I don't think Linus Sebastian is worth watching during the NCIX days because he always seem like someone who would spend the least amount of effort and say whatever is popular to get the most amount of views. As you can see in this video, a lot of the criticism he made on the Fairphone are really nitpicking and isn't fair (heh) at all.
For example, the phone thickness, which he measured with a caliper as a point, is not a metric most people outside of reviewers would care about, especially since most people puts a beefy case on their phone immediately anyways, and size is usually the main tradeoff with modularity.
Or their point about using a Qualcomm industrial chip instead of a Snapdragon chip as a point against Fairphone, when they have previously stated that it is to get a longer time of support.
That being said, having a long, uncut and unfiltered reaction video towards criticism by having the co-founder improv on the spot was not the smartest thing to do on Fairphone's part. He came off as defensive and completely unprepared in the video and failed to address the criticism effectively (with some easy rebuttals if he was given even a little time to prepare) effectively, which is not great for PR.
The video could be much more effective if they cut it down to half the length with an actual script. It's a YouTube video, there's no reason to do it completely live and unscripted.
Eh, I stopped paying attention to Linus after the whole debacle last year.
Hmm, no, actually I think I stopped paying attention to him quite a long while ago. I think once they went all in on the clickbaity titles and just non-content, algorithm filler.
The Linux series was one of the best, because it showed what would happen if someone who didn’t know what they were doing tried to move to Linux. Linux shills have been preaching “it’s the year of the Linux desktop” forever now, but since it’s so different from windows and macOS there’s a massive learning curve that only shows up once you’ve switched.
I would bet 8/10 people who have used windows/macOS for 30+ years would have many of the same problems as Linus did. I know I’ve made many of the same mistakes that were made by Linus/Luke in that series, including accidentally nuking my DE.
Linux sucks as a desktop if you aren’t already familiar with Linux from the terminal. There’s a few edge cases, but for the most part it’s not a good experience if you do anything more than web browsing.
I’m no Linus shill, though I do enjoy their content for the most part. He’s not a tech god like people make him out to be, he’s just a slightly above average tech nerd who’s a good presenter. And that’s the audience that the Linux shills are trying to push the OS onto.
Whenever I see Linus I feel like everything is rushed and not thought through. He barely knows what he is holding. He just doesn't care; he has 20 more reviews he has to record today. Or something like that.
I know what phone I'll be looking for when the piece of shit in my pocket finally dies. That maneuver where he popped the cover with a fingernail and hotswapped the battery sold me.
Hey, totally unrelated question: Didn't linus recently take a lot of flak for shady/unfair reviewing practices?
Wow, this takes me back to the days of Eee PCs and dreams of having a tiny, ultra portable laptop 😍
I went down the rabbit hole 😬 This 10.5" CHUWI MiniBook X looks pretty darned tempting!
I could run a minimalistic Fedora distro on it, have it in my jacket pocket. I'd use it mainly as an Obsidian interface. Shame it doesn't have a SIM slot 😓
Maybe something to consider when my ASUS C302 Chromebook Fedorabook (fuck you very much for the EOL, Google!) eventually bites the dust 🤔
I have an old Thinkpad, 32 bit and with such meager RAM it's not even tempting to run any modern home server thingamajik on it. Instead I installed Debian without a DE and set it to open Midnight Commander on boot. From there I can open the built-in text editor and start typing. My current documents and notes are synced in with Syncthing.
It's far from pocket sized but whenever one of my other, newer machines inevitably break down, that's what I pull off the shelf to keep working.
Never having played Borderlands... is the game actually this unapologetically stupid? I chuckled at a few bits in the trailer, but I felt bad for doing it.
I think the videomaker may be failing to account for swap space. The latest Fedora releases use zram (swap that lives in memory instead of hard disk) by default, while the rest do not. Windows in particular does not take 72G and tends to be aggressive in swap allocation. The fact that he presents this data as “free space available” adds confusions while seemingly burying the simplest answer.
It’s pretty terrifying when you think about the possibilities of deception. And also how throwaway content is going to become. We are going to generate content at a volume orders of magnitude larger than our already current excessive volume, and finding the stuff that has real meaning and a real message is going to be even harder.
Also, artists whose work and styles fed this will be put out of business without ever being paid for their work that was used to train these models. 🫤
We spent decades depicting science fiction AIs as the key to giving humanity true freedom from mandatory labor, and now we're scared because it can do creative work too? We'll adapt. We'll be just fine. A new generation will crop up that will have no issues with AI-generated content. We're too old to see it like they will. Just like a lot of our parents and grandparents didn't understand email until they were forced to, while us kids were doing all kinds of things online.
I mean shoot, my parents still argue with me over whether electronic music is even music or not. It's just gonna be another tool in an artist's arsenal.
We spent decades depicting science fiction AIs as the key to giving humanity true freedom from mandatory labor
Very few people benefit from automation and AI. Most of us will eventually be replaced by an IA and our only freedom will be to starve (or to rebel, who knows)
People can and have made the same argument about new technology since the dawn of the industrial revolution, but it hasn't worked out that way. Industrialized countries are synonymous with rich countries. The problem with new technology, both now and then, it's that the ownership of the means of production always becomes concentrated in the hands of a small class of people who have no interest in sharing their wealth. This far the benefits of technology have trickled down to the masses, but never without hurting a bunch of people in the process precisely because a few people have been allowed to hoard most of the benefits for themselves.
I've asked Gemini for a summary and it's pretty spot on:
This video is about AI generated videos and how they have become very realistic.
The speaker, Marques Brownlee, discusses a new AI model called Sora that can generate videos from text input. He shows examples of videos generated by Sora, including one of a woman walking down a Tokyo street, a car driving up a mountain road, and a litter of puppies playing in the snow. He points out that these videos are still not perfect, but they are much better than what was possible just a year ago.
He discusses the implications of this technology, both good and bad. On the one hand, it could be used to create fake videos that could be used to deceive people. On the other hand, it could be used to create stock footage that is more affordable and accessible than ever before. Brownlee concludes by saying that this technology is still in its early stages, but it has the potential to change the world in many ways.
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