“Things used to be worse” is, in no way, helpful to me. I’m not selling fear. I’m living in it. Am I starving, am I being raped by a feudal lord, or am I being tortured by a king? No, and I’m aware I’m not.

This changes very little about everything happening right now… and frankly, it’s ignorant of you to assume that runaway technofascism or a decade or two of runaway climate change, the effects of which we are only theorizing about, won’t leave us in a world just as hostile as humans have faced in the past.

In my mind the ideal product maintainer for an Lemmy approved product has to be part of the LBTQ+ community, has to be some people of color, atheist, vegan and must subscribe to the EXACT same flavour of leftism the individual Lemmy user has sold his soul to.

Maybe I’m in the minority here, but as long as the maintainer isn’t a hateful person championing movements I consider grossly immoral (fascism, racism, lgbtq+ hate, hypercapitalism, etc.) or committing acts I consider to be grossly immoral (abuse, rape, torture, human trafficking, etc) I’m happy to support a good product.

most stuff they use was created by people that they would absolutely hate in person.

This is largely true. If it’s a personality thing I don’t mind, but deeply held beliefs and actions are another thing entirely. I’m trying to change where my money, time, and effort gets spent to avoid enriching or benefiting fascists that want to immiserate, harm, or eliminate from existence me or those I care about. Unfortunately, I sometimes have to pick my battles… which is kind of fucked up when you think about it.

Obviously their part of BLM… because… <gestures broadly> you know …and that’s basically ANTIFA!

I would be absolutely shocked if these cameras had any actual impact on these kinds of experiences. They’re more likely to use it to track “ANTIFA terrorists” (aka, progressives) with it than improve the quality of your business ride.

Going by the official/intended definition of enshittification, it’s not “how shitty is the product” for consumers, that’s just a part of it. It’s a whole process:

1. Capture consumer clients by offering great service to users at low cost or free
2. Capture business client market by abusing captured users in favor of business clients
3. Fuck over captured business clients and consumer users for maximum profit/power.

Seeing as how the governments would qualify as a type of business client… the process is likely to, in the end, involve the government getting fucked.

I think the idea is that it is not something separately securable? I don’t disagree, I’d like to be able to disallow any app not explicitly granted permission to use any method to determine my location. Unfortunately if Google can scan WiFi and figure out your location, anything with access to WiFi can too maybe?

I don’t know. I love technology but this fucking surveillance state situation is really getting to me. Routers using WiFi signal passing through your body to identify and locate you regardless of whether or not you are carrying any tech and all the other shit I don’t know about… ugh.

It’s actually a bit informative. I believe Android approximates location using the SSID/WiFi information, so it’s not just network that it’s used for.

Is there not a future in which the AI bubble bursts, and we are in a glut of datacentre memory and storage with no buyers?

There is. Unfortunately, not even the chips on the memory used by data centers is compatible with consumer hardware. They use extremely high performance, expensive HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), we use DDR memory. Unless consumers start getting affordable devices that are compatible with such memory, there is not much hope of buying what has been or is in the process of being made for data centers.

Nobody needs any entertainment, but some people enjoy hobbies like gaming.

no company has ever responded to more sales with lower prices

Prices are going up rapidly thanks to AI data centers exploding demand by orders of magnitude more than retail customers. There is no end in sight to the price increases.

If you want a gaming device, buy it sooner rather than later. That’s all I am saying.

Sure. I guess it depends on your anticipated financial situation and your priorities.

Honestly, the way shit is going, get what you can while you can. Gaming is only going to get worse and more expensive by the week.

It’s a better investment than spending that money treating AIDS or preventing an ebola outbreak in Africa.

• Typical, sick, racist, fascist Republican shit-stain

If I remember correctly, some of the ROG phones could actually run directly from the cable bypassing the battery. I think the idea was that it could be plugged in and gaming without wearing down the battery.

They’ve been fantasizing about that ever since “computers” started growing in accessibility - in the 1960s…

Fantasizing wasn’t the best choice of words - I often understate what I mean to communicate at an attempt at humor. I should have said "everyone started fantasizing becoming so obsessed with intelligent “AI” that they’re willing to dump a significant portion of the world’s resources just because… "

The current crop is just the first time such things have been delivered with something resembling “average” human responses.

That’s more or less what I meant by “patterns of language that seem relevant to a given input”. I was attempting to understate this in order to exaggerate the villainous eagerness and stupidity of greedy, rich fucks.

The LLM craze is a natural maturation point of the AI field

I don’t see why that is. Using ML to generate models that accurately perform specific tasks is orders of magnitude away from attempting to feed the entirety of human text into ML and expecting superhuman intelligence to emerge.

now it’s expanded into foundational models (FM) which you would still probably just call LLMs because most people don’t know the differences.

While ML and “AI” is not my field, I’m fairly certain that what I was attempting to describe in layman’s terms in my literal first sentence were these foundational models you are referring to.

FMs are getting close to that point of a magical universal computer that you can tell it to do anything about anything and it just works.

I have no direct experience outside of LLMs and I don’t really take issue with what I understand FMs to be, so long as they keep their scope narrow and focus on accurating completing specific tasks to assist humans. As soon as we hand off control and trust it blindly without extensive trials ensuring it’s reliability and failsafes in place to ensure inaccuracies are caught I start raising concerns.

My only experience is with LLMs - a few, minor attempts to “test the waters” of the major, publicly available LLM models. I’ve been frustrated with my search results and glanced at the AI results. Work gave us Gemini licenses and I used it in similar, desperate situatiuons for coding help and help with Google products foolishly thinking that if any LLM designed to help with such tasks would be passably useful it would be the LLM of the company that owns the products I seek help with. Unless something has changed drastically in the last month or so, every interaction has been a roll of the dice to such an extent that my occasional “testing the waters” caused me to jump out and avoid it as much as possible. I simply can’t trust it to not halucinate and gaslight me.

What I see as the problem is moving way, way, way too quickly in trusting language models to do anything even remotely important. Human communication is extremely nuanced, complicated, fluid, and imperfect. Humans misunderstand each other during communication even when we have the context of in-person visual/audible cues and interpersonal history.

Maybe it’s because I’ve only ever had at most a comfortable income but I truly don’t understand the mentality of needing so much money.

I don’t get paid as much as my peers but I make enough to be comfortable. I am my own department and, aside from emergencies and other high priority situations, I manage myself and choose what to work on when. I have a decent work life balance. Because I make enough to be comfortable (in large part because my landlord promised not to raise our rent - early in the COVID lockdown - if we were “good tenants” and has managed to keep true to her word) I don’t feel the need for more. That balance is worth not making the 20% more a year I might get somewhere else because I can’t guarantee I won’t have a shitty boss that doesn’t let me have that work/life balance.

I was excited about the idea of purpose-built systems trained on specific datasets to be help find complex patterns to diagnose diseases or suggest potential molecules for specific purposes.

Then the LLM shit started and everyone started fantasizing about intelligent “AI” just because it was able to reproduce patterns of language that seem relevant to a given input. Some of those funding it kept chasing that dream and are convinced that, if they just throw more compute at the problem, they can evolve the renaissance AGI that can do anything. Then they can fire every worker and be bazillionaires with robot slaves and never have to work another day of their lives… and fuck everyone and everything else.

It’s amazing what we can ruin when we let greed and selfishness drive our society.

The majority of his presidency he’s kept them with too few members to have a quorum and therefore unable to do much of anything.

Last I’d heard, Trump was officially allowed to dismiss members of the NLRB at will. His administration is basically the definition of corruption and regulatory capture.

Don’t get me wrong - I’d be happy to see things go well for unions but I have zero faith in anything good happening. Shit is so fucked I’m legitimately worried about any legal challenges to anything because we might get another Roe v. Wade.

I have somewhat similar concerns. I’m not as worried about sanitized Linux as I am about new mandates entrenching Microsoft, Apple, and Google as the only valid options. Even it it is an enormous pain in the ass for everyone, including those big three, it would infinitely preferably for them to more widespread adoption of alternatives.

Just propose solutions/mandates that are fundamentally incompatible with GPL and FOSS ideals, or deeply contentious within open source communities and you can do irreparable damage to the growth of Linux and any space that needs to adapt to those new mandates. Linux moving into education? Pretend it is needed to protect the children. Linux moving into government? Pretend it’s needed to protect security or efficiency. Linux moving into the workplace? Pretend it’s needed to protect AI or liability or synergy or whatever the fuck gets CEO dicks hard these days. BAM - Linux gets hit with massive internal strife and splitting of vital communities and resources. I know it was already absurdly contentious before, but seeing what happened when storing a users age hit systemd really worried me.

I think it’s already been kind of ongoing by co-opting or even creating “open source initiatives” from the business world who ultimately just jump in when things look mature and rapidly implement profit extraction and enshittification.

I get and respect that people have different places where they draw lines. But to me, it doesn’t seem like they are abandoning the concept of DRM free in any real way. The majority of these have small bits of extra content, often cosmetic, like twitch drops that need the software to be online to redeem/verify.

For the few games on that list that are actually unplayable or crippled in some way, I am disappointed. For additional free or giveaway content from the developer that is part of the original package distributed through GOG, I’m much more understanding of GOG if the developer failed to accommodate offline verification/unlocking of that content.