No. The rebellious spirit is what lights the fire. It may take a few tries to follow through, but I respect the rage >=D

We need to come together as a community and encourage every effort. If you really want to see other people stick to it we need to smash any sense of righteousness or gatekeeping to bits.

I’m still not great with Wine myself, but sit down for an afternoon and try out Bottles. https://www.howtogeek.com/running-windows-apps-on-linux-with-bottles/

I’m on Arch and even the wiki just recommends using the Flatpak. It’s pretty obvious once you get the hang of it, each Bottle is just it’s own little, specific Windows configuration. Try running through the example on that site and installing Notepad++ (or something else of your choice) and you’ll probably have an a-ha! moment.

Isn’t it?

The arguments of preference and convenience are falling by the wayside as megacorporations take more and more control over not just your hardware but your behavioral patterns by dictating what you can install and how it functions. They suck up all your personal, private data for AI training without your consent.

I get it, shit sucks. It really does, but we have to remember who is to blame here and it’s not each other. There has to be some urgency here because this is a battle and we, the consumers, the ordinary people, are surely losing. It’s not about being holier than thou, it’s about lifting each other up.

Cyber security effectively doesn’t exist without consequence in capitalism. If there aren’t regulatory fines or monetary damage from breaches, what incentive is there to spend on enforcing anything? When they can’t innovate or compete anymore, they’ll begin cutting at the structural systems to save more money until it’s just a shell of an appearance of security, and maybe not even that. Who will care?

Absolutely boggles my mind that they would even consider this? I can’t imagine the amount raised would come anywhere close to justifying the damage done?

Agreed. I was actually afraid to modify my KDE desktop for months because of the trauma sustained from just trying to customize Gnome a bit. My configuration is still pretty vanilla, but it’s got enough personal flair to it that it feels uniquely mine and I’m the happiest I’ve been.

Aww, I will always love XFCE and save a place for it in my heart … but I moved to Plasma 2 years ago and haven’t really looked back either >_>

It annoys me how much crap people still give Arch because it did honestly deter me from trying it myself when all this time it was exactly the distro for me. A lot of it is the nature of the rolling releases and pacman just feeling more clean and simple then apt and the inevitable Franken-Debian installs I end up with.

The archinstall script makes installation much easier. After that, choosing all my own apps and having to read the wiki and perform minor configurations on them could be seen as tedious when something like Mint is just more out-of-the-box, but it both helped teach me more about Linux so I have a better understanding of how my own system works when things do rarely go astray and it helps me feel like my system is very personalized and my own. Sometimes I still go, “Wait, why don’t I have this very basic thing or why isn’t it working?” And I find out it’s because I didn’t install a necessary package, but then I learn and build

As far as rolling releases, I update daily because I’m a geeky maniac and I have had better stability doing that the past 2 1/2 years than I ever did in Windows. Truly, no lie. Part of that is Microsoft setting a low bar, but also my system is a simpler build. That’s not to say there have been no issues whatsoever, but I wonder at the people making these claims how much they’ve really used Arch.

My point generally being: don’t let the opinion of some Linux snobs deter you. Try Arch, it may very well be your thing, too.

I recently sat down with Baroque, the cult classic dungeon crawler for the Sega Saturn. Very good, top 20 games for me now!

First off, play the Saturn version. You can liberally rebind the controls in an emulator to make them feel a lot more like a modern FPS (d-pad up & down to left analog up/down for forward and backward movement with L & R to left analog left/right for strafing while putting d-pad left & right on right analog left/right for turning. Also rebind attack to R1 or R2 and map to whichever you didn’t bind attack to). Use scanline shaders, something like crt-royale or just hyllian-fast. Under the hood this game is a fairly standard mystery dungeon style roguelike but it’s ALL about the vibes.

The story is opaque but advances simply by doing runs through the dungeon. Make sure to talk to all the NPCs and do what they tell you to/fulfill their requests and you’ll figure it out. The gameplay is simple but the player movement is fast and smooth enough as well as hits having decent enough feedback when connecting with an enemy that it avoids feeling too much like a clunky old game. The weird monsters, gnawing on bones, and using torture devices really sell the atmosphere. A+ soundtrack, IMHO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRXUEH0ijdk&list=PLfhw8A1mg64H1MVWcSPocp6qaaQoiOAJo

TIP: Throw stuff at stuff. Experiment by throwing all the things at all the things. Throwing is a big mechanic in this game, don’t sleep on it. Throw things at sense spheres to teleport them out of the dungeon so you can guarantee them for your next run. Here’s an adorable Neocities fanpage for if you really get stuck, https://nervetower.neocities.org/guide

I’d skip the PS2/Remake, the vibes are all wrong and again, this is just a good game to spend some time with and soak in the bleak world they created. The PS1 version is pretty similar to Saturn but I think honestly the Saturn just nails the atmosphere a bit better.

You’re absolutely right, but there’s a bit more to it than that.

As someone who deployed Windows professionally for years and was a power user at home, let me supply some additional details,

Windows has become business software through and through. It can run fine enough if you go with a basic install and minimal tweaks through only the standard channels (like Group Policy) and this is probably what those people always loudly claiming “well I never have an issue!” are doing and then they’ll accuse you for bringing it on yourself from deviating from this.

But what everyone should understand, especially them, is that this is not how normal people use their computers and it’s utter bullshit that Microsoft continues to restrict people into this box. Most businesses don’t need hardly anything aside from Office and perhaps one or two industry specific applications, an overwhelming number of these being SaaS these days anyways. Normal people on the other hand use a wide variety of software for their businesses and hobbies in a wide array of configurations and what’s more, we enjoy personalizing our experiences on top of it, as we should! This unsurprisingly leads to more instability that Microsoft simply doesn’t want to take responsibility for.

People still complain about not being able to move the taskbar from the bottom of the screen and Microsoft apologists will say, “but it’s such a small thing!” And well, it is and that’s kind of my point; it’s a bellweather. I bet it’s a simple fix, they could do it, they could please people and provide further usability but they just don’t have to. How long has it gone unaddressed now? You want to play Call of Duty, you cretin? Lick our boots! And don’t even get me started on the whole SecureBoot/TPM 2.0 DRM lockdown issue.

I use Arch BTW and here’s my quick pitch for that. It really is a good distro for people of moderate or above skill level. I slowly built it out over time, bolted on each carefully selected piece of software from the repository, reading the wiki and making configurations as I went. In doing so, I gained a better understanding of Linux in general and my system in specific so on the rare occasions something does break, I don’t feel as clueless addressing it. The reason we all start to sound like cult-like zealots after awhile is because we’ve established a personal relationship with our computers; it is my friend again. It’s hard to understate the actual palpable relief that comes from cutting out a bloated, malicious corporation from that chain of trust with a machine we use in our daily lives.

It’s time to end Microsoft. Reach out, be helpful and welcoming in the Linux community. They’re losing balance, they’ve overplayed their hand on 11 and over-invested in AI and while I doubt we’d be lucky enough to be truly rid of them, we can see them suffer some real damage.

This is a good point. I’ve been trying to make it clear in a lot of my predictions that Microsoft doesn’t want or even need full control, just enough. They don’t even need to do anything particular here other than continue to manage github with their current level of incompetence.

Was trying to source an article here, wasn’t there just an outage or some other major issue a few days ago? Anyways …

not only is Windows not very profitable anymore, the real money is at businesses.

Hear me out, this is exactly why they care. Windows as a product isn’t profitable anymore, but as a market share it is. Apple has always enjoyed their locked down ecosystem and Google is trying to completely block side loading on devices we already largely don’t have control over the bootloader. It’s no secret Microsoft has been seething with jealousy for years.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

You’re a soulless corporate ghoul, how do you make those numbers work for you? Why do you think they have the absolute gall to tell you to throw your computer out and get one that supports TPM 2.0? Why do you think there are still so many people willing or not that will swallow that bitter pill that’s Windows 11?

I’m not trying to call you out in particular here or anything, but I think it’s foolish to assume they don’t

Some others have already said the “embrace, extend, extinguish” but here’s my take on it. Pair it with Secure Boot and TPM 2.0

• Embrace: Secure Boot can already work with Linux, how lucky! This gives them not exactly control, but authoritative denial over your boot process and hardware.
• Extend: This is the part that remains to be seen. If they feel threatened enough by the shift in the gaming landscape, mind you not over losing out on sales or the hearts of gamers or anything, but again control, they may begin to make Linux offerings. A concession to allow an honest to god, thick Office client on Linux would certainly appeal to some. Adobe gets in on that action to back them up with Photoshop and Activision with Call of Duty, etc.
• Extinguish: TPM 2.0. One of the less talked about features of this is remote attestation (“Remote attestation allows changes to the user’s computer to be detected by authorized parties. For example, software companies can identify unauthorized changes to software, including users modifying their software to circumvent commercial digital rights restrictions.” - DRM). We’re already seeing this with CoD on Windows. They’ll allow you to run much requested Windows software on Linux, even provide direct support possibly, but at the cost of not precisely control but authoritative denial. Which still works out to be control in most ways since if you want to use the software and they are to remotely attest, they can also insist that part of that attestation is you running some sort of telemetry or not running software they disagree with.

The reason I think this route is highly likely is because it plays well with uninformed consumers. To the untrained eye it looks like they’re giving ground and actually allowing for broader support of their software while effectively gaining control over the environment once again and removing the biggest benefits of running FOSS on your system.

I don’t know why I expected a Zitron-esque lambsating from fortune.com, but reading the article is disappointing,

But for 95% of companies in the dataset, generative AI implementation is falling short. The core issue? Not the quality of the AI models, but the “learning gap” for both tools and organizations. While executives often blame regulation or model performance, MIT’s research points to flawed enterprise integration. Generic tools like ChatGPT excel for individuals because of their flexibility, but they stall in enterprise use since they don’t learn from or adapt to workflows, Challapally explained.

Sure. Let’s blame anything but the AI 🙄

YOU exist. In this universe. Your brain exists. The mechanisms for sentience exist. They are extremely complicated, and complex. Magic and mystic Unknowables do not exist.

I’ll grant you that the possibility exists. But like the idea that all your atoms could perfectly align such that you could run through a solid brick wall, the improbability makes it a moot point.

Therefore, at some point in time, it is a physical possibility for a person (or team of people) to replicate these exact mechanisms.

This is the part I take umbrage with. I agree, LLMs take up too much oxygen in the room, so let’s set them aside and talk about neural networks. They are a connectionist approach which believes that adding enough connections will eventually form a proper model, waking sentience and AI from the machine.

Hinton and Sutskever continued [after their seminal 2012 article on deep learning] to staunchly champion deep learning. Its flaws, they argued, are not inherent to the approach itself. Rather they are the artifacts of imperfect neural-network design as well as limited training data and compute. Some day with enough of both, fed into even better neural networks, deep learning models should be able to completely shed the aforementioned problems. “The human brain has about 100 trillion parameters, or synapses,” Hinton told me in 2020.

"What we now call a really big model, like GPT-3, has 175 billion. It’s a thousand times smaller than the brain.

“Deep learning is going to be able to do everything,” he said.

(Quoting Karen Hao’s Empire of AI from the Gary Marcus article)

I keep citing Gary Marcus is because he is “an American psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author, known for his research on the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence (AI)” [wiki]

The reason all this is so important is because it refutes the idea that you can simply scale, or brute-force power, your way to a robust, generalized model.

If we could have only three knowledge frameworks, we would lean heavily on topics that were central to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which argued, on philosophical grounds, that time, space, and causality are fundamental.

Putting these on computationally solid ground is vital for moving forward.

So ultimately talking about any of this is putting the cart before the horse. Before we even discuss the idea that any possible approach could achieve sentience I think we first need to actually understand what sentience is in ourselves and how it was formed. There currently are just too many variables to solve the equation. I am outright refuting the idea that an imperfect understanding, using imperfect tools, with imperfect methods with any amount of computer power, no matter how massive, could chance upon sentience. Unless you’re ready to go the infinite monkeys route.

We may get things that look like it, or emulate it to some degree, but even then we are incapable of judging sentience,

(From “Computer Power and Human Reason, From Judgement To Calculation” (1976))

This phenomenon is comparable to the conviction many people have that fortune-tellers really do have some deep insight, that they do “know things,” and so on. This belief is not a conclusion reached after a careful weighing of evidence. It is, rather a hypothesis which, in the minds of those who hold it, is confirmed by the fortune-teller’s pronouncements. As such, it serves the function of the drunkard’s lamppost we discussed earlier: no light is permitted to be shed on any evidence that might disconfirming and, indeed, anything that might be seen as such evidence by a disinterested observer is interpreted in a way that elaborates and fortifies the hypothesis.

It is then easy to understand why people are conversing with ELIZA believe, and cling to the belief, that they are being understood. The “sense” and the continuity the person conversing with ELIZA perceives is supplied largely by the person himself. He assigns meanings and interpretations to what ELIZA “says” that confirm his initial hypothesis that the system does understand, just as he might do with what a fortune teller says to him.

We been doing this since the first chatbot ELIZA in 1966. EDIT: we are also still trying to determine sentience in other animals. Like, we have a very tough time with this.

It’s modern day alchemy. It’s such an easy thing to imagine, why couldn’t it be done? Surely there’s some scientific formula or breakthrough just out of reach that eventually that could crack the code. I dunno, I find myself thinking about Fermi’s paradox and the Great Filter more …

There’s no getting through to you people. I cite sources, structure arguments, make analogies, and rely on solid observations of what we see today and how it works and you call MY argument hand-wavey when you go on to say things like,

LLMs today are like DaVinci’s corkscrew flight machine. They’re clunky, they technically perform something resembling the end goal but ultimately in the end fail the task they were built for in part or in whole.

But then the Wright brothers happened.

Do you hear yourself?

I admit that the Chinese Room thought experiment is just that, a thought experiment. It does not cover the totality of what’s actually going on, but it remains an apt analogy and if it seems limiting, that’s because the current implementation of neural nets are limiting. You can talk about mashing them together, modifying them in different ways to skew their behavior, but the core logic behind how they operate is indeed a limiting factor.

AI derangement or psychosis is a term meant to refer to people forming incredibly unhealthy relationships with AI to the point where they stop seeing its shortcomings, but I am noticing more and more that people are starting to throw it around like the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” term, and that’s not okay.

Has it struck a nerve?

It’s like asserting you’re going to walk to India by picking a random direction and just going. It could theoretically work but,

1. You are going to encounter a multitude of issues with this approach, some surmountable, some less so
2. The lack of knowledge and foresight makes this a dangerous approach; despite being a large country not all trajectories will bring you there
3. There is immense risk of bad actors pulling a Columbus and just saying, “We’ve arrived!” while relying on the ‘unknowable’ nature of these things to obfuscate and reduce argument

I fully admit to being no expert on the topic, but as someone who has done the reading, watched the advancements, and experimented with the tech, I remain more skeptical than ever. I will believe it when I see it and not one second before.

deep breath OK here we go: Hard NOOOOOOOOOO.

First let’s start with the two different schools of AI, Symbolic and connectionist AI.

When talking about modern implementations of AI, mostly those generative and LLMs, we’re talking about connectionist or neural networks approaches. A good example of this is the Chinese Room Argument which I first read about in Peter Watts’ Blindsight (just a fun sci-fi, first encounter book, check it out sometime).

“Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.”

It’s worth reading the Stanford Encyclopedia article for some of the replies, but we’ll say that the room operator or the LLM does not have a direct understanding, even if some representation of understanding is produced.

On the other hand, symbolic AI has been in use for decades for extremely narrow approaches. Take a look at any game-playing AI for example, something like StackRabbit for Tetris or Yosh’s delightful Trackmania playing AI. Or for something more scientific, animal pose tracking like SLEAP.

Gary Marcus makes an argument for a merging of the two into something called neurosymbolic AI. This certainly shows promise, but in my mind there are two big problems with this:

1. The necessary symbolic algorithms that the connectionist models invoke are still narrow and would likely need time and focused development to plug into the models and,
2. The chain-of-thought reasoning of LLMs has been shown to be fragile and exceptionally poor at generalization, Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage? A Data Distribution Lens. This is what would be required to properly parse data and hand it off to a more symbolic approach

(I feel like I had more articles I wanted to link here, as if anyone was already going to read all that. Possible edits with more later …)

So why are there so many arguments for sentience and super-intelligence? Well first and most cynically, manipulation. Returning to that first article, one of the big cons of connectionist AI is that it’s not very interpretable, it’s a black box. Look at Elon Musk’s Grok and the recent mecha Hitler episode. How convenient is it that you can convince people that your AI is “super smart” and can digest all this data to arrive at the one truth while putting your thumb on the scale to make it say what you want. Consider this in terms of the Chinese Room thought experiment. If the rulebook says to reply to the question, “Do you like dogs?” with the answer, “No, I hate them” this does not reflect an opinion of the room operator nor any real analysis of data. It’s an obfuscated opinion someone wrote directly into the rulebook.

Secondly, and perhaps a bit more charitably, they’re being duped. AI psychosis is the new hot phrase, but I wouldn’t go that far. The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con from July 4th, 2023 (!!!) does a good job of explaining the self-fulfilling nature of it. The belief isn’t reached after a careful weighing of evidence, it’s reached when pre-formed hypothesis (the machine is smart) is validated by interpreting the output as true understanding. Or something.

So again, WHY? Back to Gary Marcus and the conclusion of the previously linked article:

“Why was the industry so quick to rally around a connectionist-only approach and shut out naysayers? Why were the top companies in the space seemingly shy about their recent neurosymbolic successes? Nobody knows for sure. But it may well be as simple as money. The message that we can simply scale our way to AGI is incredibly attractive to investors because it puts money as the central (and sufficient) force needed to advance.”

Would this surprise you?

People want you to believe that amazing things are happening fast, in the realm of the truly high-minded and even beyond that which is known! But remember the burden of proof lies with them to demonstrate that the thing has happened, not that it could’ve happened just outside your understanding. Remain skeptical, I’ll believe it when I see it. Until then, it remains stupider than a parrot because a parrot actually understands desire and intent when it asks for a cracker. EDIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzeskMI8-L8

Gary Marcus nails it again, massive respect for the dude: LLMs are not like you and me—and never will be.

Been getting into bullet hells lately and the OST for Espgaluda slaps so hard, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJSlYmeW_es&list=PL6N1UyX9iZqvHkgNTslgU0ivl2jiLjNk2&index=6

The whole game is a wild, 2000’s anime fever dream and worth checking out even if you’re not into bullet hells. The primary mechanic involves building up gems from enemy kills that allow you to activate a power up to slow time. When time is slowed, any enemy you kill has their bullets cancelled and added to your score, so it encourages you to build up insane amounts of bullets on screen before going bullet time and killing everything. With this insane, trance-y soundtrack playing in the background it is a V I B E.

Anyone know what music visualizer that is in the screenshot near the bottom under entry 2? Quick search of the available music widgets and I didn’t see anything that looked like it.

The thing I remember most about the early internet was staking out your own weird little corners. There wasn’t much of any “everything” site yet, so you’d find the things that appealed to you and settle there.

A lot of my early tastes in indie and experimental music were formed by the Music message board on GameFAQs. I was already going there for the walkthroughs and found my way to some of the under-populated, miscellaneous boards.

You experienced meeting people with names (even if just pseudonyms) and ideas that weren’t just blended into an algorithmic slurry.

It’s why I like Lemmy, I can feel a bit of that here. Still, I have a hard time surrendering things like Twitter and moved instantly to Bluesky where I continue the trend …