ngl, sometimes it is. it depends on the game. usually the problem is anti-cheat, but Valve has been working on improving that with many games working out of the box today. i’d say if you’re playing single player games, once you get Proton installed it’s virtually the same experience.

check out https://www.protondb.com/

if your games are gold or above on there, i’d go ahead and pull the trigger.

yeah i have friends who are medical technicians, and i’ve heard some things

right so we should continue making smart investments in cutting edge tech, which is probably the point they were trying to make, even if the wording of it is informed by a pop culture zeitgeist more than an understanding of the tech and ethics that are currently being scrutinized as part of the development of what is called “AI”

i’m definitely not advocating for that. it’s just a bit strange to talk about it like that on a policy level. should the US, as a policy, defund AI research?

why focus on the AI boogeyman? investing in AI is important in this context because it has the potential to increase overall productivity. which, like, don’t we see that as a good thing? also, AI might suck right now, but it’s stupid to think that we should just abandon that research. AI is clearly an innovation, and if you don’t think so it’s time to touch grass.

easily said

i doubt the recent uptick in traffic is from “stealing data” for training but rather from agents scraping them for context, eg Edge Copilot, Google’s AI search, SearchGPT, etc.

poisoning the data will likely not help in this situation since there’s a human on the other side that will just do the same search again given unsatisfactory results. like how retries and timeouts can cause huge outages for web scale companies, poisoning search results will likely cause this type of traffic to increase and further increase the chances of DoS and higher bandwidth usage.

bruh i know people in their 40s making 6 figures that couldn’t read an error message if it would save ten generations of their family.

member when all the big cool web 2.0 companies had public facing APIs?

this is just combining existing data scraping tools with LLMs to create a pretty flimsy and superfluous product. they use the data to do what they say. if they wanted to scrape data on you they can already do that. all they get from this is your interest and maybe some other PII like your email address. the LLM is just incidental here. it’s honestly not even as bad privacy wise as a “hot or not” or personality quiz.

i’ve used Chezmoi for years now pretty successfully. works on my Mac and Linux machines. it probably could be made to work on Windows. i am transitioning to NixOS, but i’ll probably keep using it anyway, since i still have Macs for work (and because they’re great laptops don’t @ me). the only real downside is that it only works for the home folder, so i have to manually control stuff for /etc, but i generally prefer user configuration for most tools anyway.

i had messed around with Ansible for this in the past, but i didn’t really like it for this use case. it’s been a while tho so it’s hard to say why.

not to pile on, but you might also look at GNU Stow. i decided against it, but it’s there.

obligatory i s’pose: https://github.com/covercash2/dotfiles

most Zionists i’ve met are white Protestants, and most Jews i’ve met aren’t Zionists…

ah yeah. maybe less well known, but i had a dev kit from Qualcomm that came with Ubuntu

always? Android runs a linux kernel, and they support all kinds of embedded systems that run Linux.

nushell is excellent for dealing with structured data. it’s also great as a scripting language.

not sure what you mean by expensive. i run language models on my laptop that are pretty good at this type of task. and, yes, these models are infinitely easier and cheaper ultimately than trying to change the human proclivity for attention seeking behavior.

you’ve not seen the type of email chains i get at work. personally i think it should be illegal to respond-all to an email chain with hundreds of people with “Great job team!!! 🎉”. but it would be great to have a LM to read it near instantaneously for me to be like “oh yeah there was a product release and here’s a few relevant metrics”. doesn’t matter if it’s 100% in on every subtle detail, and a decent summary could tell me where or if i even should dig into details.

yeah i see that too. it seems like mostly a reactionary viewpoint. the reaction is understandable to a point since a lot of the “AI” features are half baked and forced on the user. to that point i don’t think GNOME etc should be scrambling to add copies of these features.

what i would love to see is more engagement around additional pieces of software that are supplemental. for example, i would love if i could install a daemon that indexes my notes and allows me to do semantic search. or something similar with my images.

the problems with AI features aren’t within the tech itself but in the surrounding politics. it’s become commonplace for “responsible” AI companies like OpenAI to not even produce papers around their tech (product announcement blogs that are vaguely scientific don’t count), much less source code, weights, and details on training data. and even when Meta releases their weights, they don’t specify their datasets. the rat race to see who can make a decent product with this amazing tech has made the whole industry a bunch of pearl clutching FOMO based tweakers. that sparks a comparison to blockchain, which is fair from the perspective of someone who hasn’t studied the tech or simply hasn’t seen a product that is relevant to them. but even those people will look at something fantastical like ChatGPT as if it’s pedestrian or unimpressive because when i asked it to write an implementation of the HTTP spec in the style of Fetty Wap it didn’t run perfectly the first time.

i guess the rare thing is the public commitment, but Apple has generally had a good track record for updates compared to its Android counterparts, who have previously failed to meet their goals or set laughable goals like 2 years.

this data is not the world

i think most ML researchers are aware that the data isn’t perfect, but, crucially, it exists in a digestible form.