Just want to thank everyone here, reading this, on the decentralized unbought future of the web. We all collectively made the content, be it posting, commenting, making the yt videos or writing the articles..
Big tech didn't make the world of the Internet or the data within, we did; all big tech did was steal it from us. They erected walls to exclude us from the gardens we built and planted.
Just by being here and participating, you are making the difference. Keep making content because if your passions and because you like to. Keep commenting, shit posting, debating, arguing, and being debaucherous. The future is ours, not theirs.
I agree with you for the most part, but you omitted the symbiotic (or even mutualistic) relationship users and platforms have. For example, Google provides a video platform, and user provide the videos. Such a transaction comes with a contract we all neglected to read, but accepted regardless. As far as the contract is concerned, both parties should be fine with this situation. Nobody is stealing anything.
Obviously, this situation has quite a few problems, and the Fediverse addresses many of them. However, self hosting text, audio and video doesn’t happen for free, just like Google can’t run their servers for free. Either you pay directly to the devs and admins, or you find other creative ways to make money flow. That’s where the Fediverse and commercial platforms differ greatly.
What annoys me about companies like StackOverflow, Reddit, Twitter, etc. partnering with AI firms is that they do not actually create any of the content on their platforms. Sure, if you read the terms they technically own the data, but still...
That's basically what most tech companies are trying to optimize these days, the ability to make money off of other people's work. It's why they're so hyped about trying to use AI to replace the very workers it's trained on.
Most of modern civilization wasn't built by the current S&P500 — most of them didn't exist 50 years ago, let alone 100 — it was built by humanity, collectively, over thousands of years.
That fact won't stop any individual or corporation from trying to claim absolute dominion over the entire human population, all derivative works and resources, or the rest of our descendants futures, for all eternity.
Just more nonsense showing how broken modern copyright is. It's too hard to write weasely legalese to just say you have the right to reproduce content submitted to your website, you have to own it entirely. And if you own it, why not sell it?
It's not difficult at all, these companies just have no reason to do it that way. They force you to agree to their terms before you can use the website at all, which means they're in a much better position to make demands. We can't counter with anything, it's just "agree that we own this copy of your content".
And most of us agree to it because we have no way of knowing that someday our content might actually be worth something.
I don’t think it’s broken. I’m pretty sure it’s working as intended. In the early days of the colonisation of the web capitalists made it already pretty clear how property laws will be applied there.
"AGI is going to create tremendous wealth. And if that wealth is distributed—even if it’s not equitably distributed, but the closer it is to equitable distribution, it’s going to make everyone incredibly wealthy.”
So delusional.
Do they think that their AI will actually dig the cobalt from the mines, or will the AI simply be the one who sends the children in there to do the digging?
It will design the machines to build the autonomous robots that mine the cobalt.... doing the jobs of several companies at one time and either freeing up several people to pursue leisure or the arts or starve to death from being abandoned by society.
Work a blue collar job your whole life and tell me it’s possible. Machines suck ass. They either need constant supervision, repairs all the time, or straight up don’t function properly. Tech bros always forget about the people who actually keep the world chugging.
They suck because your employer wouldn't pay me more for a better machine. Chemical is where it is at, outside of powerplants and some of the bigger pharms the chemical operator is a dead profession. Entire plants are automated with the only people doing work are doing repairs or sales.
LLMs aren't going to be designing anything; they're just fancy auto complete engines with a tendency to hallucinate facts they haven't been trained on.
LLMs are preventing real advancements in AI by focusing the attention and funding into what's evidently a dead end.
LLMs are incapable of "recognising" any patterns they haven't been trained on.
And they don't really even recognise those, they're just fancy auto complete engines, simply outputting the highest scored token from their training base based on their input.
They're pattern matching machines; there's no recognition, inner modelling of new knowledge, self referencing, or understanding of any kind, merely blind statistics.
They're just bigger and fancier Eliza's, and just as distant as Eliza was from any practical form of intelligence, artificial or natural.
While I personally do believe that achieving AGI¹, on a Turing machine is possible, LLMs and how they work are an excellent example in support of John Searle's arguments against it with his Chinese room though experiment.
1— Or at least something equivalent to human intelligence, or better, in the measures by which we consider ourselves to be intelligent, though it's arguable whether we can really be considered intelligent at all, or we're just better, more complex, Chinese rooms.
But since we don't understand how cognition works in living beings almost at all -- who's to say that's not how 'actual thinking' works other than 'I know it when I see it!"
Because there are many aspects of what we understand as "actual thinking" (understanding concepts, learning, or solving puzzles, for instance) that LLMs are fundamentally incapable of achieving no matter how larger or more complex we make them or how much we optimise them.
They do one single thing (which, granted, they do relatively well): they take an input, they apply it to every token in their training data, generating a score for each of them, and they output the one with the highest score. And that's all they do.
And that's why, for instance, you'll never be able to make a LLM that's any good at playing chess, because there simply wouldn't be enough atoms in the universe for it to store all possible states of the game, which it would need to have in its training model in order to auto complete its next move (and that's not even accounting for the actual score computation, both in space and time).
They're a cool fancy gimmick, possibly useful in certain cases as long as you can account for their hallucinations, but they're not any closer to actual intelligence than Eliza ever was.
you’ll never be able to make a LLM that’s any good at playing chess,
They said that about machines and then we all laughed at the mechanical turk hoax. Now machines can almost beat you in Go.
I'll say it again -- It is hubris and you will obviously be wrong to try to predict the future or what will have value.
like come on -- superpositioning exists and we've no clue how consciousness works (Bostrom thinks its just maths) but you have this crystal ball full of certainty. It smells...
I'm not talking about "machines" or any other generic term.
I'm talking specifically about LLMs. And their limitations are evident. For instance, maths is one of the many things they can't do (and will never be able to do in any efficient way).
We have indeed, developed programs that play chess better than people (though sadly, until the LLM bubble pops we probably won't get any further). But they're not LLMs, or anything resembling an LLM. Because one of the other many things an LLM can't do is play games of skill. Or reason. Or solve puzzles. Or even have a concept of strategy.
LLMs, again, can only do one single thing. And that's to pick up the one card from their deck that's been picked up most often after the sequence of cards on the table according to their training model.
That's all they do. That's all they'll ever be able to do. Because that's how they work. And, sure, with that you can make it look like they're holding a conversation (until you ask them something that isn't in their model), but that's it.
They'll put words after another according to statistics (not, keep that in mind, according to meaning, or strategy, or anything like that; they don't, and can't know or care what the words mean, or whether the sentence they've put together makes any sense, or whether what it's stating is true or false), and that's that.
They won't play chess, they won't write good innovative code, they won't write original stories, and they won't drive your car.
We don't need to know how what we call consciousness works to know that. We just need to know how LLMs work. And that we most definitely do.
Sure steam engines may not fit every use but from them we learned to make other kinds of engines right? But yeah I'm sure 'LLM' will either change scope/definition or we'll make new stuff to fit other use cases kind of like diffusion models for images vs llm for text generation.
It may be used within strict parameters to improve the speed of theoretically testing types of bearing or hinge or alloys or something to predict which ones would perform best under stress testing - prior to acutal testing to eliminate low-hanging fruit, but it will absolutely not generate a new idea for a machine because it can't generate new ideas.
The model T will absolutely not replace horse drawn carts -- Maybe some small group of people or a family for a vacation but we've been using carts to do war logistics for 1000s of years. You think some shaped metal put together is going to replace 1000s of men and horses? lol yeah right
You're comparing two products with the same value prop: transporting people and goods more effectively than carrying/walking.
In terms of mining, a drilling machine is more effective than a pickaxe. But we're comparing current drilling machines to potential drilling machines, so the actual comparison would be:
is an AI-designed drilling machine likely to be more productive (for any given definition of productivity) than a human-designed one?
Well, we know from experience that when (loosely defined) "AI" is used in, for e.g. pharma research, it reaps some benefits - but does not replace wholesale the drug approval process and its still a tool used by - as I originally said - human beings that impose strict parameters on both input and output as part of a larger product and method.
Back to your example: could a series of algorithmic steps - without any human intervention - provide a better car than any modern car designers? As it stands, no, nor is it on the horizon. Can it be used to spin through 4 million slight variations in hood ornaments and return the top 250 in terms of wind resistance? Maybe, and only if a human operator sets up the experiment correctly.
No, the thing I'm comparing is our inability to discern where a new technology will lead and our history of smirking at things like books, cars, the internet and email, AI, etc.
The first steam engines pulling coal out of the ground were so inefficient they wouldn't make sense for any use case than working to get the fuel that powers them. You could definitely smirk and laugh about engines vs 10k men and be totally right in that moment, and people were.
The more history you learn though, you more you realize this is not only a hubrisy thing, it's also futile as how we feel about the proliferation of technology has never had an impact on that technology's proliferation.
And, to be clear, I'm not saying no humans will work or have anything to do -- I'm saying significantly MORE humans will have nothing to do. Sure you still need all kinds of people even if the robots design and build themselves mostly, but it would be an order of magnitude less than the people needed otherwise.
I agree that AI is just a tool, and it excels in areas where an algorithmic approach can yield good results. A human still has to give it the goal and the parameters.
What's fascinating about AI, though, is how far we can push the algorithmic approach in the real world. Fighter pilots will say that a machine can never replace a highly-trained human pilot, and it is true that humans do some things better right now. However, AI opens up new tactics. For example, it is virtually certain that AI-controlled drone swarms will become a favored tactic in many circumstances where we currently use human pilots. We still need a human in the loop to set the goal and the parameters. However, even much of that may become automated and abstracted as humans come to rely on AI for target search and acquisition. The pace of battle will also accelerate and the electronic warfare environment will become more saturated, meaning that we will probably also have to turn over a significant amount of decision-making to semi-autonomous AI that humans do not directly control at all times.
In other words, I think that the line between dumb tool and autonomous machine is very blurry, but the trend is toward more autonomous AI combined with robotics. In the car design example you give, I think that eventually AI will be able to design a better car on its own using an algorithmic approach. Once it can test 4 million hood ornament variations, it can also model body aerodynamics, fuel efficiency, and any other trait that we tell it is desirable. A sufficiently powerful AI will be able to take those initial parameters and automate the process of optimizing them until it eventually spits out an objectively better design. Yes, a human is in the loop initially to design the experiment and provide parameters, but AI uses the output of each experiment to train itself and automate the design of the next experiment, and the next, ad infinitum. Right now we are in the very early stages of AI, and each AI experiment is discrete. We still have to check its output to make sure it is sensible and combine it with other output or tools to yield useable results. We are the mind guiding our discrete AI tools. But over a few more decades, a slow transition to more autonomy is inevitable.
A few decades ago, if you had asked which tasks an AI would NOT be able to perform well in the future, the answers almost certainly would have been human creative endeavors like writing, painting, and music. And yet, those are the very areas where AI is making incredible progress. Already, AI can draw better, write better, and compose better music than the vast, vast majority of people, and we are just at the beginning of this revolution.
sure. But, like I said, those are subject to a lot of caveats - that humans have to set the experiments up to ask the right questions to get those answers.
i would be extremely surprised if before 2100 we see AI that has no human operator and no data scientist team even at a 3rd party distributor - and those things are neither a lie, nor a weaselly marketing stunt ("technically the operators are contractors and not employed by the company" etc).
We invented the printing press 584 years ago, it still requires a team of human operators.
the comment I originally replied to claimed AI will design the autonomous machines.
It will not. It will facilitate some of the research done by humans to aid in the designing of willfully human operated machinery.
To my knowledge the only autonomous machine that exists is a roomba, which moves blindly around until it physically strikes an object, rotates a random degree and continues in a new direction until it hits something else.
Even then, it is controlled with an app and on more expensive models, some boundary setting.
Fair, I thought they all got recalled but I guess they're back. but I'd also counter that Waymo is extremely limited about where it can operate - roughly 10 miles max - which, relevant to my original point was entirely hand-mapped and calibrated by human operators, and the rides are monitored and directed by a control center responding in real-time to the car's feedback.
Like my printing press example - it still takes a large human team to operate the "self" - driving car.
OpenAI themselves have made it very clear that scaling up their models have diminishing returns and that they're incapable of moving forward without entirely new models being invented by humans. A short while ago they proclaimed that they could possibly make an AGI if they got several Trillions of USD in investment.
Okay but the people who made the advancements are telling you it has already slowed down. Why don't you understand that? A flawed Chatbot and some art theft machines who can't draw hands aren't exactly worldchanging, either, tbh.
This is such a rich-country-centric view that I can't stand. LLMs have already given the world maybe it's greatest gift ever -- access to a teacher.
Think of the 800 million poor children in the world and their access to a Kahn academy level teacher on any subject imaginable with a cellphone/computer as all they need. How could that not have value and is pearl clutching drawing skills becoming devalued really all you can think about it?
Anything you learn from an LLM has a margin of error that makes it dangerous and harmful. It hallucinates documentation and fake facts like an asylum inmate. And it's so expensive compared to just having real teachers that it's all pointless. We've got humans, we don't need more humans, adding labor doesn't solve the problem with education.
Those textbooks and the people who regurgitate their contents are the training data for the LLM. Any statement you make about human incompetence is multiplied by an LLM. If they don't have access to a human teacher then they probably don't have PCs and AI subscriptions, either.
There are other people in the world. Some of them are inventing completely new ways of doing things, and one of those ways could lead to a major breakthrough. I'm not saying a GPT LLM is going to solve the problem, I'm saying AI will.
Some of them are inventing completely new ways of doing things
No, they're not. All the money is now on the LLM autocomplete chatbots.
Real progress on AI won't resume until after the LLM bubble has burst. (And even then investors will probably be wary of putting money in AI for probably a few decades, because LLMs are being marked as AI despite having little to do with it.)
define design -- I had Chat GPT dream up new musical instruments and then we implemented one. It wrote all the code and architecture, though I did have to prod/help it along in places.
Neither can the majority of engineers I have meet, but that hasn't stopped them. You really don't need any design ability if your whole day is having endless meetings terrorizing OEMs.
AI might be the one to say "solving global warming needs a drastic reduction car-based infrastructure, plus heavy government regulation and investment in new infrastructure". They'll throw out that answer because it isn't what they wanted to hear.
Nah, they're probably planning to do what Amazon did with their "Just Walk Out" stores... force children into mines and just claim it's actually AI. As NFT's, Cryptocurrency, and so many other hype tech fads have taught us: marketing is cheaper than development.
They just mean "steal from the weaker ones" by "create".
Psychology of advertising a Ponzi scheme.
They say "we are going to rob someone and if you participate, you'll get a cut", but change a few things so that people would understand, but would think that someone else won't and will be the fool to get robbed. Then those people considering themselves smart find out that, well, they've been robbed.
Humans are very eager to participate in that when they think it's all legal and they won't get caught.
The idea here is that the "AI" will help some people own others and it's better to be on the side of companies doing it.
I generally dislike our timeline in the fact that while dishonorable people are weaker than honorable people long term, it really sucks to live near a lot of dishonorable people who want to check this again the most direct way. It sucks even more when that's the whole world in such a situation.
To be fair, that did improve things for the average person, and by a staggering amount.
The vast majority of people working before the industrial revolution were lowly paid agricultural workers who had enormous instability in employment. Employment was also typically very seasonal, and very hard work.
That's before we even get into things like stuff being made cheaper, books being widely available, transport being opened up, medical knowledge skyrocketing, famines going from regular occurrence to rare occurrence, etc as a result of the industrial revolution.
We had been on a constant trajectory of everyone getting wealthier up until the late 1970s where afterwards we saw a sharp rise in inequality, a trend that hasn't stopped. (Thatcher and her other shithead twin Reagan?)
In the mid 70s, the top 1% owned 19.9% of wealth. Now that figure is around 53%.
Let's not forget this is all driven by people with the right skillset, in the right place at the right time, who are hell-bent on making vast amounts of money.
The "visionary technological change" is a secondary justification.
Permission granted to scrape this comment too, if you like.
Yep, our library has a 3D printer and they'll make anything you want for a very low cost, like a couple dollars. I've never tried but I want to. What should I ask them to make? Any suggestions?
Having built a number of Repraps, "nearly everything" is highly exaggerated. I have seen 3D printers with an almost entirely printed frame, but using off the shelf T slot rails is a lot more time and cost effective.
It is currently not possible to print the control board, wiring, sensors, hot end, motors, heaters, bearings, slides and rails necessary for a 3D printer. Some of the mechanical parts and a lot of the bracketry that holds the frame together can be 3D printed.
Ultra specific storage cubbies for your favorite 5 tools. Label tags. Cabinet door knobs. Print in place toy cars with rolling wheels and doors that open. Compliant mechanisms. A coin sorting device. If they can print flexible things, phone cases.
Do not expect anything 3d printed to be food safe.
It helped me to know that checking out items helps the library.
I always thought of it as being a consumer of library resources, but the fact that the books/movies/library of things items are being checked out helps them prove that their services are useful to the community.
Strange how Google became the default search engine back in the day because they were so good at filtering out the dumb websites that just spam search terms all over the page.
I think it takes a while for that kind of competitor to emerge and gain enough traction to become a genuine alternative option. The primary option everyone long since adopted kinda has to suck for a while :/
It also is going to take another leap in algorithm.
It was a hard problem to solve when Google's founders cracked it, but it's an even harder problem to solve now that you have state of the art spam bots filling the Internet full of shit that looks like it was composed by humans.
If someone cracks how to figure out whether something is ai or not (for real, not the fake solutions we have now) and adds that to a good search algorithm and filters the fake shit by default, they will have a hell of a product on their hands.
I'm of the opinion that it will require human interaction to fix this. It can't be purely solved via algorithms.
What people don't realize is that the original Google search algorithm, PageRank, effectively looks at how real humans interacted with the websites they were indexing. Only websites referenced by other websites were being considered by Google's search engine. And at the time, that meant real human beings were making those links. This gave them a real advantage over other, purely algorithmic search engines.
Something like this will have to be recreated. We will have to figure out a way of prioritizing search results that real human beings have found to be useful.
DDG has been around for quite a while. Now it was a few years ago I used it last time, but the reason I switched back to Google was because I was clearly less productive with DDG.
I don't think something like duckduckgo is gonna be the eventual contender to take on google. I think it'll have to be an engine with its own index or some kind of lateral solution.
Something like brave, kagi, qwant, or stract could maybe turn into something exciting with more momentum, but honestly I have a hard time seeing them be the kind of scrappy competitor with a new approach that unseats the old king who has lost their way in pursuit of more profit at the expense of product quality. None of them seem like they truly have a new approach, but only time will tell how that story plays out this time.
I honestly think it will have to be semi curated and look a lot like a more complex digital version of an encyclopedia.
I mean I think the stupid LLM craze is from trying to make something like that in the vain of the "Hitchhikers Guide" but without having to do the actual work and using autogenerated articles except that makes them prone to being false. The Hitchhikers Guide still had writers and people entering and double checking information.
It can then further link you to related stuff from the web but the wide spread of information is somewhat dead since it's now the product to be sold and free and easy sharing of it would ruin profit margins.
I use DDG but i do wonder what i dont see sometimes.
I often google a specific brand of components at work and even with the exact brand and/or part number in the search it sometimes doesnt turn up any results (say 5-7 random unrelated webpages) and thats it. Then i put the same search in google and bam, top result.
That's what I said - the right key wording. It's pretty strict, whereas Google's results sometimes are a tiny bit more loose understanding of what you roughly mean. Though not always, and on Google I found myself often just adding "Reddit" for specifics. Though really really depends on what you search.
For me DDG offers a lot more than just search results, the bangs and features like I added a script to directly port my questions to some AI is really useful.
"DDG likes to ignore parts of your query to get more results."
Wow sounds extremely useful and like a feature I want. I love searching for something specific and they are like "did you mean totally unrelated thing?"
Reddit used to be better, but now any time you search for advice on good _____ to buy, the only answers you can find are "use the search function, this question has been answered already"
I've noticed half the subs are now marked as "NSFW" when searching for something like a plumbing issue for example, which won't allow you to see the posts without using the reddit app.
I do (and did when I was still there) use it on a desktop but on a phone it directs you to the terrible mobile site where the HVAC and plumbing subreddits are somehow NSFW and restricted. Maybe next time I'll try to manually redirect to old.reddit and see if it works.
Are they actually recommending the Reddit search function? We shit on their internal search function for over a decade, and told people to just use Google and site:Reddit in the search.
I'm starting to feel like a shill because I say this so often, but Kagi is the only one I've found that actually does the job anymore. To me a search engine that works is worth the small cost each month, but unfortunately I don't see paying for search becoming mainstream anytime soon.
I was sceptical at first too, but a not-paid-for search engine will either have ads, paid results or try to monetize the search data in some way.
I feel it helps me find what I need, better than the alternatives I tried, and I like the features and configuration options it has.
To be fair when Google solved SEO spam in 1999, thanks to pagerank, it was no small feat. The others were bad not because they abused ads but because they didn't know how to deal with cheating webmasters.
I've found DDG to be adequate for the majority of things I search, but when I need something specific or with some nuance, it fails miserably. For that reason I still use Google when I do stuff for work, or when I do troubleshooting. For my daily usage DDG is just fine, though.
I use it, but to be honest I did not do a comprehensive comparison. I like it mostly for the fine grained website control. For work and some personal stuff I often look for code and can push websites like GitHub to appear more often. Or I can block Pinterest in my search results. I tried to do this in SearXNG, but this was too much of a hassle so in a way I pay kagi for convenience. I recently got a new job and will evaluate in the coming months if it is still worth the money, but right now I am satisfied. Nobody else I know would pay for a search engine, so I can understand the stance, but I am really fed up with all the advertising and enshitification so I thought why not give it a try. And yes, because it was recommended here.
I didn't get recommended it here, but elsewhere. I ended up paying for a years worth last year and yeah I like it better than pretty much everything else. There is still a rare occasion that I need to use Google, but that is maybe once a week whereas with DuckDuckGo it was multiple times per-day.
I did lol, why the hell would I recommend it otherwise?
It’s a search engine, so to be better than the others it’s obvious it would have to return better results than the usual ad-based crap — and it does. There is a free trial and you can check out if it’s worth it for you btw
It has quite a lot of QoL features for searches, but their main one — searching — is worth the cost; if you do a search once in a blue moon or append “Reddit” at the end of a query, it’s not imo since any search engine is “good enough” for that. If you instead actually do a search without having a specific website in mind, it’s good. You can also filter out the quora and other shitty websites results, which is nice
Not sure if you read the recent article or not, but the guy responsible for this enshittification came from Yahoo, where he applied the same policies. So you're more literally correct than you may think
Having done my time as an Army medic, this is incorrect. It takes more force than that, but less than you might think. A good 25 kilos with some velocity behind it will easily sever a phalange. Up it to 50 or 80 kilos and you can claim an arm or shin. Mass is the real killer. I’ve seen a vehicle at comically slow speed absolutely yeet someone because it had several tons of momentum behind it.
Casual readers might remember a recent very low-speed collision that nonetheless caused a catastrophic failure due to the tens of thousands of tons of weight. The MV Dali vs. the Francis Scott Key Bridge, if you didn't guess. It struck the bridge at about 8 mph.
He did demonstrate it that way, specifically with a carrot. And it somewhat worked. The problem is they programmed it to do more and more pressure every time it fails meaning that doing the carrot first actually caused a safety issue. He only moved onto his finger because the safety feature seemed to be working.
The engineer told him the frunk increases in pressure every single time it closes and detects resistance, Judkins said. It's going to assume you want to close the frunk and maybe something like a bag is getting in the way, which would make it close harder.
In an interview with the Journal, Neuralink's first patient, 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, opened up about the roller-coaster experience. "I was on such a high and then to be brought down that low. It was very, very hard," Arbaugh said. "I cried." He initially asked if Neuralink would perform another surgery to fix or replace the implant, but the company declined, telling him it wanted to wait for more information.
Neuralink isn’t just treating humans like guinea pigs, they’re treating them like disposable guinea pigs.
Is that where you draw the line on sympathy, or are you one of those people who is physically incapable of talking about anything but Israel/Palestine?
Even the worst people in history were at some point just a child that we could have potentially saved. Even as an adult, or after doing evil, I think sympathy and compassion never stops being the right answer. It's just in practice we have to prioritise: the needy, the many.
You said verbatim, that a quadriplegic guy hoping to regain some control deserves no sympathy and then immediately went to war orphans in Gaza. I'm not putting anything in your mouth you didn't shit out of it before
You cherry-picked the first part of that paragraph. The end goes like this:
Arbaugh went on to say that he has since recovered from the initial disappointment and continues to have hope for the technology.
And then the next part of his statement is found in the following paragraph:
"I thought that I had just gotten to, you know, scratch the surface of this amazing technology, and then it was all going to be taken away," he added. "But it only took me a few days to really recover from that and realize that everything I’ve done up to that point was going to benefit everyone who came after me.” He also said that "it seems like we’ve learned a lot and it seems like things are going in the right direction."
Of course, the goal here is not to have an honest assessment of what happened. . .but to simply choose what we want to further our hatred (justified, IMO) of Musk.
And nothing about what you quoted indicates what he was or was not told about the potential outcomes of the procedure, or how he was treated. Only that he was disappointed with the outcome. Of course he was, of course he wanted it to work out, so of course he was disappointed.
I stand by my point that only the negative part of his statement was cherry-picked out in order to justify shitting on Musk, rather than honestly assessing what happened.
My criticism of Neuralink’s response has nothing to do with whether or not the first patient was treated unfairly. It’s that it reveals Neuralink’s priorities: they had a choice going forward of trying to fix the first patient’s implant or giving up and starting over with a fresh patient, and they chose the latter.
In animal testing, that decision would depend on how valuable the guinea pigs are.
My guess is you know nothing about this. They may think reinserting them is too risky for the patient because they don't know. You're almost certainly just making up facts to justify your conclusions, rather than assessing the facts and coming to a conclusion based on them.
They didn't exactly say no, they just said they want more data. It might not be that crazy not to rush things with a patient that needs re-implantation when you're trying to test the next revision of the implant and have willing patient who only requires an initial implantation.
As long as these patients are properly informed on the risks and limitations of this experimental tech, I don't see a problem. There's no evidence that they are treating their patients badly, or failing to fulfill any promises in regards to the efficacy of the implants, or commitment to support these early test implants insofar as they agreed to provide to their patients (to my understanding, they are informed that the implant could be a total failure with no opportunities to re-implant.).
Okay, no. As much of an issue as I have with musk and the way he bullrushes into these things, this really was the right response at this point.
It's a new tech. That goes into someone's brain. You do not just go rutting around up there if the first attempt failed, and further tests (which have a significant element of risk) shouldn't be in the brain that's already been through this, not until it's much better tuned.
Brain surgery isn't a minor procedure.
If they're able to fix it for him, there's a fair chance they will, I'd imagine.
But continuing to dig around after that failure is what treating him like a disposable Guinea pig would look like because that's how they'd very likely kill him or substantially diminish his quality of life with brain damage.
There are lots of real reasons to hate musk. This isn't one of them.
No? That’s insane. “We don’t k ow exactly what’s going on, but we are going to go poke around inside- oh shit he’s dead, if only we had waited until things stabilized and we had the information we needed.”
Come on, don’t be ridiculous. “Try to fix it” could easily result in a dead patient, and I’m sure you’d be all for praising their attempt to fix it, right?
You could actually read the article. The guy is glad to have helped make some one else's life better. He doesn't have brain damage and he is not dead nor is he worse off.
Or they want to actually have something that has a chance of working before doing it again...I doubt installing one of these things is a walk in the park and every install carries a high risk ... I sure hope patient #2 is getting something with a possible fix...
I feel like the 'Jarvis assistant' is most likely going to be a much simpler siri type thing with a very restricted chatbot overlay. And then there will be the open source assistant that just exist to help you sort through the bullshit generated by other chatbots.
Yes and in 2019 Musk's claims went even further, when he claimed it was stupid to buy anything but Tesla, because next year (2020) You would be able to make money on it as a RoboTaxi. As I recall it was $200,000.- you should be able to make on a Tesla per year!!! Why he sold them then is a bit strange?
He also claimed that instead of losing value, a Tesla would increase as much as five times in value in a year, because FSD was worth that much.
How this man hasn't been jailed for fraud years ago is beyond me, I could understand if USA was a corrupt country for the rich...
oh... Never mind.
He's claimed before that he honestly believes it each year by watching the progress the past X months, but suddenly all progress stops as their method hits a plateau. So they keep changing methods.
It's probably an honest mistake the first time or two, but he's done this every year since and has no credibility anymore.
After being wrong by a year or two, he should have explained what was going in, and shut up about it, with a simple I don't know when it'll be ready but you should see forward progress each year.
There are plenty of bosses like him out there. Completely high on their own shit. He reads about technology in a sci-fi book, and thinks he can Steve Jobs into bullying workers into making it a reality. Completely deludes himself into thinking it’s real and sells it to investors with full confidence. He has no idea of the actual technical challenges and fully convinces himself his genius brain could figure it out if he wasn’t so “busy” all the time. Everything is perpetually just 6 months away.
The worst part is that he doesn't even understand the sci-fi he consumes. He said this not too long ago:
Grok is an AI modeled after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask!
Every AI in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was broken, an asshole or both. Douglas Adams clearly thought the idea of a "human-like" AI was abhorrent. Especially one developed by a giant corporation.
Also, he thinks the name of the main character in Blade Runner is "Bladerunner."
True, and since part of the meaning of grok in the book was 'to love,' naming your "anti-woke" AI after that suggests he also didn't understand that book.
No it was not, we have testimony from employees that FSD wasn't even close to what Musk claimed. And it can't even do it today.
Just because you can flip a switch that says FSD doesn't mean it works.
That argument is stupid. My robot lawn mower "can drive itself" but it can't follow traffic rules and would crash after a while if set to drive on its own in a road. Just as a Tesla. What Musk was implying was "it can drive itself without violating traffic rules and causing crashes" and clearly it can't.
Well yes, but the end result after driving unattended in traffic for a while is the same still, that's the point. You could argue that a FSD Tesla makes it a bit further, I guess that's true but still it's far from what Elon was selling to the people.
I think FSD is further along than you think it is.
This is the issue with all these debates currently. The people arguing against FSD are totally unaware of how far it has come since just a few months ago. They have already made up their minds based on how much it sucked a year ago and they're under the illusion that it's at best just marginally better today. I love watching the YouTube channel CYBRLFT and seeing people's minds getting blown in real time when they realize that what they've heard on the news and on social media is so far from the reality.
That's like saying a car with cruise control can self drive. Although FSD is more sophisticated, it still can't.
The Tesla cannot self drive by any reasonable meaning of the term.
Tesla also calls it assisted self driving now. And that's obviously not because it works now, which even now 8 years later it doesn't.
It can do that now. Probably not with zero driver interventions especially when talking about a trip across the country but Tesla is the only vehicle manufacturer today that offers this capability. There's a dude on YouTube doing ridesharing with Tesla using FSD and with the latest software version it completes 90% of the trips from the pickup to the destination without intervention from the driver.
Musk also said more safely than a human being. I've seen videos with FSD creating numerous dangerous situations on a single trip, that required quick intervention to avoid collisions. Driving in narrow roads it would suddenly turn into opposite traffic (potentially lethal), not minding right of way in crosses (also potentially lethal), and even turning straight towards parked cars, when the lane it was in was unobstructed!!
Another video I saw, it crossed at a very clear red light!! That's a very potentially lethal situation.
There is no way it can be reasonably argued that Tesla has working full self driving.
it completes 90% of the trips
You know 90% isn't even close to being half finished. The next 9% are probably more difficult, and the last percent the most difficult. There's a reason the hard parts are finished last.
I don't see anyone claiming they have "working full self driving". That's a strawman argument. Their system is really good and years ahead of competition but there's still a shit ton to improve. That's why it's classified as level 2 and not level 3. It's a vehicle capable of driving itself under supervision but it's not a self driving vehicle.
I’ve seen videos with FSD creating numerous dangerous situations on a single trip
In the past few months? Because the current software version is completely different than what it used to be. They've moved entirely from human code to neural nets and it made a giant improvement in its performance.
I don’t see anyone claiming they have “working full self driving”
The whole thread is about Musk claiming in 2019 that Tesla has FSD working NOW, that could drive the car from a parking lot on the other side of the country (USA) and pick you up in a parking lot where you are. AND that it could drive more safely than a human being.
I am not interested in the slightest whether it's 50% or 90% there now, the fact is the claim was made first in 2016, that Tesla would have it ready NEXT YEAR, and in 2019 he claimed it was ready NOW! And it's STILL not ready!!
So what is it about Musks claims being false you don't understand?
I don’t see anyone claiming they have “working full self driving”.
That's decidedly false, because you yourself wrote:
The whole thread is about Musk claiming in 2019 that Tesla has FSD working NOW
From the article:
(1) representations that Tesla vehicles have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability and, (2) representations that a Tesla car would be able to drive itself cross-country in the coming year.
So not only are you clearly emotionally invested here but you're also being dishonest about the claims that have been made. I don't think there's any reason to go further with this.
Oh boy you are tiresome, I wrote the thread, not the post.
But still the context of "the coming year" Musk claimed Tesla had that NOW in 2019, and it would
be made available to consumers in the coming year being 2020. It's from the exact same presentation.
Nothing you quote contradicts anything I wrote. It's just different parts of the same thing, which of course requires background knowledge you evidently don't have.
Wait, so in your mind products need to have "working" in their name in order to be held to the standard of ... working? I don't understand what you're trying to argue at all. They're calling and selling this product as "full self driving". It's not full self driving. It doesn't need to be called "working full self driving" in order for it to be misleading.
No, the other user is claiming that they don't have a "working" full self driving but is being vague about what they mean by "working".
Full Self Driving is just the name of the software. There's also autopilot but that's different. The end goal of it is to eventually be capable of level 5 self driving so that's why it's named like that even though it has been a work in progress all of it's existence. Wouldn't make much sense to call it "partial self driving under supervision" because Full Self Driving is a better marketing term. Misleading? Well yeah perhaps but that's what marketing teams do. Nothing new there. Not a single Tesla owner is under the illusion that you can just enable the system and take a nap. Doesn't mean people don't do that but they know that they shouldn't. The system tells you that every single time you enable it.
Personally I don't see a huge issue with that name. It's level 2 meaning that it needs driver supervision and it's by no means flawless but it does what the name implies: drives itself. It's not just an advanced cruise control like for example the Mercedes Drive Pilot but it is actually capable of independently driving itself and especially with the V12 it's actually getting quite good at it.
No, the other user is claiming that they don't have a "working" full self driving but is being vague about what they mean by "working".
I don't think the other commenter is being is vague at all. "Full self driving" quite literally means Level 5, maybe level 4. That's just what those words mean. There's no argument here.
Full Self Driving is just the name of the software
Yes, which is the problem.
The end goal of it is to eventually be capable of level 5 self driving so that's why it's named like that even though it has been a work in progress all of it's existence.
Which is exactly why calling it "full self driving" now doesn't make any sense. It's false advertising at best, and a super dangerous overpromise at worst.
Wouldn't make much sense to call it "partial self driving under supervision" because Full Self Driving is a better marketing term.
Of course it's a "better marketing term", because "full self driving" is the pinnacle of self driving tech, what Tesla and everyone else in the race is trying to achieve. The problem is that what they have is not full self driving, and in fact whether it can ever be achieved with current Tesla hardware is far from proven. I'm not confused as to why they call it that, I'm arguing the point that they shouldn't call it that.
Misleading? Well yeah perhaps but that's what marketing teams do. Nothing new there.
Not at all. This is not typically what marketing teams do at all. It's pretty damn unusual for a major corporation to sell a product under the technical term for what it may be at some point. Or do you have any other examples of this?
Not a single Tesla owner is under the illusion that you can just enable the system and take a nap.
Maybe not, but do you really think no-one bought a Tesla based on Elon's promise that it'd be fully self driving by 2019? Or that you could monetize it by having it run as a robotaxi at night by 2020?
Doesn't mean people don't do that but they know that they shouldn't.
Tesla and Musk not constantly overpromising and misrepresenting their product with false confidence might help with preventing people from placing undue trust in the system.
Personally I don't see a huge issue with that name. It's level 2
As you say, it's level 2. "Full self driving" is level 5. You still don't see the problem with the name?
it does what the name implies: drives itself
It quite literally does not drive itself given that a driver needs to be around and alert to take over at any moment.
I'll grant you that the name is misleading. They should change it. It's also plausible that there's some number of customers for which the false marketing claims may have been the deciding factor in their purchase decision.
Is there something else you feel I'm confused about?
"Their system is really good and years ahead of competition but there’s still a shit ton to improve"
Is it years ahead of the competition? I thought the consensus was that Tesla is far behind, hence why Mercedes is the first brand to actually have some basic level 3 automomus driving actually to customers, and companies other than tesla are actually doing tests with robo taxis. Tesla is good at claiming it can do the above, other companies are the ones actually doing it.
And indeed, there's a shit ton to improve, which directly contradicts statements Elon Musk made, and keeps making. As others already pointed out, calling it Full Self Driving while letting it do that is basically suicide is just the beginning. Elon Musk regularly repeating that it's there, it works etc... only to leave customers waiting for nearly 8 years now with a system that is not what Elon described, etc...
Self driving is really hard, Tesla made some good progress on it, but Elon continuously lying about it should indeed get legal consequences. I'm hope this lawsuit teaches him to actually talk about things he actually knows are true, and not just what he wishes was true.
I thought the consensus was that Tesla is far behind, hence why Mercedes is the first brand to actually have some basic level 3 automomus driving actually to customers
Yeah that seems to be the consensus but I have no idea what it's based on. When the Mercedes system is put against FSD it looks like this. The level 3 driving is available only on a handful of highways between LA, SF and LV and even then only in ideal weather and traffic conditions.
If the competition really is ahead then where are all the videos of their vehicles doing what FSD does? There are countless accounts on YouTube demonstrating the capabilities of FSD driving both on highways and in cities but nothing about these other brands.
Why don't you ask the experts that rather than a random lemming like me? And why don't you ask Elon why he keeps claiming it's capable of more than it actually is?
I honestly don't care enough about it to do research, but you seem to. And i'd just love for guys like Elon to stop lying about what they have.
Mercedes Calls their version of fully autonomous driving: Drive Pilot but you show a comparison to a way more basic Driving Assistant, which is nowhere close!
This comparison shows that Tesla FSD in reality is merely a drive assist.
Forget Tesla dude! Trust me I'm from the year 2024. In just a few months your world will change drastically and everyone will start getting 😷 sick and wearing a mask. We called it COVID 19 and it was bad. Real bad. The only way to fight this pandemic was to isolate as much as possible until a vaccine was made available. The markets never crashed like Trump suggested.... almost as if he knew something was happening....you must invest all your money on moderna and Pfizer vaccine related stocks. Anyway, that's all I remember. Paxlovid was okay but not a vaccine. Wow, Lemmy let's you time travel! We need to invest into this technology!
Funny how rich people can get away with that. I could say I fully believe I’m going to win $50 million in the lottery next week, buy a bunch of shit I can’t pay for, and probably wind up jailed pretty shortly thereafter and nobody would bat an eye. Rich guy selling vaporware? No problem, he just believed his own hype train. Sorry, investors.
Uh-huh... There is a long, LONG list of bullshit that he believed, and continues to believe. There comes a point where we either have to accept that he has the mental level of a 5 year old believing in Santa Claus, or that he is a narcissistic compulsive liar.
Yes with Starlink which the military threatened they might nationalize if Musk sabotaged Ukraine access again.
I honestly don't think Musk's value as a military contractor is very high, and probably (hopefully) not enough to protect him from criminal liability.
Jesus christ dude. There's quote from the author himself, Walter Isaacson who is the person from whose book the whole claim originated from.
To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.
You believe him when the narrative suits you but you don't when it doesn't. Talk about cognitive dissonance lol
Enabling Starlink in Crimea would have been against the sanctions to Russia by the US. Literally illegal.
Anyone who wants to switch to Linux we welcome you with open arms. Ask as many questions as you need. There are no stupid questions just bad answers. (You probably know the type)
If you can't switch, that's ok. Alot of us know what it's like, especially us gamers, Nvidia card owners, and recovering adobe-holics. Life is tougher but a whole lot more rewarding. I moved from windows/Macos and I wouldn't give it up for anything.
I need a PC that runs with no monitor and gets interfaced with through remote desktop only. I just installed Linux on that machine. It currently must have a keyboard and monitor because if it gets rebooted, it comes to the login screen. The login screen cannot be brought up via remote desktop (RDP through Remmina). I also have so far been unable to find a way to force it to automatically sign in "passwordless" like it used to do with Windows.
This box runs Plex as well as whatever game server I want to run for friends and I at the moment. (Currently Minecraft, which is having trouble since th switchover with server lag, but that is far less important than being able to reboot the screenless server box and have it work with no further input )
I have three ideas: First, you could switch the desktop environment to one of the ones that has a GUI settings tool to set passwordless automatic sign in. I think Gnome 3 on Ubuntu, and Mate Desktop on Linux Mint have that feature. There are probably others.
Second, you could switch your display manager to "nodm". The display manager is the thing that runs the X server or Wayland, and it starts the greeter (the greeter is the program that shows the login screen). nodm is a special display manager that doesn't use a greeter or ask for a password. It immediately starts the session using the username and desktop environment specified in its configuration file.
I use nodm for my HTPC and it works very well. The only downside is that you have to edit its configuration file, /etc/default/nodm , using a text editor. I'm not aware of any GUI configuration tool for it. However, it's pretty easy to configure.
Third, you could abandon all display managers, and start the session manually, either from a shell script, or over SSH. This is a little more complex. You will probably want to get comfortable with SSH before trying this (SSH is the command-line analog of remote desktop).
Yeah I also haven't found a good alternative for a windows management host for RDP. I use my last remaining windows box as an "admin host" and the Linux alternative to this would be vnc or xrdp, both of which have their issues (no dynamic resize, clipboard issues, session restore issues)... I've also tried x2go recently which is closer but still not as slick/simple as a windows RDP session.
I have a pi5 at work (upgraded this year) that I use to administer my work network from home. I use ubutnu mate with xrdp for the desktop. Works great, even the sound works. No monitor and even if you hooked one up it would just show a login prompt.
I think the first thing is actually recommend is enabling a daemon that launches Plex at boot without login. sudo systemctl enable plexmediaserver For something like a Minecraft server I'd recommend reading up on the setup process. (It's a fair bit to summarize)
If the application doesn't come with a systemd service I'd recommend making a cron. They're scary looking but actually pretty easy to use, I use it for automating maintenance on my server.
It may feel counter intuitive but Linux servers don't really need a desktop to manage them so most the tools don't really come with graphical apps. If you want an interface to check on things I'd recommend installing and using cockpit web based graphical interface.
If you want to do it proper on a systemd system make a systemd.service it's not as easy to learn but you get extra tools to manage it.
I've heard there's a lot of work that has been done in kde and gnome to get rdp (remote desktop protocol) with remote login.
I hope this helps! If not, almost everything can be done through the terminal and ssh(secure shell) makes that process really easy. I installed and setup my Linux laptop and my server that way.
If you just want to transfer files there is sshfs(secure shell file system) and the ability to go to your file browser and type in an sftp(secure file transfer protocol) address. In kde dolphin for example you select network and type in the bar sftp://(IP address or hostname)@(user):(working directory). Make sure you have sshfs installed on both machines and sshd enabled on at least the system you want to access.
Configuring automatic login shouldn't be difficult. Here are instructions on Ubuntu (should work on any GNOME system), and here's how to do it with pretty much any KDE system. This is a feature of desktop managers (like gdm or sddm), not desktop environments (like GNOME or KDE), so if neither works for you, you're probably using a different one. If that's the case, reply with your distro and as much info as you can provide.
That said, what exactly is the problem you're trying to solve? It's usually a lot easier to login remotely using SSH instead of remote desktop, and then use console commands to do whatever you need. To login with SSH:
ssh <user>@<IP address>
So if your username is tux and your IP is 1.2.3.4:
I use an app on my phone to login, so I can get it done while sitting on the toilet in like 10s (I use it to unlock my computer so my kids can use it). If you're accessing from your computer and just need to run a single command, provide it after the command in quotes (note, sudo commands won't prompt for a password and will just fail).
Adding to this if you rub Plex from Docker, and you tell systemd to start docker on machine start you can also have the Plex container start automatically.
Then you dont even have to worry about logging in.
Get a virtual hdmi dummy plug. A very cheap and easy fix. Because the machine now thinks a screen is attached it will create a desktop environment you can remote in to.
It sucks man, I feel you. There are a lot of free options out there you might want to check out!
I'm not experienced in this field but prosonus is working on a Linux version of their studio one app. I think they are trying to make VST extensions work at least on their software.
I'm probably not the best person to answer that question but maybe it helps. Most proprietary stuff is typically designed for Ubuntu or redhat so Ubuntu based or fedora is probably your best bet.
It always amazes me to see an actively supported native Linux game. I've only tried native AAA games and the support for Linux is typically abysmal. I think hollow knight is the only one that worked flawlessly out of the box, I didn't even realize proton wasn't enabled.
Hey, I've been a Linux gamer for many, many years, and before Steam Deck it was exclusively on nVidia hardware (mostly because I also wanted CUDA cores for Blender).
It's amazing how fast we got here though isn't it. There were a ton of talented people, most of them working without pay just to make it happen.
I love the sense of community from something like that even if all I could do is be a beta tester, request potential improvements, and donate to my favorite projects.
I do like that saying a little better. Most people are just trying to help and yeah, any amount of help is appreciated.
Some people could try a little harder to understand that we all started out knowing nothing and we all need a little help from time to time. It's awesome to see so many people trying to be understanding here though.
The thing is, not all answers are satisfactory, or easy without further information. That said, learning is a journey, and if you don't get stupid answers once in awhile, you're not asking enough questions.
I think a lot of people get caught in non existing platforms wars. I've always believed in using the right tools for the job and always encouraged people to try everything. If you don't keep using this software or that os, your very likely to learn what you like and bring it with you.
And to be honest I'm just tired of companies being shitty towards their customers and it's honestly fun to see people discover Linux.
Both my PCs have nvidia cards, a 3080ti and a 970, and not run just fine with games and Linux. I dont quite understand the hate for nvidia cards. AMD cards must poop glitter or something too.
That's understandable but its still inaccurate to say that those with Nvidia cards will have trouble with Linux. I understand people have biases but that's not a helpful one.
Maybe I wasn't clear, I'm an Nvidia user too. I got on at the ground floor of Nvidia just beginning to support Wayland and it was rough. To be honest my desktop would straight up refuse to boot most distro installers, hints why my first real experience with Linux was archlinux.
I understand X11 is perfectly usable but I just didn't want to use a system with constant screen tearing, I also just ran into weird issues with x11 when it came to running anything more than basic apps. It's always fun when your screen locks but can't capture inputs because you had a game running.
Probably the biggest reason I champion Wayland and I'm very excited for the upcoming explicit sync driver update. When wayland reaches maturity we'll have a smooth experience on par with windows or Macos and more secure/private than both.
It still happens more than it should. It took me 4 tries to get the nVidia driver to take on my "gaming" laptop with Fedora 40, (it wouldn't accept the public keys for some reason). And I had to wait for some updates that took 2 weeks to show up. But, the onboard Intel chipset ran Nouveau just fine with no waiting and tinkering. I think people are still having some issues with nVidea and Wayland yet. I know I still have some minor ghosting issues with a couple of AppImages I really need to use that would prefer straight X11 over X-Wayland.
Now that didn't bother me because I've been using various distros since buying my first boxed set CDs with RedHat 5 from Walmart of all places for $25US. (I still suffer from PTSD thanks to rpm hell). But I can see how a stumbling block like that can turn newcomers to Linux distros off.
You will have terrible with nvidia, if you choose a the wrong distro and you are not knowing about vulcan and mesa drivers and that there are lib32 versions of those needed for steam if steam is not installed as flatpak (I not recommend that, because you have to give it access to mounted iso/disks and maybe other stuff using flatseal) , I guess.
This is the nicest way someone's put it. I've tried to switch to Linux three or four times but until there is a distro that makes it plug and play like Windows or mac its going to be a tough sell. I consider myself tech savvy enough (I can google things, and for goodness sake at the bare minimum I can cut and paste into the terminal) but the barrier for getting Linux to work is too high right now for a very large part of the population.
I have W10 computer running the arrs and my plex server that I'm going to have to figure out as I can't get W11 on it.
I want to do it so bad!.... but I think I'll probably just end up getting a new, used computer that can run W11
Also stuck on Windows but for specific software (Adobe & Revit). Zorin has looked like a promising distro for a little while now, at least coming from Windows.
Even if something like proxmox or a Debian install with docker is more customizable. It's a steep learning curve.
But isn't something like truenas scale a option? I run Emby(as my media Server) and the arr's on it. All the apps are already in the "software store" including plex. And setup of the arr's is just the same as normal. All installs are basically automatic.
I easy passthrough my intel gpu in the config page on the webportaal, but don't how easy it is for Nvidia or amd. Especially with Nvidia due to drivers. But maybe someone here knows?
the barrier for getting Linux to work is too high right now for a very large part of the population
My elderly (late 80s) parents have Windows on their laptops and it would be impossible for them to use it without my regular intervention. I might as well take the plunge and set them up with Linux.
My mother asked me to switch her over and she loves it. I love it too because she isn't always asking me for help all the time. I was playing around with windows games on Linux and while I was testing her game because it was fast to download, she was impressed and she wanted to switch right there.
I don't remember when it started but every other update to windows home popped up an advertisement for the Microsoft account (she had a local account) and an advertisement for office 365. She would literally call me every time it popped up saying it looked important so she didn't touch it. Libre office is close enough to excel that all the time I spent teaching her Excel didn't go to waist and I could finally cancel my office 365 subscription.
I'm thinking of recommending it to my aunt because her PC is slow and won't be supported by windows 11. If she's interested I'll let her play with it on an old laptop for a while before verifying she wants to switch over. The same thing I did with my mother.
Isn‘t it very easy to spin up a Debian with Docker installed and just pull those Docker container yml files straight from freedesktop.org using docker compose? (Portainer would be a webGUI for the containers)
Good luck! 😉 I think there is nearly no server task where windows is more easy than Linux 🤔 well, except proprietary ActiveDirectory/EntraID, of course.
I literally just went through an entire mental exercise of what do I “need” to run, and got stuck hard with my audio interface and DAW software. Cubase (by Steinberg) and IK Multimedia just do not provide support at all.
I use ardour as DAW, but only for recording on Linux. It's also available for macOS and windows. So you can check if it fits your work flow.
I mostly only use Linux, but sometimes you just need a program with out support. In my case it's sometimes qlab, Linux show player is great(and I have used it for many shows). But it's not feature compatibel with qlab
Reaper is Linux friendly and free for 60 days, I would give it a try. It's free after the 60 days but will prompt you to pay. The audio interface, I'm not to sure about, I personally do not run Linux.
It definitely helps you become a lot more independent as a Linux user. The tools you learn when you troubleshoot things are incredibly universal. Tools on Linux are intentionally designed to be intuitive and informative which is quite refreshing to obtuse tools like regedit.
Well you see, they put it in page 69 of their EULA that got updated last week that they emailed directly to your spam folder. Since you didn't opt out of that clause my sending a registered letter to their offices in Uganda, Japan, Washington, and Ukraine, it is considered that you agreed to the EULA.
I don't want a dumb phone. I want a circa 2014 smart phone that is not expected to replace my laptop and serve as a constant data stream for corporations. I want to be able to visit a website on my phone and not have it try to get me to download an app, be ads on 70% of the screen, or just be unreadable formatting. Let me call, text, do a basic online search, play a stupid flash game, and take my money. Stop being greedy and trying to make everything I do monetizable
Is fair phone (review) that? Its camera and battery are sub-par for the money, but it says that it makes up for it in many ways, like longevity and ability to swap out components that in other phones can mean almost getting a new one. It sounds kinda perfect for my use case but I've never owned one so can't be positive. When my current phone dies, this is something I'll heavily look into.
Personally I'm very happy with my fairphone. Knowing I can replace parts when they break is nice. And idgaf about camera as long as it can take a halfway decent picture, so a phone that skimps on camera for less cost is a win in my book
That is literally the top feature I am looking for: skimp heavily rather than go all out on the camera, so basically the exact opposite of a Pixel. Whatever amount I pay for a phone - $100-$500 - I want the camera to be perhaps 20% of the price, not well over half as tends to be the case these days. OnePlus especially the "flagship killers" used to be the most similar to that (or at least you didn't pay the Premium for Pixel while getting significantly lesser specs), but after their cofounder left when they enshittified I simply don't trust the company to ever purchase anything from them again.
I have a Fairphone 5 and it's... ok. It's definitely overpriced for its specs but you can't really expect a cheap phone while cutting down on slave labour at the same time. It's also quite buggy. Not unusably so, but coming from a Galaxy S9 (yes, Samsung bad, that's why I switched), it's a bit jarring. For example, sometimes I'll pull it out of my pocket and it's mysteriously off. I turn it back on and there doesn't appear to be a reason for it and it works fine. A few times I've had the battery drain insanely fast for some reason, despite the phone reporting no apps having high battery usage. Some apps also have issues on occasion, Discord for example tends to get stuck in the gallery view after you send a picture and it doesn't allow you to open the keyboard again. It's also missing some minor, but neat things, like the ability to snooze alarms by turning over the phone (Edit: tbh that's probably a stock Android thing and not really fair to hold against the phone, but I still miss it) and the fingerprint reader is nowhere near as reliable as the one in my old phone.
The vast majority of the time it works just fine and if you don't expect the polish you'll get out of a Samsung flagship, you'll probably be ok with it. But you are very much paying a premium for the sustainability and repairability, not the overall experience. I don't regret supporting Fairphone, vote with your wallet and all that, but I definitely recognise the device itself has issues and when looked at purely on specs and software quality, it isn't really worth the money.
I can't comment on fairphone, but the Discord thing is likely not your phone, it's Discord or something. The same happens to me randomly on a Pixel 6a.
As a fellow FP5 user, I haven't come across the issues you've mentioned - that said, I did install /e/os pretty much immediately, so perhaps that's why.
Thank you so much for sharing your experiences - that should definitely help people!:-)
I wonder if they perhaps have some QA issues, so you got a lemon, or maybe the design itself is just that bad. You wouldn't necessarily know, I'm just musing out loud!:-P
One thing I do want to ask if you don't mind - b/c I don't know how to interpret the specs and I no longer trust paid reviewers - is how smooth does it handle? Like, noticeable lags or no? If it is basically a cheapie smartphone for a sub-flagship price, I might even be okay with that but wanted to know before getting into it.
Keep in mind that my basis for comparison is a Galaxy S9. The Fairphone feels smoother and more responsive most of the time, but you do occasionally get freezes and lag spikes, mostly when you try to minimise an app that is currently loading something from my experience. Particularly heavy websites also slow it down sometimes, but pretty rarely.
And I wouldn't really call the design "that bad", I was listing off my issues with it, so it might have come across that way, but the majority of the time it works completely fine.
So on a scale of 1-5, responsiveness might be a 4?
About the design, I mean like a poorly-placed power button that is easily triggered (and then whatever confirmation procedure is in place can be performed by your pocket), or the sudden drainage of battery issue could be something about poor Quality Assurance when they pick batteries at the factory to put into the devices prior to shipping them out. Or worse, you could replace the battery and that effect could still happen!?
I had a Nexus 5 that would dial things, like even emergency #s (fortunately I don't think it would actually do the call, just dial the numbers) while in my pocket - it may have had something to do with turning the screen on while a headphone jack was plugged into it. I replaced the OS for other reasons and that happened to solve that issue as well:-). So I would not turn a phone away for such a thing, especially if there is a software/configuration fix.
But responsiveness is as much due to hardware as software - e.g. if Firefox runs slow b/c it was compiled for and websites (even mobile) designed for higher-end specs.
Yeah, I'd say 4 is about right. And the power button is a bit recessed (it doubles as the fingerprint reader), so it's really hard to press it accidentally. I genuinely have no idea how it could randomly turn off in my pocket. As for the battery, I'm pretty confident it's a software issue. It's only happened twice in the 4 months I've owned the phone and a restart fixed it both times.
Thanks for the additional feedback!:-) That does greatly reassure me.
Since you said the phone would come right back on immediately thereafter, it sounds to me like it does not seem connected to the battery issue.
Unless the battery issue wasn't "really" a discharge but the sensor somehow being tricked into thinking that the battery was dying - in which case the phone likely shut down gracefully rather than risk a brown-out situation, but then when you powered it up later it realizes once again that it has battery.
But in a more normal scenario, if you have either tap-to-wake or if hitting the power button results in a screen prompt confirmation that does not require a fingerprint or PIN, and especially if you were walking or cycling or some such, then the screen likely rubbed up against your pocket lining and managed to cause the proper combination of actions to shut it off. It could not start up an app that way - that would need your login - but turning a device off usually requires lesser security.
Fortunately the latter may be possible to fix with a configuration setting or other software fix:-).
Hmm, I do have tap to wake and that is giving me an idea. You can pull down the status bar while the phone is locked and in the bottom right corner there's a power button. So theoretically my leg can double tap the screen, pull down the status bar, tap the power button and confirm. Feels like a bit of a stretch but who knows. I've never had it randomly turn off while I was using it or while sitting on my desk after all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's likely it. Weirdly, turning off that feature may not make all that much of a difference, bc it's so incredibly rare, but if you don't need it - like a long press of the power button would do just as well, in the also rare event that you want to turn it off at all - then disabling that feature would give you peace of mind.
Either way, I'm glad I could help by giving you the idea of how to (maybe) fix it!:-)
The frequency of this issue happening probably varies per person like depending on pockets and usage patterns and such. Like nowadays when I go cycling I either put the phone into an attachment on the front of the bike, or after that broke I put it in my backpack, and either way it never randomly turned off. And in my old Nexus where the issue did happen, the headphone jack working to pull the phone up more than it would have done all on its own probably contributed. i.e., for some people it will never be a problem with their patterns, but if it is for you, then presuming that's it, disabling that power-off feature (if you can) should make you much more satisfied!:-)
Dumb phones don’t help you for tickets, boarding passes, tap to pay, etc. those things require strong security, not the latest tech. I’ve got a few teenage kids and even for them it’s not very practical to exist without a smartphone.
With Firefox and unlock origin it'll remove all the cruft from websites, and you can degoogle your phone, making it more private than it was in 2014 (unless you install apps that don't respect your privacy)
I mean these kinds of "AI companions" are grifts anyway. They won't take off because they are a solution looking for a problem. They aren't as affordable as the entry level HomePod/Amazon Pod/Google Home units, so they can't be bought as a "why not, and it's a speaker anyway" type thing. They don't have any secondary functionality you don't already have in your phone.
And if that's not enough, you can bet your cute arse on that Apple and Google are both working on bringing LLM functions into their assistants, basically making these units obsolete.
The moment that these companies decide that they can't afford to pay for servers and API subscriptions anymore, the service will die and you'll end up with a colourful brick. Don't buy these things, they're unfinished and will die within a year or two.
The ultimate issue is exactly what you said; phones exist. I’m not carrying another voice assistant around when both Siri and Google Assistant can be installed on my phone.
Based on MKBHD’s review this whole product category definitely screams “solution in search of a problem”
Rabbit has a SIM slot. I think the idea is that once its software gets better, it will be able to be a replacement for a phone for people who just want to quickly do simple things. Its battery seems to be pretty rubbish, though, and for now, the software is not nearly good enough.
But you can literally buy a cheap android phone for less than this device that does everything it does (and might do some day), maybe even better. Why buy a strange and unfamiliar form factor, when most people are comfortable with a smartphone already? They can just choose not to interact with anything other than the assistant if they really want to, and still be better off.
I agree, fairly gimmicky, but I do like the idea of being able to press a single button to ask a quick question. I like my meta glasses for the same reason, but they need some improvement, and quite frankly, I'd like them a whole lot more if they were from someone other than meta. Also, I like the smallest of it. If I could get away with carrying just a tiny box, sometimes I'd do that. The software on it needs to get much better, so hopefully, they stick with it.
On Pixel (but probably also other phones) you can press and hold the power button to summon the assistant. Put chatgpt or whatever as your assistant and you have a rabbit equivalent with one button summon.
Great point! Here are samsung instructions for this.
Download chatgpt from play store (ensure its by open ai and not a scam app). Set it up and make sure you have access to the voice feature
Download good lock from galaxy store (NOT play store)
In the good lock app, In the "life up" section, download the "RegiStar" module.
Open the RegiStar module and click the "side key press and hold action" setting. Turn it on
In the options underneath, choose "open app". Then scroll to the chat gpt app in the list, and click the setting icon next to the name. Then click "voice".
Now you should be able to long press the side button to directly access the chatgpt voice assistant.
The rabbit is also just an android apk. You could literally install the rabbit on a cheap phone if you'd like. It's beyond useless.
What someone needs to do is put something similar into something all cutesy like a Furby, and sell it for kids. Just a $100 wifi only PG rated thing that can do some fun stuff. It wouldn't change the world, but it could run a few years of actual profiting and not feel like a rip-off.
Like, I can imagine a world where a smart watch replaces my phone for day to day stuff, but that's because I'm in that weird space where I prefer a laptop for almost anything serious, but still appreciate the convenience and functionality of remaining connected wherever I am, even if I'm on the move.
But another device I need to keep in my pocket? What's the point?
Yeah, build this into a watch or Earbud that I already have on person for other reasons but gives me hands free access to a decent AI when I don't have my phone on me, and I might have some interest.
That wouldn't surprise me. I think there's a Siri shortcut for integrating with ChatGPT. It's not the most elegant of solutions but it works well enough.
I'm quite sure that this year we'll see whatever Google and Apple has cooked up in terms of machine learning integration into the operating systems. Likely a flagship feature of the new Pixel phones, and definitely a significant Siri update on iPhone, probably along with some gimmicky feature to sell the new 16 Pros.
At that point, who is going to care about these devices?
In addition to being able to run the exact same thing on that phone you already have, too.
Their device does not have any specific hardware for their usage. Even if Google and Apple don't bring any improvement to their own solution, soon enough someone is bound to just provide an "assistant AI app" with a subscription, proxying openai requests and using the touchscreen, camera, micro and speaker that are already there instead of making you buy a new set of those.
Yes, there is. And yes, it would be huge. I know a lot of people that are staying away from all this as long as the privacy issues are not resolved (there are other issues, but at this point, the cat is out of the bag).
But running large models locally requires a ton of resource. It may become a reality in the future, but in the meantime allowing more, smaller provider to provide a service (and a self-hosted option, for corporation/enthusiasts) is way better in term of resources usage. And it's already a thing; what needs work now is improving UI and integrations.
In fact, very far from the "impressive" world of generated text and pictures, using LLM and integrations (or whatever it is called) to create a sort of documentation index that you can query with natural language is a very interesting tool that can be useful for a lot of people, both individual and in corporate environment. And some projects are already looking that way.
I'm not holding my breath for portable, good, customized large models (if only for the economics of energy consumption) but moving away from "everything goes to a third party service provider" is a great goal.
In the early days of laser development, it was seen as a solution seeking a problem. A few decades later, it actually turned out to be really handy, but it would have been tough to sell this idea to anyone before that. Imagine how hard it is to find funding for research that solves a problem that doesn’t exist.
They're a solution looking to solve a problem that already has a well established better solution.
The modern smart phone and voice assistats have been around for 14+ years....
For all these Ai devices can currently accomplish, our budget $200 phones can do an unmeasurable amount more.
If anyrhing, they should be focusing on the voice assistant aspect - "Hey google, add nearest gas station to my trip" "Here's a list of gas stations (I know you're driving but please review this list and select one using the tiny select button)" {presses button} "Please enable location data analytics to continue"
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