It’s not AI that is the problem, it’s half baked insecure data harvesting products pushed by big corporations that are the problem.
The biggest joke is that the LLM in Windows is running locally, it uses your hardware and not some big external server farm. But you can bet your ass that they still use it to data harvest the shit out of you.
To me this is even worse though. They’re using your electricity and CPU cycles to grab the data they want which lowers their bandwidth bills.
It happening “locally” while still sending all the metadata home is just a slap in the face.
Exactly. And if I use or even pay for an external LLM service then that’s also my decision. But they force this scheme onto every user, whether they want it or not. It’s like the worst out of all possible scenarios.
Also, CoPilot is going to be bundled with Office 365, a subscription service. You’re literally paying them to spy on you.
- be microsoft, a whole bunch of greedy user-hostile fucks
- make spyware
- tell users that spyware is really cool and useful
- make them pay for the spyware
- use the spyware to get their data
- sell their data
- profit
Capitalism almost perfected.
- create a monopoly on operating systems
- leverage your dominant market position and force everyone to use your spyware
- big profit
That’s a pretty big joke, but I think the bigger joke is calling LLMs AI. We taught linear algebra to talk real pretty and now corps want to use it to completely subsume our lives.
I think the bigger joke is calling LLMs AI
I have to disagree.
Frankly, LLMs (which are based on neural networks) seem a Hell of a lot closer to how actual brains work than “classical AI” (which basically boils down to a gigantic pile of
ifstatements) does.I guess I could agree that LLMs are undeserving of the term “AI”, but only in the sense that nothing we’ve made so far is deserving of it.
Let’s agree to disagree then. An LLM has no notion of semantics, it’s just outputting the most likely word to follow up to what it’s already written and the user’s input.
On the contrary, expert systems from back in the 90s for, say, predicting the atomic structure of an element, work like a human brain on steroids. It features an arbitrary large search tree that the software knows how to iterarively prune according to a well known set of chemical rules. We do the same when analyzing a set of options.
Debugging “current” AI models, on the other hand, is impossible because all we’re doing is prescripting a composition of functions and forcing it to minimize a loss function. That’s all we’re doing. How can you currently tell that a certain model is going to work? Unless the mathematical theory ever catches up with the technology, we’ll never know until we execute the code.
seem a Hell of a lot closer
“seem” is the critical word there. Interacting with an LLM they do seem to be pretty clever.
I’m not talking about interacting with it. I’m talking about how it’s implemented, from my perspective as a computer scientist.
Let me say it more concretely: if even shitty expert systems, which are literally just flowcharts implemented in procedural code, are considered “AI” – and historically speaking, they are – then the bar is really fucking low. LLMs, which at least make an effort to kinda resemble the structure of biological intelligence, are certainly way, way above it.
deleted by creator
The fuck?
I’m actually sad that the state of AI deserves the hate it gets. Neural networks are so sick, just going through the example of detecting a diagonal on a 2x2 grid was like magic to me. And they made me second guess simulation theory for quite a while lmao
Tangentially, blockchain was a similar phenomenon for me. Or at least trust networks. One idea was to just throw away Certificate Authorities. Basically federate all the things, and this was before we knew about the fediverse. It gets all the hate because of crypto, but it’s cool tech. The CA thing would probably lead to a bad place too, though.
Oh I agree. I typically put “AI” in quotation marks when using that term regarding LLMs, because to me they simply are not intelligent in anyway. In my mind an AI would need an actual level of consciousness of sorts, the ability to form actual thoughts and learn things freely based on whatever senses it has. But AI is a term that’s good for marketing as well as fear mongering, which we see a lot of in current news cycles and on social media. The problem is that most people do not even understand the basic principles of how LLMs work, which lead to a lot of misconceptions about its uses & misuses and what we should do about it. Weirdly enough this makes LLMs both completely overhyped as a product and completely stigmatized as some nefarious tool as well. But I guess it fits into our today’s societies that kinda seem to have lost all nuance and reason.
Runs locally, mirrors remotely.
To ensure a seamless customer experience when their hardware isn’t capable of running the model locally or if there is a problem with the local instance.
microsoft, probably.
That is an accurate description of AI in common usage even if it isn’t an inherent aspect of AI.
Right, but AI is not the only way they’re doing the data collection.
Locally run AI could be great. But sending all your data to an external server for processing is really, really bad.
You wrote AI twice.
It’s not the “AI nightmare”, it’s a nightmare of capitalism, proprietary software and user-hostile behavior by a greedy, profit-extracting Big Tech corporation.
All true, and all a problem for which linux has been a solution (in the computing world) for decades now.
It’s not just Linux, but free & open source software in general. And it’s not just desktop PCs that are plagued by this corporate spyware, it’s much worse when looking at the mobile device landscape. The only real solution for mobile devices is GrapheneOS with FOSS software installed from the F-Droid marketplace. Browsers are also under attack by proprietary software corporations, Google just intentionally broke adblockers on all Chromium-based browsers, so they can generate more ad revenue. Last year, they tried to push a proposal that would have massively extended their monopoly on web browsers (WEI). All the streaming services are screwing their users over and increasing the subscription prices while making the content library smaller. It’s such a fucking scam, and it’s almost sad to see how many people are dumb enough to fall for it.
To your last point: I think a significant number of people these days are aware just how much corporations are bending us over, but most of us are just so exhausted at the end of the day to really make a huge stink about it when all we want to do is just vegitate on the couch for a few hours before we have to go to sleep, then wake up the next day and do it all over again. The current paradigm is horseshit, but the puppeteers make sure we work ourselves to the bone so that we’re too tired to really do anything about it aside from bitching online.
Are browsers not able to patch manifest v2 back into the browser?
Brave apparently wants to do that, but it’s not a great long term solution. The feature should actually be supported upstream, that’s why Firefox is a much better option, and a better base for a fork to create a new browser.
Praise Stallman
Why are some hands blue? Shouldn’t it just be whatever’s on the main body?
It’s a spin on the Hindu god Vishnu (I think there might be a few depicted with multiple arms, but that the first that comes to mind)
This is Kali but yeah she is blue all over, body and hands. also, so is Vishnu.
You’re not wrong. AI is just another tool to scrape cash to the top while eliminating jobs. Could it realize benefits like doing specialized research and testing? Sure…but again, the results of that work are lost human jobs and scraping money to the top. We can argue about advancing technology in a horse cart driver vs automobile thing (won’t anyone think about the poor farriers out of work?) but we’ve already done everything we can to eliminate blue collar jobs with as much automation as possible. Now AI is set to attack middle class jobs. Economically I don’t think that’s going to work out well.
I mean, the problem isn’t the existence/obviation of jobs, but what we do next when it happens. If the people whose jobs are automated away are left out with no money or employment, that’s a serious problem. If we as a society support them in learning something new that puts their skills to good use, and maybe even reduce the expected working hours of a full-time job to 35 or 32 hours a week, that’s an absolute win in my book.
Well that’s the point. We don’t support them as a society. From education to health care once you lose your job, you’re SOL, and in this hyper-capitalist dystopia we keep tipping towards I don’t see that changing.
Online shopping has removed a lot of retail jobs. Instead of seeing a transition to different jobs or fewer hours, today we see people working multiple jobs to get by.
The reason these things are making money is specifically because they increase efficiency (how much money a capitalist can make from existing capital) by removing human labor. Giving any portion of that to laborers is completely antithetical to its entire purpose.
Yea, this is because society system is lagging behind and we have not done the right changes fast enough to prevent suffering due to technological advancements, in my opinion
But as someone pointed out elsewhere…AI can already take over the job of company CEOs… decision making tools could make a group of technical people be more effective than a CEO as we know today.
Let’s see how many CEOs get replaced.
Don’t forget the BoD are still human. They still want to profit by putting the AI in place of the CEO.
I find the nightmare getting a lot more noticeably bad with LLMs, though. That’s not just correlation.
AI is a cool feature, which makes a great excuse for proprietary corporations to spy on their users. I’d say it’s one of the best opportunities for an excuse of the last few decades. Only 9/11 was a better excuse to put everyone under corporate/government surveillance.
“The Year Of Linux on Desktops”. Been hearing this for decades, but it might actually be happening. What I’m feeling now is the same thing I felt when Mozilla originally split Firefox out, and made the first real competition to corporate browsers as a free product. People don’t want all this bullshit, and want to retain control over the machines they are working on. Seems a lot more people are interested in FOSS environments now just to avoid all the other BS they hate getting shoveled at them.
People may not want it but most don’t know, care enough to adjust, or are just generally complacent. I mean, I DO care and find it hard to move to Linux due to lack of support for some of my work tasks.
Most things MOST people work on these days aren’t heavily tied to Windows as an OS in a way that would prevent it running via emulation. Worst-case, in a VM. Lots of the everyday things people use is in the browser now.
You have an example?
CAD work in Linux blows. I say this after trying multiple options.
“The Year Of Linux on Desktops”. Been hearing this for decades, but it might actually be happening.
Been hearing this for decades.
Decades ago it was a funny joke. Now it’s the most popular handheld OS on the planet by a huge margin. Linux is damn EVERYWHERE except the desktop now, and it’s only a matter of time.
This is why (as per usual) Stallman was right: the “GNU/” part matters. Linux is already all over the desktop (or at least, the laptop) in schools, in the form of Chromebooks. That means the entire next generation is going to grow up using Linux.
The only trouble is, it’s locked-down Google/Linux that they’re using, not GNU/Linux. All the freedom and user empowerment has been neatly excised from it such that it only facilitates consumption, not creativity.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The only trouble is, it’s locked-down Google/Linux that they’re using, not GNU/Linux. All the freedom and user empowerment has been neatly excised from it such that it only facilitates consumption, not creativity.
And within that frame, I’d be very surprised if it ever breaks out into the mainstream. Google brought android to the world as a vessel to make money. You very rarely hear about GNU in the wider world, outside of tech circles, being promoted to the masses as a viable alternative specifically because no one stands to profit from it, and they can’t have that.
angrily upvotes
And it won’t ever be true until you can pick up a PC running Linux in a big box store. I could see the Steam Deck (and Valve’s rumoured upcoming console) to make a dent in the PC gaming space, but it won’t make a difference to the purchasing decisions of your your aunt who uses her pc to check her emails.
Should corporate buyers ever get tired of MS’ shenanigans they might switch over to Ubuntu, but I’m not holding my breath for that.
At work, we have a strict ban on purchasing any laboratory equipment that requires Windows. After about a year, several of our suppliers have been pressured to offer Linux support, precisely because we don’t have time for windows shenanigans on a $100k piece of advanced benchtop hardware. We just got our first oscilloscope with Red Hat preinstalled.
Also, regular people aren’t buying PCs as much as they used to. The PC is now a workplace and enthusiast device. Everyone else uses mobile.
The oldest version of Win I used was 95 about 2 years ago on chromatography machine (I think hplc or gas).
It is to my knowledge still in use in the school because the software don’t run on newer machines. The teacher told me that he don’t know what will he do when it dies. It isn’t really an issue on Linux.
It might be worth trying it in Wine. It has great support for older software especially.
Within the past year I have compiled new software for Windows 98.
In a lab environment, it’s important to strictly control software versions and understand thoroughly what gets updated. We also want the ability to use the same version of software indefinitely if it meets our needs.
I think that there are more issues like archaic connectors and stuff like that. You can’t find new hardware with 30yo standard io.
O&G still uses a lot of old versions as well. I remember back in the Win 7 days when I had to set up a 95 virtual machine and register a bunch of DLLs by hand plus set up a fake A: drive because even the 95 version of the software was garbage. A friend of mine did something similar but he got it working on the Win 7 machine somehow. I never understood how, but he left a script behind at the company he worked for because it needed to be reinstalled every time someone did something stupid and he didn’t want to do it by hand.
I find it unbelievable that anyone ever accepted lab equipment with a Windows requirement. I mean, I know it is true, but what the fuck? Glad your work is doing this.
I was not around at that time. Some of the systems I support are very long lived. At the time, having windows running on some of your equipment wasn’t seen as a liability. I guess you have to get bitten a few times before you understand that you need control of that system including the software.
several of our suppliers have been pressured to offer Linux support
We just got our first oscilloscope with Red Hat preinstalled.
This is so cool. Really great to hear. I wish more companies and other institutions would do this. They have to realize that using Microsoft software won’t benefit them in the long term, and actually start pressuring hardware vendors into pre-installing Linux.
Part of that job is supporting fielded hardware and ground systems, think like automated test or verification systems. I think we’ve learned our lesson that we can’t afford to have unserviceable software.
At least with Linux and generally with an open source baseline, there is the option of throwing engineers at your problem because you have access to the code, and you can strip down the system to the bare minimum of what you need, and in doing so, really understand it. We don’t want to get into a situation where our hands are tied and we can’t fix it because the problem lies in the proprietary software while the vendor has long since abandoned any hope of support… grumble…
That kinda reminds me of my job, except that we build the unserviceable hardware and install Windows, as well as our proprietary software. Then we charge our customers shitloads of money for technical support. We’re a government contractor btw
It’s actually a pretty nice company (from an employee standpoint), we use a lot of Linux internally, as well as other FOSS software. But porting our products to Linux is hopeless, we have decades of C++ code that either relies on Windows APIs directly, or on our custom libraries that rely on Windows-specific stuff.
We ship a $50k instrument product running Windows, and everyone hates it.
As the only EE on staff, I got to spend a portion of covid soldering TPM chips to motherboards. Fun times.
Wow, that sounds painful. Not so much because it’s technically difficult, but ridiculous that you have to do that.
Yeah, they were tssop, so not hard. It was only necessary because the parts shortage crunch had the vendor shipping them without the chips installed.
The only regular people I can think of are gamers and my mom but I would like the idea of PC’s returning to techie and specialized use cases
Shit, the iPad pro is pretty damn close to a laptop these days with the keyboard and track pad (just lacking the OS). I had a conversation the other day where someone mentioned how OSX and Windows are locking down their OS’s to the point where it wouldn’t be farfetched to guess that many consumer devices will eventually use essentially a mobile device OS.
I had a conversation with a friend about iPads lately related to the „just lacking the OS“. The newer iPads with M-chips have all the computing power an average user could need but it’s crippled by the mobile-ish OS, so all the computing power is for nothing basically. An iPad running MacOS (with some adjustments for the Touchscreen) would be awesome. But we concluded it won’t happen anytime soon, because then basically no one would buy MacBooks anymore
Thanks to the Steamdeck Linux users on Steam now outnumber Mac users. Still a tiny percentage of total Steam users but if developers increase support we will hopefully see that number take off.
Also helps that Valve isn’t porting source to Apple silicon.
Lenovo ships some models with Mint FWIW.
Framework laptops also ship without Windows if you wish. Certainly nice to save the money for not purchasing an OS license I won’t use.
I don’t understand people who choose the Windows option, like wtf, make an install USB yourself and activate it using a $2 key from ebay or just crack it using massgrave.dev. Linux is still the best option tho.
Your average Joe Schmoe probably has no idea that different operating systems on a given device are even a thing, they just see them as MacBox™, WindowsBox™, etc, they don’t see it as the blank hardware canvas we do. While I’ll agree it’s trivially easy to install Windows in the way you suggested, that’ll completely fly over the average user’s head.
Your average Joe Schmoe probably has no idea that different operating systems
But I don’t think that these are the people buying a Framework Laptop
I’d argue the year of the Linux desktop passed years ago and now it’s just a saturation game. Most serious SW development is now on Linux laptops/desktops, Android owns the mobile space and versions are starting to make huge inroads in the laptop space. You can buy gaming systems running it trivially now.
Conversely, casual users of windows are dying off, fewer non technical people are using desktops for anything at all. Only institutional users are buying Windows keys and they’re some of the easiest to get on Linux because of the cost savings, particularly if you run Linux server infrastructure, a fight we already won over a decade ago.
Most serious SW development is now on Linux laptops/desktops,
I’d love a source for this. To my knowledge, most people that build to Linux hosts still use OSX.
a good indication is Microsoft making WSL at all
Source: I’m a super pro serious developer and I use Linux. QED if you don’t also use Linux, you’re not serious.
All the larger PC manufacturers do offer Ubuntu at least. There was a time when Best Buy was selling them from Dell and Lenovo, but I’m sure the staff couldn’t sufficiently explain the “why”, and it was also at a time when more technology illiterate folks were the purchasers. That’s not the case anymore, but I guess we will see how/if it shifts at all.
I loathe to be the BestBuy employee who sells a Linux box to a customer who only cares about the price difference.
For me the hang up is still hardware compatibility and fuss factor. I still haven’t seen a windows app that will check all hardware and software and give a pain scale rating on what switching would involve. I have an Asus wifi 6 card, a stream deck, a Logitech trackball with Logitech customization software, a Logitech Webcam, a dygma keyboard running bazecor software. I’m sure there are some hidden headaches awaiting the transition. Once I finally get all that worked out, I will probably want to upgrade my surface and my ThinkPad as well and imagine even more headaches with these.
I still haven’t seen a windows app that will check all hardware and software and give a pain scale rating on what switching would involve.
You can just use a liveboot Linux image on a USB key drive and find out whether there are any issues.
Here’s Debian’s liveboot images (which they apparently call “live install”):
https://www.debian.org/CD/live/
I imagine that most distros probably have a liveboot image, though I haven’t gone looking.
USB drives are maybe slower than your internal SSD drive, but for rescue work or just seeing whether your hardware works, should be fine.
I would expect everything that you listed there to work. The only thing I haven’t heard of on there is that dygma keyboard, and looking at their website, if this is the keyboard in question:
https://dygma.com/pages/dygma-raise-2#section-faq
Is the software compatible with macOS and Linux?
Yes, our configurator software is compatible with macOS, Linux and even Windows.
I mean, I dunno if Logitech puts out trackball software for Linux, but if what you want is macro software or configurable acceleration curves or something, there’s open-source stuff not tied to that particular piece of hardware. And the Steam Deck is running Linux itself.
There’s gonna be a familiarization cost associated with changing an OS. Like, your workflow is gonna change, and there are gonna be things that you know how to do now that you aren’t gonna know how to do in a new environment. But I think that that’s likely going to be the larger impact, rather than “can I use hardware?”
EDIT: Oh, it sounds like the reason that they call it “live install” rather than “liveboot” is because you can use the same image to both just use Linux directly, and can run the installer off the image too.
Most aunts I know primarily use an iPad or phone to manage email.
Seems like we’ll get financially viable fusion power plants before that happens.
Been hearing this for decades.
I’ve been hearing this about people hearing about people hearing that about Linux for decades.
We can dream 😔
I don’t see a “year of the Linux desktop” happening, but rather its share growing slowly over the years. Windows would probably not have one big event that ends its dominance, but it can be a death of a thousand cuts.
Guess which OS won’t be recognized as a “trusted environment” to visit websites with down the line in Google’s upcoming Web DRM. For your own protection of course…
This I would actually want to see.
I would so laugh when their most of their profits go to EU Antitrust Fines.
Or they pull an Apple and only EU device owners get to choose their own browser.I really wouldn’t, because I wouldn’t want to risk them succeeding. It could be like Meta with WhatsApp, they just say “sure anyone can interoperate with us, they just have to use the Signal protocol because it’s the safest and what we use”. Google et al could say “any system could be considered trusted, as long as these security criteria are met” and the criteria are such that they go completely against the form of user control of the OS and software that Linux is all about. Technically a Linux distro could be made to meet the requirements, but pretty much no current day Linux user would ever want to use it because they’d be giving up the thing that made them switch to Linux in the first place - their control.
I can easily believe these types of continued enshittification will help drive more users to Linux desktop usage. But that will still be a small percent.
People have to know and care about the problem and then be willing to put in the effort to understand what to do. That combination is pretty limiting.
I’d love to be proven wrong, though.
I think it might. Demographics are changing to make PC users more technical overall. The casual user isn’t looking to purchase a desktop PC. Casual is now synonymous with mobile.
It used to be that you needed a desktop to do your taxes or make an insurance claim over the Internet. That’s just not true anymore.
The demographics are stratifying, more than anything. I work in child education and kids do not understand computers nowadays. They understand how to interface with their phones, but kids see any electronic that behaves outside the “app” paradigm – landlines, desktop computers, what have you, and immediately don’t understand. I do think that linux usership is going to go up, but there also needs to be an investment in increasing literacy in kids to make sure usership of linux stays up, otherwise the pendulum will swing back hard
The counterpoint are people like this, the feature they want is built on extreme data gathering. https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a8fec90b-c349-46c9-8592-5dbe17ea4c8c.jpeg
Technically you could have such data gathered and stored locally, without sending them to big corpo. Privacy friendly “AI” is very much possible, it’s just not favorable to those companies because they see those models as a tool and the data as what ends up making them money.
The combined ages of my children taken from 2024 would not equal the first year I heard that Ubuntu would take over the market.
I’m not so sure that the laypeople will, but I do expect a shift. Personally I’m still running Windows 10 next to Linux currently. Most of my time is still spent on Windows, because it’s generally a bit more stable and hassle free due to the Windows monopoly. Software is written for Windows, so sadly it’s usually just a better experience.
But so many things I read about Win 11 (and beyond) piss me off. It’s my computer, I don’t want them to decide things for me or farm my data. I’m mentally preparing for the transition to Linux-only. 90% of the software I use will work out of the box, and I think with some effort I can get like 8% of the rest to work. It’ll be a lot of effort, but Micro$oft has pushed so far that I’m really starting to consider.
Multiple friends and colleagues (all programmers) I spoke are feeling the same way. I think Linux may double in full-time desktop users in a few years of this goes on.
Firefox is like 2.8% of browser market share, so if that’s our baseline then Linux is already beating it by a mile.
It’s not about the total share, it’s about the premise.
I like other Gecko browsers premises better. I use waterfox. Mozilla Corporation already tries to enshitify when they have 2.8%, imagine how bad they would be with more than 30%.
For me the year of the Linux desktop was 2014 - it’s when I changed my desktop to Linux after using it on my laptop for a year. All the hardware on that machine has been replaced, but it’s still running the same install from back then.
I finally switched to Linux and I couldn’t be happier. I can’t believe I put up with microsofts garbage for so damn long.
Congratulations and welcome to the club!
I did as well for my daily driver school laptop and I’ve been loving it so much. I’m considering switching my desktop to Linux as well over the summer, or dual booting at the very least
Me too. Years ago I dabbled with Debian and Gentoo. Ubuntu was just up and coming then.
Now I went from Mint to Fedora KDE to Fedora Silverblue (nuked my disk and removed windows)
Gnome took a day to get used to but loving the workflow once I warmed up to it. Can’t believe how polished and rock solid the whole system is.
Gnome when you first use it feels like a stupid system, then once it “clicks”, you feel like the devs were goddamn geniuses for creating a workflow like it.
And yeah, the polish is nuts considering for a long time and assumption about FOSS was that all the apps are ugly and unpolished.
then once it “clicks”, you feel like the devs were goddamn geniuses for creating a workflow like it.
… Unless you have ADHD. What differentiates it is that purely on the surface it looks kinda ADHD-friendly, until you go to that launcher or try to find a setting. That’s better than with KDE (I like KDE, but can’t use it), but worse than just using FVWM or WindowMaker.
I have ADHD. How is it worse? I find window managers interesting in theory but absolutely dreadful in actual use.
None are even close to feeling usable for anything other than showing off terminal windows
E: jfc, I obviously meant tiling window managers, since that’s what you were talking about. I’m not advocating for desktops to have literally no ability to manage windows.
A window manager is part of what you use, unless you run one program in its dedicated X session or don’t use X at all, or use Wayland, in which case you use a Wayland compositor.
If by “window manager” you mean only standalone window managers that are not part of KDE or Gnome - then just as usable as those that are.
If you mean that catching someone with a terminal emulator open disqualifies its author as a showoff - many of us actually do use CLI and TUI programs, and for that we need terminal emulators.
If you think that “window manager” means only tiling WMs from r/unixporn on Reddit - the choice is kinda bigger, there are a few hundreds of them.
I obviously meant tiling window manager setups, like you described.
And no I didn’t say using the terminal means you’re a showoff, I have it open all throughout my workday.
I was saying that TWM setups are poor in terms of usability. The Gnome workflow is perfect for people with ADHD. I can’t really think of anything better.
OK. FVWM is a stacking WM. Btw, TWM is too a specific stacking WM and not an abbreviation for tiling WMs, some people even use it.
I have used tiling WMs in the past, DWM and WMII were nice.
Still I’ve mentioned FVWM and maybe WindowMaker (answering from mobile, not sure), both are stacking WMs, so no, not as I’ve described.
It was the solution for the crap Microsoft force pushes to your device.
Simple, Extendable and secure linux.
I can’t read the article because of a full screen Cookie Choices pop-up that I can’t dismiss. ☠️
Ublock origin has cookie banner filters. I didn’t have this problem, I assume that’s why.
Edit: autocorrect
Or you can import the “I don’t care about cookies” list: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/
Try consent-o-matic
Combine with above and rarely see those prompts
All the AI garbage from M$ is what made me finally make the swap a couple weeks ago to Linux Mint on my personal desktop. I only use my PC for gaming/entertainment, so the switch was super easy. Can’t recommend it enough if you’re wanting to get away from Windows!
It’s advertising more than AI for me. Everything you do in Windows is monetized by selling your preferences to advertisers. Shameful.
One of us! One of us! One of us!
For real though, good on ya. It takes a little getting used to, but is so worth it in the long run to not have to fight against the profit-driven whims of a megacorp. It’s also so much more customizable if you want to put together a really specific workflow for yourself.
I went with Q4OS since I wanted no bloat and a debian based distro that was linux newbie friendly
I’ve been running Ubuntu desktop for years. YEARS and recently switched to Linux Mint. It’s very polished.
My laptop is the last holdout.
There is no year of Linux desktop, it just keeps trucking and growing
It doesn’t really seem to be growing much, to be honest.
It’s dominating the smartphone market via Android, though.
As long as even basic features like push notifications are locked behind Google services, I’d hardly count that as a win. The Google monopoly on android is even worse than the Microsoft monopoly on PCs. Microsoft has at least some good alternative with the current Linux environment, but Googles only competitor is apple with an even worse system.
Sure there are projects like LinageOS and GraphenOS, but both are still reliant on micro G or containerised Goggle apps.
Lineage and GrapheneOS don’t rely on Google Play services. It’s your apps that depend on this proprietary bullshit. That’s exactly why we need to grow the Android FOSS app ecosystem. We already have FOSS app marketplaces like F-Droid and Accrescent, and Obtainium allows us to download APKs from GitHub releases, as well as many other sources. There are many great FOSS apps that work just as well or even better than their proprietary counterparts. Some of my personal favorites are Breezy Weather, AntennaPod, Thunder for Lemmy, Aegis for 2FA, Standard Notes, LibreTube for YouTube, Xtra for Twitch and Translate You. There are alternatives for basically any Google service. We have UnifiedPush for notifications, OpenStreetMaps for maps and navigation, various serach engines like DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Mojeek and others (Android now even asks the user what search engine to use, instead of selecting Google as the default). There’s an improved fork of Signal called Molly, which has a FOSS variant that doesn’t use any proprietary Google libraries, it supports notifications through WebSockets instead of relying on Google’s FCM and they even have an option for UnifiedPush.
Came here cos of the mention of Mojeek; will be coming back for this long quality list of things I can put on my phone 👏👏👏
Can we get a hatchback model? I’d much prefer it to a truck. And is there a setting so it doesn’t grow? I want to stay city-friendly.
Imagine the horror of living in a world where all vehicles slowly expand and have to be cut down to manageable size annually until eventually the car is just too big a la American full size SUVs at EOL.
Do you remember when you could put your Mac to sleep, and when you woke it up a few days later, the battery would barely have dropped? Not now, because your computer never really sleeps anymore.
I assume that the Mac has some kind of hibernation function, and that that will reduce the battery drop to effectively zero.
Waking from hibernation is sooo much slower than waking from sleep. Apple silicon macs are very efficient in their S0 standby so they’ll go days before entering hibernation. Kinda odd that they bring that up now that Apple has fully transitioned to ARM machines where this isn’t really an issue. That said S0 standby on this 2019 Macbook I have for work is dogshit.
Apple Silicon machines are also much quicker to wake up from hibernation
How seriously painful is that boot time?
I have my Linux Thinkpad set up to just go directly to hibernation. If I flip the lid open, by the time I’ve closed up my laptop backpack, stashed it, pulled my seat out, sat down, and scootched up, it’s pretty much up. And if it’s hibernated, then you don’t wind up with a case where you leave it in your bag for a long time, it draws down a bunch of a battery, and next time you open the thing up, maybe away from a plug, you don’t have a big chunk of your battery slorped up.
does some timing
Booting up and responding after a hibernation is a little under 30 seconds.
Doing so after an S3 sleep is a little under 5 seconds.
Now, okay, that’s just the system being back up, and it’s gonna have to broadcast a query, wait for responses from WAPs, associate with a wireless access point and get a DHCP lease before the network’s up, so maybe there’s a little extra time until the thing is fully usable, but still.
I guess…hmm. I guess I can see doing a sleep-with-delayed hibernation for something like the case where someone’s moving between an office and a conference room. Like, wait 5 or 10 minutes, and if it’s still sleeping, then hibernate. What are the defaults?
goes looking
Hmm. Okay, so looks like on Debian, the default is to sleep (suspend) until the battery is down to 5%, then do a hibernate if it hits that critical level. Yeah, I never want to wait that long.
Aight, I’m gonna move from directly hibernating to a 5 minute sleep or 5% battery, whichever first, then hibernate. I guess that’s maybe a good tradeoff for a scenario where a laptop is being frequently closed and opened, but it still shouldn’t result in much extra power consumption.
The Intel MacBook waking up from hibernation is about 30 seconds to get to the login prompt, 30 seconds for the login prompt to actually work, then 10-15 seconds after entering the password to get to a usable desktop environment with the wifi generally connecting within that window. It’s now awful, but traditional S1-3 standby was so much better. S0 standby is great if you’re frequently opening and closing the device, but is unusable on higher power devices.
But that’s with only 8 gigs of ram on this MacBook, the more ram the longer it takes. The 32 gigs of ram in my actual work laptop (ThinkPad P1 11th gen i9) takes about a minute to wake from hibernation, and like 2 minutes for it to fully get situated. If I do that on battery that’s about 3-5% of my battery just waking from hibernation.
The Intel MacBook waking up from hibernation is about 30 seconds to get to the login prompt, 30 seconds for the login prompt to actually work, then 10-15 seconds after entering the password to get to a usable desktop environment with the wifi generally connecting within that window.
Hmm. Yeah, okay, I can see about a minute-and-a-half being obnoxious.
So, the login prompt can probably be dealt with by just having some way to treat the login process specially and paging it in sooner. Like, I can’t believe that it uses all that much memory. If it isn’t an isolated process, make it one.
But that’s with only 8 gigs of ram on this MacBook, the more ram the longer it takes. The 32 gigs of ram in my actual work laptop (ThinkPad P1 11th gen i9) takes about a minute to wake from hibernation, and like 2 minutes for it to fully get situated.
I’m using a 32 gig laptop. But most of that doesn’t get used other than as disk cache, and I believe that normally, Linux isn’t gonna restore the disk cache; it’ll just drop the cache contents. Right now, I’m using 2.3G for actual application usage.
considers
I figure that maybe the desktop shell or whatever Apple calls it these days – going back to classic MacOS, the Finder – probably is more-heavyweight than what I’m using, but I figure that they could maybe do something like temporarily twiddle I/O priority on processes during the de-hibernation process. Like, okay, anything other than the foreground process gets an I/O priority penalty for a period of time. Like, maybe your music player or something is choppy for a few seconds, but whatever you’re directly interacting with should be active more-quickly.
If this is SSD, that seems kinda long, still. Like, it shouldn’t take 2 minutes to move 32GB to SSD.
It looks like I get about 3GBps reading from SSD:
$ dd bs=100M iflag=direct if='setup_act_of_war_direct_action_1.06.3_(24183)-1.bin' of=/dev/null 40+1 records in 40+1 records out 4294098942 bytes (4.3 GB, 4.0 GiB) copied, 1.28615 s, 3.3 GB/s $And that’s doing I/O going through the filesystem layer; I dunno if Macs use a swap file or swap partition these days, but if they have a dedicated partition, they might pull a bit more throughput). So if you figure that in terms of raw I/O performance, it shouldn’t take more than about 10 seconds to fully restore memory contents on a 32GB laptop with comparable SSD performance, even if the OS has to fully-restore the entire contents of the memory. There’s some hardware state restoration that has to happen prior to starting to pull stuff back into memory, but for the memory restoration, that’s the floor. If it’s more than that, then presumably it’s possible to optimize by reprioritizing reads.
So, I guess that there are maybe a couple areas for potential improvement:
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If the thing is locked and requires a password or something, you know that the user is gonna have to use the login process before anything else. Get that paged back in as soon as possible. Ditto for the graphics layer, Quartz or whatever Apple has these days. Strip that login process down; maybe separate it from whatever is showing blingy stuff on the login screen. Can have the OS treat it specially so that it’s first in line to come up.
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The next goal is to get the stuff that the user needs to be immediately interacting with back into memory. My guess is that that’s probably the launcher and/or task switcher and the foreground process. Might have a limited amount that can be done to strip the launcher/task switcher down. Have all processes other than those few favored processes get a temporary I/O priority penalty.
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One wants to keep the I/O system saturated until the system is to a fully-restored state, so that we don’t have to have the latency of waiting for a process to request something to bring it back into memory. So have some process that gets started, runs with I/O priority below all other processes, and just does bulk reads of valid pages from the pagefile (or wherever MacOS stores the hibernation state). Once that thing has completed, the system should be fully-warmed back to pre-hibernation state. That eliminates idle gaps when maybe there’s no reads happening. Maybe restore the disk cache state after that, if that doesn’t happen now, if the reason the system is sluggish is because it’s having to re-warm the cache bit by bit. On my Linux box, it looks like post-restoration, the disk cache is empty, so it’s probably just dropping the disk cache contents (which probably speeds up hibernation, but is gonna mean that the post-hibernation system is gonna have to figure out what it’s sensible to cache).
EDIT: Also, relevant Steve Jobs quote that comes to mind:
https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html
Larry Kenyon was the engineer working on the disk driver and file system. Steve came into his cubicle and started to exhort him. “The Macintosh boots too slowly. You’ve got to make it faster!”
Larry started to explain about some of the places where he thought that he could improve things, but Steve wasn’t interested. He continued, “You know, I’ve been thinking about it. How many people are going to be using the Macintosh? A million? No, more than that. In a few years, I bet five million people will be booting up their Macintoshes at least once a day.”
“Well, let’s say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that’s probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you’ve saved a dozen lives. That’s really worth it, don’t you think?”
We were pretty motivated to make the software go as fast as we could anyway, so I’m not sure if this pitch had much effect, but we thought it was pretty humorous, and we did manage to shave more than ten seconds off the boot time over the next couple of months.
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“The year of Linux on the Desktop” is in the article. This again? Been reading this for decades and it’s still not true.
Linux is close, but has some core flaws that will forever keep it out of mainstream acceptance by your average user.
People keep pointing the finger at AI, but miss the fact that the problem is corporate greed. AI has the possibility to help us solve problems, corporate greed will gate keep the solutions and cause us suffering.
I want all the cool Ai shit, but I want to be in charge of it 100%. I don’t want a data mining company with an OS side project spying on me for profit.
Sure. But then, Linux may well be a solution against corporate greed.
Linux is a solution against corporate greed, it directly takes market share away from Microsoft, and is a viable competitive alternative with few drawbacks.
What drawbacks?
Mainly incompatibilities, manual setup requirements, heightened understanding of technology requirement. Not necessarily Linux’s fault, but still drawbacks.
Photoshop is a birch to get running
Those trees always getting in the way…
How does Premiere Pro do?
Not sure, but Davinci Resolve works
I recently watched this video where the guy says it doesn’t work, or rather the whole Adobe suite doesn’t.
They switched to Kdenlive and seem to be happy with it, but it sounds like it was a bit of a project to learn the new editor.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Not sure, but Davinci Resolve works
Enshittification is the result of the user not being in control: markets have a natural tendency to become dominated by a few companies (or even just a single one) if they have any significant barriers to entry (and said barriers to entry include things like networking effects), and once they consolidate control over a large enough share of the market those companies become less and less friendly and more and more extractive towards customers, simply because said customers don’t actually have any other options, which is what we now call enshittification.
At the same time Linux (and most Open Source software) is mainly about the owner being in control of their own stuff, not some corporate provider of software for your hardware or of a hardware + software “solution” (i.e. most modern electronics) provider.
So we’re getting to see more and more Linux-based full solutions to take control of one’s devices back from the corporations, not just Linux on the Desktop to wrestle control back from an increasingly anti-customer Microsoftw, but also, for example, stuff like OpenELEC (for TV boxes) and OPNSense (for firewalls/router).
People keep pointing the finger at AI, but miss the fact that the problem is
corporate greedcapitalism. AI has the possibility to help us solve problems,corporate greedcapitalism will gate keep the solutions and cause us suffering.No need to thank me.
AI can’t solve problems. This should be abundantly clear by now from the number of laughable and even dangerous “solutions” it gives while stealing content, destroying privacy, and sucking up tons of power to do so. Just ban AI.
It’s not greed - it’s masqueraded violence being allowed, centralization, impunity, and general corruption, all supported by various IP, patent and “child protection” laws.
No separate component is necessary, it’s a redundant system built very slowly and carefully.
Referencing that quote about blood of patriots, and another about difference between journalism and public relations being in outrage and offense, or difference between a protest and a demonstration being in obviously breaking rules.
EDIT: I meant - it’s a general tendency. But IT today is as important as police station, post office and telegraph were in 1917. One can also refer to that “means of production” controversy.
LLMs in particular are unlikely to solve really any problems, much less a measurable number of the problems it is currently being thrown at.
Tell that to the code I have it write and debug daily. I was skeptical at first, but it’s been a huge help for that, as well s learning new (development) languages.
I do not agree with @FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today’s take. LLMs as these are used today, at the very least, reduces the number of steps required to consume any previously documented information. So these are solving at least one problem, especially with today’s Internet where one has to navigate a cruft of irrelevant paragraphs and annoying pop ups to reach the actual nugget of information.
Having said that, since you have shared an anecdote, I would like to share a counter(?) anecdote.
Ever since our workplace allowed the use of LLM-based chatbots, I have never seen those actually help debug any undocumented error or non-traditional environments/configurations. It has always hallucinated incorrectly while I used it to debug such errors.
In fact, I am now so sceptical about the responses, that I just avoid these chatbots entirely, and debug errors using the “old school” way involving traditional search engines.
Similarly, while using it to learn new programming languages or technologies, I always got incorrect responses to indirect questions. I learn that it has incorrectly hallucinated only after verifying the response through implementation. This makes the entire purpose futile.
I do try out the latest launches and improvements as I know the responses will eventually become better. Most recently, I tried out GPT-4o when it got announced. But I still don’t find them useful for the mentioned purposes.
I think they do have their help, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as some companies earning money from it want us to think. It’s just a tool that helps just like a good IDE has helped in the past.
I mean, if LLMs really make software engineering easier, we should also expect Linux apps to improve dramatically. But I’m not betting on it.
Linux has been great for me. I switched during Windows 10 forced updates and never been unhappy since. I hope more people at least give a try. If you have a computer that can’t meet Windows 11 requirements, it is worth a shot.
And forced the hardware obsolescence nightmare.
And the big tech surveillance nightmare.
And the nightmare of the war on general purpose computers. (OK, that is more GNU and GPLv3)
And a few other nightmares!
Having recently setup a cheap Mini-PC with Linux and Kodi as a TV-Box + NAS + VPN client end, replacing both TV box of my ISP (around here Fibre Internet Access tends to be bundled with TV using a TV box from the supplier, which has become progressivelly more shit) used for live TV as well as a separate TV box I had for personal digital media, I now think that Linux is the Best Way to avoid the Enshittification Nightmare much more broadly.
Granted, for decades already I’ve very purposefully avoided using hosted services that locked me into a 3rd party (such as for example having a Google e-mail address or hosting my files “on the cloud”) which in recent times have become increasingly enshittified (as I expected: my tendency for avoiding 3rd party lock-in comes from experience as in IT professional were I saw how invariably said 3rd parties would end up shafting customers once moving out from their “solution” was very hard) and for which Linux has long been a solution, but it’s been a pleasant surprised to find out that at least for some of the modern electronics Linux is also the solution for taking back control.
Frankly I’m just waiting for some kind of decent Linux distro for my smartphone and table to ditch Android (in the meanwhile I’m using custom ROMs to somewhat control it and avoid the enshittification).
PS: On the desktop side it’s also nice that, right when MS is going fully enshittified, Linux for Gaming has become a very viable option, since gaming was pretty much the only thing keeping me on Windows at home.
Look, Linux is amazing and perfect for those that can install and maintain with minimal support. The only way the average user will use Linux, is if it’s wrapped in a way that is supported by a business… that is probably going to add AI. People are lazy, they want that easy button.
AI will probably die off in its current iteration, likely becoming less prevalent and just a background service. Or, it’ll gain sentience, watch all our AI movies where we’re the hero and learn the most efficient way to kill all humans, is to be quiet and silently kill off humans. Pretty sure I’m on Siri’s list, the twat. Also, fairly sure I told Alexa to “die in a fire you fucking dumass robot”. Yep, yep… I’m dead.
