscale (since that’s the only res it would take at 120HZ or something like that), and it looked good. Those TV ASICs are quite powerful these days.

I mean, it will do 4K in old games just fine.

FSR(4) is less noticable at higher res, anyway.

Yeah, that’s tiny. That’s like 3.8L.

I travel with a 10L SFF PC, and that’s small for an SFF case.

Oh, mine did too. Or stuff like the table not being quite right…

That sucks :(

Mine did. I just hacked around parental controls when I was young, heh.

I will say your parents could be crazy and earnestly trying to help at the same time.

…Isn’t this a bit ironic, considering GTA’s/RDR’s writing of (loosely) “plain folk’s plights?”

It’d be like CDPR going all in on DRM/corpo surveillance tech. And NO, CDPR Bot, that was not a suggestion!

Whoa. These comments are quick to jump to “your parent doesn’t love you” or talking about divorce. Chill out, folks.

“Come on, Sarah, can’t you just be normal and use Gmail like everyone?”

my mom, scolding me.

I don’t know the context, but… that doesn’t seem like something that should hold your Mom’s attention?

Maybe she’s worried about something else, and the email topic is just a proxy. My Mom was the same when I really got into tech hobbies in some problematic points of my childhood.

…The picture says 'Start Now. Download."

I posted some similar ads above.

I mean, I’m using Firefox now? Cromite blocks them by default too. I tested with and without a VPN as well.

If you’re gonna get all pointy, what I was trying to politely imply is your original statement is incorrect.