Freedom to kiss Putin’s ring? What more could you want?

The DDR4 sticks I got 18 months ago now cost 300-400% the price they were, so it’s not just DDR5.

… and I just realised the title doesn’t actually mean “DDR5 prices”, but that was an easy misinterpretation on my part, so I guess I’ll post this anyway.

Did you miss the part where I said “It’s not there as an alternative.” or are you being deliberately obtuse?

The point of them putting Discord itself into their page of Discord alternatives. It’s not there as an alternative. It’s there for comparison purposes.

You missed the point. They’re using it as a baseline (literally their word), a basis for comparison, a control (in the sense of experiment) if you will, before leaping off into the alternatives.

At first glance, sure. But then, strength in conviction and leadership mean nothing if you’re strongly leading your people and your country into ruin.

Most of the age verification things I’ve seen are wise to that and require a video camera, not a still one.

I reckon there’s a few of us about on here.

Good call. They unprinced Andrew, they can unlord Mandy.

Sure you can, but why fabricate evidence against someone when you can trick them into making real evidence?

The hard job of fabrication begins if and only if that fails.

Yes. The institution in question is human society. We generally grant the permission to make rational decisions over our lives to other humans who know better that we do or are more skilled than we are.

Sometimes, yes, those humans turn out to have been deceitful or dishonest, but there are mechanisms in place for when that happens.

And yes, sometimes those mechanisms are wilfully avoided by the deceitful. Politicians and rich people are especially good at this.

Guess who’s pushing “AI”? The thing that has no contract with human society and cannot be held accountable. And neither will the people pushing it.

This is why we should have as little to do with it - at least as it is in its current form - as possible.

This is true. But then I’m not using the latest version while I still have an active session, and that can lead to weird behaviour or errors after the fact.

Case in point, I once received an Xorg update that I allowed to install, but didn’t restart the computer properly until much, much later.

By then I’d forgotten about the update, so when I restarted and started having graphics problems, I was mystified.

I’ve also forgotten how that all panned out, but in the same situation I’d roll back to a previous Timeshift snapshot and work the system forward again until I find the culprit or things are stable, so I assume that’s what I did back then.

Tangential advice: Many people use YouTube (and formerly Twitch until they nixed it) as a place to store videos. As in the only copy of a video is hosted there.

If your videos are precious to you (or you think they’re going to be), make arrangements for them to be at least stored elsewhere, if not hosted. That’s not going to be cheap what with hardware prices going through the roof, personally or third-party, but it is necessary because no host is both trustworthy and permanent.

Actually not even self-storage is as trustworthy and permanent as we’d like, but it’s still better than any alternative for data retention.

Also, donate to your chosen Fediverse host(s) if you can.

For me, it’s about reducing the amount of time the “update available” icon shows up in the system tray, because its very presence bothers me. Maybe there’s something cool and new. Maybe it fixes a severe security problem. If it’s for programs I’m not using right now, then the update can be applied right now. Otherwise it’s going to have to wait until I’m done. And bother me.

Yes, I could turn updates off and never see it, but that seems like a bad plan in the long run.

Fake AGI is like fake banknotes. Some of them are really good approximations. Nigh indistinguishable. A lot of people will be fooled by it but eventually it will be discovered to be a fake and people will get hurt in some way or another.

And it won’t be the people who are pushing for “AGI”.

The people who are seeking AGI will be happy when an LLM appears clever enough to fool them, not anyone else.

They may even realise this, because they think everyone else is less clever than they are.

This is why the whole thing has been called AI in the first place.

Nah. He has other tricks. Sending in armed goons and cheating at golf are a couple of them.

I suppose you could go to the root of all these for the real lone trick: being a self-serving piece of [redacted]

Mild disagree. Most spreadsheets are Turing complete, especially if they have one or more built in programming languages and have been for decades at this point, yet new “must have” features seem to get added to Excel with every release. Or that was the case until the recent “Office is no longer Office” debacle anyway.

And programming languages themselves keep updating and changing.

As I’ve said before, once Linus is gone, we might well end up with splits at the kernel level rather than at the distro level. And we would be wise to avoid any one organisation’s stock kernel, even if there are some very large organisations providing a lot of code for the kernel at present.

I can see a future where, say, GNOME, start producing their own kernels to support their vision of the Linux desktop from the ground up.

And it’s all but certain that Canonical and Red Hat would be very interested in things going their (respective) way(s) when the time comes.

See also: feature creep