Instead of regulating people, how about we regulate big tech and their predatory business practices instead.

It’s not the cameras that are tracking you, it’s the machine vision that reads licence plates, and that has not been around longer than you’ve been alive.

All these loops can detect is if a massive chunk of metal moves over them, no PII. Knowing how many cars use a road is critical in knowing if a road is congested or not, and that helps make roads better for everyone. It’s not part of the surveillance machine. This kind of sensor is no more nefarious than the 100 year old sensor in your toilet that stops filling the tank when it is full.

Take your tinfoil hat off.

LLMs have no opinions. They are merely mathematical models that predict how an average person (mostly Internet people) might respond plus a little bit of invisible priming baked in to steer the behaviour a little (which is also easy to change yourself).

A lot of these chatbots, notoriously chatgpt, are heavily primed to pander to the user.

A hobby is pretty much anything you do other than what you do for your own or someone else’s sustenance. Getting paid to barbecue for customers paying you? Not a hobby. Grilling some burgers at dinner time because you or your family are hungry? Not a hobby. Spending hours and weekends on end slow cooking a particularly challenging piece of meat? Hobby. Eating an expensive piece of meat (as a treat)? Also a hobby.

Remember clipart and wordart? It was colourful and flashy and easy, and everywhere in PowerPoint presentations and word documents and even online. For a few years. Then it vanished.

Turns out, easy and flashy doesn’t have a lot of staying power because when something is easy, it is ubiquitous, and when it is ubiquitous it stops being impressive.

AI slop is easy and flashy, and will probably run its course as people become tired of it.

There will still exist AI content, but it will not resemble the slop we see today.

Depending on where you are in the world, and how much of this is coming out of pocket, this is either really good or pretty bad.

The left-right linear political spectrum is a simplified fiction. I think it is a waste of time to try to fit people on this spectrum.

If my laptop is offline can I just not use it because it can’t confirm my id?

Yes. The powers at be will stop at nothing to take more, and more, and more power away from you. This is human nature.

Do nothing about school shootings. Destroy hobbies and manufacturing instead. America is rotting from the inside.

There are two ways to make a game that leads the industry in a genre: invent a new genre, or be the preeminent example of the genre. The GTA franchise has a reputation of consistently being in the latter category.

I’d rather these jobs be automated than the ones AI is gunning for.

I guess it depends what you run, and how the projects/containers are configured to handle updates and “breaking changes” in particular.

But also, I’m being a bit broad with the term “breaking changes”. Other kinds of “breaking changes” that aren’t strictly crashing the software, but that still cause work include projects that demand a manual database migration before being operational, a config change, or just a UI change that will confuse a user.

The point is, a lot of projects demand user attention which completely eclipses the effort required to execute a docker update.

Are you updating 1000’s of stacks every week? I update a couple critical things maybe once a month, and the other stuff maybe twice a year.

I don’t recommend auto updates, because updates break things and dealing with that is a lot of work.

Documentation is for onboarding other people. Why on earth would I need to onboard other people to something self-hosted?

Star Field is a great example of a game that has amazing, immersive visuals, but the crappiest gameplay imaginable. All style, no substance. In the end it makes for an overall still crappy experience.

I can’t think of a more fitting title to showcase this AI tech.

How is the average person going to know that? If Joe blow can’t easily get to the distro they “should be using”, Linux ain’t happening for most people.

I enjoyed the depth of this answer. That being said…

4 copies seems like a level of paranoia that is not practical for the average consumer.

3 is what I use, and I consider that an already more advanced use case.

2 is probably most practical for the average person.

Why do I say this? The cost of the backup solution needs to be less than the value of the data itself x the effort to recover the incrementally missing data x the value of your time x the chance of failure.

In my experience, very few people have data that is so valuable that they need such a very thorough backup solution. Honestly, a 2$ thumb drive can contain most of the data the average user would actually miss and can’t easily find again scouring online.

While you are not wrong about these different specialities within the trade, there can still be an effect. Let me illustrate:

Suppose you like bananas but not apples. One day there is an apple disease that kills most of the apple trees leading to a collapse of the apple market. You feel relieved because you don’t eat bananas anyways. But you go to the supermarket and find that not only are the apple shelves empty, the banana shelves are empty too! Why? Well people still gotta eat, and not everyone is as picky as you, they switched to bananas and now the banana market is under supplied too. And it’s not like you can build a banana farm overnight.

Back to electricians, if the salaries of data center electricians increases rapidly, you will find that those electricians who are qualified for both (even if it is just a very small number) might focus on data centres, straining the supply of residential electricians. Just like with banana orchards, it takes time for new electricians to enter the market, and those new hires will further be swayed to the data center specialty first, further straining the residential market.

We can see a real example of this with the price of RAM. RAM manufacturers saw increased demand for data centre RAM so they switched focus to that market and it ended up drying out the consumer side supply, hence the surge in price. And just as with banana plantations and electricians, you can’t start up a RAM fab overnight.

Ding ding ding. If they had made changes to improve the game, they would be advertising those changes. No rational company invests time and money into improving a product without capitalizing on those changes. Best case scenario, nothing noticable changes, worst case scenario, they have added anti-consumer features, like drm, game store/3rd party launchers, sign-in, telemetry, ads, and other crap.

You don’t need the latest Nvidea GPU to self host your own computing. You don’t even need ssds. You arguably don’t even need that much RAM. A ten year old Dell work fine. Are you self hosting your own AI? Probably not. So what? AI is not mature enough that it is a necessity.

Are computing prices coming down? Unlikely before the AI bubble pops. I think we have taken for granted that computing will perpetually improve price/performance. This is not sustainable.