Everything to do with living as a person in a larger community, part of which is using technology.

puts a bunch of AI features in, turns them on by default without user’s asking for them, mandates employees use it when ever they can.

“How could this be a bubble? Look at all the demand!”

Sounds interesting, but, I do worry, if such a system were to get any sort of significant adoption, it would create a financial incentives for projects to do questionable things.

Like, even the best intentioned dev would have a very strong incentive to intentionally make their software run in the background in a way that made it look like it was being used. And if a lot of projects did that, then, suddenly there is a bunch of always on stuff eating up system resources.

There is also potential complications around one project pressuring or paying off others to do stuff that gets them more run time. Like say, pressuring a distro or desktop to include their project as a default that turns on when ever the system starts. Or simply include their project as the default even if it’s not well suited to the task.

The incentives created by the system for devs and projects would need to be considered in aggregate, like what down steam outcomes could be created for the entire software ecosystem.

KDE is avalible for most distros. It being just a desktop environment. It’s well supported on Fedora, openSUSE, Debian and Arch. As well as many of the various distros based on those. Ubuntu, a Debian derivative, and fedora both have a version that installs with KDE out of the box, and the arch install script has it as one of the main options. You could also install it on mint, but, like, half the point of mint is the cinnamon desktop.

If you’re interested in customizability, are willing to read some wiki pages, and never want to wait for support for some new feature, arch is great.

If you want a system that’s incredibly stable, will run on basically any computer made after 1995, and is generally just very reliable. Debian can’t be beat.

Fedora and Ubuntu are both fairly easy to use, new versions are released fairly often. If you don’t want to think much about it, they’re good options.

As for game compatibility, most will work without any effort, some stuff will need a bit of puttzing with settings. The only situations where you may need a VM or duel boot would be certain competitive multiplayer games that specifically use kernel level anti cheat. If you play one of those, check it on ProtonDB . Notionally Proton DB is for the steam deck and steam games run through proton, but generally what’s on there also applies to any other game run through wine.

You shouldn’t need to replace any hardware. If you have an Nvidia graphics card you will need to install the drivers as they don’t come with the kernel, but it will run just fine. I’ve heard of some issues regarding specific brands of headphones, and I had to fuss a bit to get my microphone and it’s audio interfacing working.

Adobe products, a lot of popular music production software and a few popular CAD programs will have issues. Most of them can be run on Linux, but they don’t like it, and finding an alternative would be better.

That’s “Werwolf the Apocalypse” plot line if I ever saw one.

Newsome keeps trying to reach out to younger voters, but it’s always in such… performative ways. It’s never him listening or signaling he concurs on issues they care about.

It always feel like an effort to inform them that he exists, become a familiar figure, as if the issue that Democratic candidates have been having was lack of visibility.

But the issue is a misalignment of values and goals, not that people haven’t seen them get interviewed on a popular platform. Visibility will rise on new media as they adopt talking points and positions that align with the bases values, just forcing them selves in to these places without changing their stances is going to just make them a laughing stock.

He put out a video a few weeks back basically endorsing Mamdani.

That’s a super interesting read, like, there have been a few services I used that were inexplicably awful in the exact ways described and I was bewildered by how bad it was.

As has been made very clear, it is not actually possible to prevent these models from regurgitating any information they’ve been trained on, no matter how fancy the system prompt. So, if there is NSFW content In the training data, users will always be able to access it, not matter how “compliant” the company is with restrictions on NSWF content by way of system prompts.

They can have their cake and eat it to, many users will prefer the models because of their ability to do porn stuff, and they will not be held legally liable for that since they’ve done everything they possible could.

So long as no one proves that they did in fact intentionally train the models on a shit ton of porn …

I think some department or team lead was told by higher ups that they needed to “implement AI” and are just trying to find places to shove it so they can tell the boss they hit the metrics.

The reason they turn stuff like this on by default without asking creators or users is probably because previous things that were implemented and made optional all got turned off and not used, meaning it didn’t help the department or team hit their metrics for usage of the systems.

this guy was able to make a silicon chip with 1200 transistors on it in a garage, far from a modern CPU, but spitting distance from the 3500 transistors of the intel 8008 CPU. Projects in flight also has a series working on DIY semi conductor fabrication he’s not quite to the stage of fabricating a full chip, but he’s covered a lot of the more difficult parts already. And this is all stuff being done as hobby projects.

Something like an early pentium chip like the P5 would not be a particularly difficult task for a well resourced team. The questions are how much could they rely on the currently available off the shelf supplies and tools and how much do they need to scale production.

GE makes the engines, Boeing makes the Airframe.

It’s so fucking funny to me to see governments unwilling to do anything positive to support their constituents constantly stumbling in to this same kind of law. Like, governments that want more control over their citizens but are completely unwilling to offer them any additional benefits in exchange for that control.

So instead they frame it as “protecting the children” because who’s ever gonna object to that? But nah, it’s about actually being able to enforce other moral panic laws and forcing more information in to the hands of servaliance capitalism.

Balatro.

It is a mechanically very dense game. There is a lot of depth and complexity to its gameplay. I get why a lot of people enjoy that. But I just kind of bounce off that, I need something to motivate me to engage with game mechanics. I need a story, or like, some kind of theming that I can project a goal on to. Poker but weird just doesn’t do it for me.

Like I adore paradox games, but I can project a broad world buildy-esq self built narrative and goals on to that, even when the mechanics are as broad as an ocean but as deep as a puddle.

Consider, that, much of the dialog is the internal voices of the main character, and that he does in fact have his head firmly lodged in his own rectum.

I’m shocked! Shocked I tell you!

… well not that shocked actually.

You’d probably be fine using mint.

Like, if you’re using an Nvidia graphics card you’d want to use mint’s built in driver manger GUI (don’t need to even use the command line) to make sure you have the best driver. If you have AMD graphics (ether iGPU or dedicated GPU) you don’t even have to do that. The main thing that Bazzite does is have the right Nvidia graphics drivers out of the box.

The main difference between the two is the package manager, the thing that downloads programs and makes sure they have all the dependencies they need to run. Bazzite is fedora derived so it uses DNF instead of the Debian derived APT for package management. Frankly the differences between the two are not really material.

Ether way, Lutris will get windows versions of games running as well as steam does, and any game can be added to Lutris regardless of how you got it, if not from one of the major store fronts you just have point Lutris to the files.

I switched over about… I suppose 2 and a half years ago now? Honestly it’s been a lot easier to use. Like it’s kind of shocking to me that people will act like windows is cohesive and better put together. Every time I interact with it these days, the more it looks like a taped together ball of junk crusted over with 30 years of repainting.

Like the fact that with windows I had to go to three separate settings programs to find the right toggle, that every program has a dedicated installer and its own path for updates. That there are just default always on programs running in the background eating up a 1/4 of the ram and two of my CPU cores for no damn reason. That a laptop will randomly wake up inside a bag when it should be asleep and run down its battery over 6 hours of trying to connect to an absent WiFi network to run updates.

It has burst in terms of the liquidity of the system, sure the on paper value of the asset hasn’t collapsed, but that’s because the number of people willing to sell has reduced in turn with the number of people willing to buy. Everyone who was going to cash out big time already has, and the people who bought from them are waiting on another order of magnitude increase in value before they cash out, or they intend to hold on to it forever.

They’re dependent on it indirectly. Like, most of the rest of the economic growth that has gone on in recent years has been from the wealthiest 10% of Americans increasing their consumption of various goods, or continuing consumption even as prices rise while wages stay stagnant.

That 10% has felt comfortable spending money due to the value of their assets growing, being able to liquidate some here and there or using them as collateral for loans.

If they lose a significant portion of 1/3rd of their assets in stock, and no other investments are showing rapid growth, they’ll probably pull back on their spending, which will in turn hurt the rest of the market. That won’t be as quick as the panic around “AI” companies, nor as disastrous.

It will be a slow thing, as companies that have moved towards the high margin premium side of the market see sales dry up on their most profitable products.