OK, except the post indicate building a new garage to get rid of the unused car.
Kind of overkill IMO.

Being mindless about anything has pretty similar results, I don’t see the point of this?
Forget you have a car parked in your garage and it will get dirty over time.
Maybe not the best analogy, but if you don’t give a shit, things tend to fall apart.

Are you saying you don’t know when you install additional packages?
How does that work?

This doesn’t make sense to me.
If you install features over time, it’s because you want to use them, if you want to use them, it’s not bloat.
If it’s to try it, and it’s not for you, why not just remove the package again?

I can’t say for others, but my system definitely does not get bloated over time.
On the contrary, I remove preinstalled features I don’t use, when I get tired of seeing them updating.

they are definitely not doing everything they can to increase their conversion rate.

Oh you mean like prompting users to buy extra services all the time?
Yes they are actually doing exactly that.

Of course I do, but ChatGPT still has a free option. And the basis to compare paid subscriptions when there is also a free option stand IMO.
Without a good free option, how would it be only 5% who pay? It’s exactly the same as with Youtube in that regard.

The free option is a form of advertising and allowing people to get to know the service. With Youtube the free option isn’t really free, you pay by allowing advertising.
So by that comparison Youtube is actually the worse free option of the two. And despite that more people pay for ChatGPT.
So your argument that they are not the same, actually makes ChatGPT numbers even more impressive not less.

Paying gives advantages on youtube, just the same as ChatGPT.

That’s a weird editorializing of the headline, for an article that describes wide spread use, and a market of rapidly growing value.

For instance a sentence like these:

This is no longer experimentation; it’s habit formation at an unprecedented scale.

This rapid adoption drives real dollars: In the two and a half years since OpenAI’s ChatGPT introduced the public to generative AI, consumer AI has become a multibillion-dollar market.

One of the most surprising findings? Parents are among the most engaged AI users, turning to AI for everyday help.

Even ChatGPT, with its first-mover advantage, only converts about 5% of its weekly active users into paying subscribers

Considering there’s a pretty strong free option, 5% is not bad.
How many pay for using Youtube? IDK but my guess is that it is way less than 5%.
How many pay for using search? My bet is that we are in the thousandth on that. Yet search is profitable!

State subsidies and a huge protected home market.
But to be fair, they really made the most of it. So absolutely also talent.

The article says Mac sales are declining too.
Apparently most of the decline is people that are simply ditching their PC because they don’t need it anymore.

But we’re pre-dating the common distro hopping discussions

No we aren’t, Linux fora were full of them even before Ubuntu more than 20 years ago. Debian, Suse, Fedora, Mandrake, Mepis, PCLinux.
Distro hopping was always a thing people debated.

The rest of that sentence is a bit confusing, who are we? And how am I supposed to read minds? And going back was kind of where we started, because you claimed it was a new thing for Debian. Debian was definitely recommended to general users, for many good reasons. Stability and huge repository among them, but also user friendly install procedure, and good package manager, that handled dependencies way better than Suse and Fedora.

I think this points to the idea that knowing why an answer is correct is important.

If by knowing you mean understanding, that’s consciousness like General AI or Strong AI, way beyond ordinary AI.
Otherwise of course it knows, in the sense of having learned everything by heart, but not understanding it.

Debian was never talked about as a serious contender in distro hopping

Back in 2005 when Ubuntu was all the rage, the first alternative to Ubuntu was almost always Debian. Only later when Mint became a thing, that was also an obvious alternative, because it was similarly focused on being easy to use.

Good summary. 👍

Debian. I do see Debian mentioned now a lot more than it has been in years.

I haven’t noticed much difference, Debian has always been the go to distro if you wanted reliability and repositories that cover almost everything. Debian has always been an excellent choice for productivity. It’s not by accident that Debian for more than 20 years has been the distro with by far the most derivatives.

By that standard Arch is the only distro that has achieved something similar, and it may be somewhat telling that SteamOS switched from Debian based to Arch based. Arch is way smaller in scope, and more nimble and easier to maintain. But AFAIK they do not have the democratic process Debian has, so I’m not sure it can really be called community based distro like Debian. Arch has more of a top leadership.
Debian is probably the most true to the Free and Open Source ideals among the big distros.

it doesn’t know or understand

But that’s not what intelligence is, that’s what consciousness is.
Intelligence is not understanding shit, it’s the ability to for instance solve a problem, so a frigging calculator has a tiny degree of intelligence, but not enough for us to call it AI.
There is simply zero doubt an AI is intelligent, claiming otherwise just shows people don’t know the difference between intelligence and consciousness.

Passing an exam is a form of intelligence.
Can a good AI pass a basic exam?
YES.
Does passing an exam require consciousness?
NO.
Because an exam tests abilities of intelligence, not level of consciousness.

it can only guess at the next statistically most likely piece of information based on the data that has been fed into it. That’s not intelligence.

Except we do the exact same thing! Based on prior experience (learning) we choose what we find to be the most likely answer. And that is indeed intelligence.

Current AI does not have the reasoning abilities we have yet, but they are not completely without it, and it’s a subject that is currently worked on and improved. So current AI is actually a pretty high form of intelligence. And can sometimes out compete average humans in certain areas.

That headline is a straw man, and the article really argues on General AI, which also has consciousness.
The current state of AI is definitely intelligent, but it’s not GAI.
Bullshit headline.

The Danish government said on Thursday it would strengthen protection against digital imitations of people’s identities

Good call. 👍

So Iran knew EXACTLY how strong they needed to make their defenses!
Pretty stupid of the American military to give that info to a game developer, that would obviously use it.

But the information still seems valid.

From this article it sounds very likely that the bunker buster attack failed.