I feel like I am just repeating myself, disability does not prevent creative expression? A broken arm does not define your ability to paint. Perhaps one medium or another is more challenging but art has many many forms and we have been managing for thousands of years without a tech startup reinventing art. And not every culture in history has been as ableist as the one while live in today. Anyone can already make meaningful art.

As for not having the time, I think that’s an excuse for taking a shortcut using other people’s art and trying to make it their own. It won’t be as impressive, no matter how long they spend typing prompts into the computer, the person badly sketching mushrooms on their 10 at the local coffee chain is far more inspiring.

I wish we lived in a time where we were allowed to do what we loved and I may be a little envious of the people who are able to, but they have a right to complain that their work is being stolen and invalidated by people who don’t value it.

It’s using endless electricity and water to perform tasks I could do powered by a bowl of cereal in the morning. I’d rather need one solar panel than ten, and a river rather than a dried up well, personally, but ever increasing energy demands require the latter two.

If by accelerating you are referring to making the problem worse so we have to deal with melted ice caps sooner, then I agree! I for one don’t really trust turbo predictive text to solve the collapsing jet stream, but I sure do expect it to play a part in causing it. Or maybe just the extraction of increasing material from colonized countries to pay for our funny memes and your “art” through solar panel and battery. Either way, it is contributing in a very real way to the destruction of our planet for little gain that could be achieved more efficiently by other means.

The cool part about a smartphone is I actually wanted it and it did a thing nothing had before (except some PDAs maybe). Also living without one is very possible and I do so frequently, I’m not a chronic poster or social media user. Machine learning with a gui on it is neither something I wanted nor is it novel, and it is not improving the world we live in, it is making it worse.

The saving grace is this fad will pass as it becomes clear it’s the same as home automation, block chain, machine learning, the concept of web domains, etc. and it’s mostly been hype by tech investors all along. I would care about it a whole lot less if it weren’t so full of negative externalities.

I don’t think ‘disabled people’ need a computer to generate content to participate in art creation, and I don’t think artists making art is exploitation. The artists, meaning anyone who ever had their art posted online, are the ones being exploited here, their work was stolen and made to work for tech investors.

Even if these were tangible benefits they are a small compensation for the accelerated degradation of our shared planet, the mass robbery of nearly everyone on earth, and the further damage to our ability to critically think and create. And on top of that, the stuff it generates isn’t even very good.

If it turns out to be real, that would be the easiest buy I’ve ever had with a car. But with a design supposedly about practicality, why do they have to go with the iPad car controls? Hopefully that trend dies out soon and we can have buttons again.

I can’t see myself spending money on anything beyond a smartphone with a touchscreen for everything, and seeing it in this makes me more skeptical about the product as a whole.

It’s nice to imagine we can keep living exactly as we are and not have to pay up for any of the consequences of our actions. Maybe there will be a tech miracle to save us and the non-consenting species we are taking with us, but that hope, belief, and gamble is not a solution to the problem we have.

We have the solution, we know what it is, and we know how to execute it, we just lack the will. Until that miracle appears we should try to actually fix the problem.

Waiting for a tech solution to appear is like standing on the beach after an earthquake as the tide goes out praying that it won’t come back in.

Edit: Or maybe eating a nice dinner out and continuing to order hoping they forget your bill or someone else pays it. Either way it’s not doing a thing to make the problem better.

These are great examples of that part of art AI can not capture.

The first was painted by a donkeys tail in the presence of a legal witness, sent to exhibition under a false name, and when it began to be recognized at the time by critics and media, the artist said “aha! You literally like art that a donkey can make, your taste is terrible and so is popular art”.

The second is a physical can of the artists feces (I don’t know if anyone has opened the can to be sure), this time with no explicit agenda. What did the artist mean by this, was it another criticism of art critics, was it a criticism of the commodification of art, or something else entirely?

The last was made as the artist tried to find a religious experience derived from art. He said with this piece he did. I don’t find it particularly compelling, but 100 years ago this rethinking of what art can be was revolutionary enough for Stalin to send him to the camps.

If you only value art for consumption, yes these are exactly the same as me sitting at the computer pressing generate for a few hours. If any of the context is included in your enjoyment of the art, there is no comparison.

I enjoy art for the human aspects, the hundreds of musicians performing a single piece together, the incredible talent and skill on display in a photorealistic painting of a person who died hundreds of years ago, or the incredible mind and life of a person writing a moving essay. I don’t usually enjoy art for the sake of the object or product.

AI generated material robs that intangible spirit, floods the world with meaningless content, and as a consequence makes it more challenging to find art. Even when you sort through the muck and see that photorealistic painting, you aren’t imagining the monk who painted it, you’re looking at the hands thinking I don’t know if this is real or not.

Fortunately that’s mainly online for now, you can still go to a concert or museum to confidently see art, you can opt out of the AI content experience. But this sale symbolizes a further erosion of that separation. It seems inevitable that there will be AI “concerts” and “exhibitions” which will physically take space and money from actual artists and further challenge finding enjoyment from art and artists for people like me.

I understand others enjoy art differently, as a consumable product for example, and those people may not be as bothered by AI content. I do hope those people understand that it does impact other people around them and that the generated material is coming at a cost, if not to them, to those people (and the environment, and the artists).

I’d just recommend against NVIDIA GPUs if you don’t want to tinker, I’m sure it’s not as bad as it was back when I had NVIDIA cards, but faffing around trying to get NVIDIA drivers to play nice was the bane of my existence (and where I was forced to learn the most about Linux).

Oh and the screen tearing was a nuisance too that went away as soon as I got an AMD card.

Looks like you got lots of great advice on the OS. Good luck, and enjoy whatever you end up doing!

It’s a really good video. He did a very good job putting words to my thoughts too, I’ve struggled to say why I don’t like AI beyond “it’s not very good at things”, but as he touches on in the video, that is only one small part.

I was also very surprised by the 3% statistic, I think I watch nearly everything from my subscriptions, the recommended is either completely useless from whatever the algorithm has decided I want or showing me videos I intentionally didn’t watch.

I went and followed him on Mastodon, and in that thread learned you can just add a channel to an RSS feed by using the link to their channel. I’m sure that’s old news to some, but as I already use an RSS app, I’m going to start switching over I think.

I just finished watching the series for the first time the other day. I started out a little skeptical it would have aged well and there’s a few moments that reminded me it came out in the early 90s, but wow what a fantastic show. And what a time to be watching it, some of those newscast episodes hit close to home.

I think it’ll be on my rewatch list too now.

Depending on where you are sweet potatoes are often grown as an ornamental vine but the tubers are literally what you eat. You can grow them in the ground or in pots (I recommend pots so it’s easier to harvest, ymmv). Tomatos, blueberries, herbs, sunflowers, and strawberries are probably pretty easy to get away with too as long as you keep them organized looking.

If you don’t have an HOA and you live in its native range, central north america, the sunchoke is a crazy good source of food. Honestly too crazy, once you start growing it, it’ll be there forever and it’ll try to take over everything, but you’ll have the food there buried waiting for you year round. You can also grow it in pots, just be careful with the tubers and the soil, they will seriously spread out of control.

I don’t think you’re going to find peer reviewed studies on something that happened a month ago, but I would be very sure to say someone is working on it.

But if you’ve used Twitter you can recognize when something changes. I haven’t used it for years, but secondhand I’ve heard it was pretty egregious. Obviously this could be due to external parties heightening a disinformation campaign, but I’m not sure that really matters.

American social media platforms creating an environment where propaganda and misinformation flourish and refusing to take action against it has the same net effect as TikTok altering internal algorithm. Arguing that somehow TikTok is worse because it’s a foreign government is nonsense when every social media platform is manipulated by foreign governments to the same effect.

Doesn’t help the US government just keeps saying “trust us bro, we have reports that say China is spying on us” while they threaten to ban one platform. Nobody trusts that, it looks like a witch hunt, and sounds racist when they single them out this way.

Yeah I think “evangelical vegans” or “bad vegans” are a sort of caricature made for comedians and then everyone else to punch down on. Sure annoying vegans exist, and so do annoying meat eating people, but diet isn’t necessarily why these people are annoying.

I imagine there’s also an element of defensiveness from meat eaters as well. Even reasonably stating “I don’t eat meat because of the cruelty in the industry and the negative environmental impacts” is implicitly challenging a meat eater to consider those things, which they likely never have. And being faced with the certainty that the vegan is making that statement (the cruelty of the industry and environmental impacts are objective), the meat eater is possibly going to feel like they are being judged or attacked.

To be clear, the EU developing an operating system for EU use is not a dystopian vision without assuming many things about the theoretical future project. The petition is asking for this for transparency and independence from an actual dystopian vision coming to fruition in a ‘forced’ Windows standard. That doesn’t really lead me to imagine a dystopian nightmare where the EU forces everyone to install their distro (A potentially comical vision on its own).

I rather like the idea that governments contribute to open source projects, sounds a lot better than the same contribution going to private institutions. The use of open source software may introduce some vulnerabilities, but those are replacing vulnerabilities that are already there. I would also imagine investment in some open source projects would encourage more development in adjacent areas, much like Valve, Proton, and gaming.

I would be interested to hear what alternative you have to solving the problems that the project in this petition is attempting to solve. It’s easy to shoot down something for not being perfect but it’s pretty challenging to come up with a theoretical proposal that pleases all.

By definition, an agenda is “a program of things to be done or considered” which does not equate to wanting to do something. It more closely resembles a daily planner or task list.

So in as much as you and I have an “agenda” when we get out of bed, you are right, the person submitting the PR did likely have an agenda of waking up and going about their day. There isn’t a ‘woke agenda’ at play here, however, as the person I replied to seemed to imply.

Imagine you have been purposefully targeted for harassment or excluded from activities in the past due to your preferred pronouns or perceived gender. Seeing “he” with that context would likely feel excluding, which is a reason someone without an ‘agenda’ would want to see it changed.

I made the leap a few years ago now, and since getting a (slightly) newer AMD GPU I haven’t had a single problem that I didn’t create by messing around with things without knowing what I was doing. I use steam and the Glorious Egroll version of proton and every game I have wanted to play has worked, even ones that are brand new. No tinkering past the initial steam setup. I don’t really play competitive online games with anti cheat so you may encounter problems that I haven’t if you do.

I use the advanced hardware support version of MX Linux, if that really matters. I had bad experiences with Ubuntu, but haven’t tried it with this machine so I don’t know if it was the OS or the hardware.

I’d say give it another shot on its own drive when Microsoft frustrates you again, you can always swap windows back in if you don’t like it.

If I’m reading that right, that could also say that Instagram is suppressing anti-israel content? It’s just saying that in comparison to Instagram tiktok is showing more x, y, z. But Instagram is absolutely not a neutral point to measure from.

For starters there’s different demographics on each one, but I’m sure you could adjust for that, maybe the study did. But I don’t think you can adjust for the impact the US government has on Meta. I don’t believe for an instant that some US agency isn’t manipulating algorithms or requiring certain tweaks to steer discourse just like they did with US news outlets.

I’d diagnose the problem similarly to the person you replied to and I don’t think I’d feel compelled to offer a specific remedy either.

People have been experimenting with economies and societies for thousands of years and we are in a relatively new money/power/control stuck spot right now. I’m sure there’s been a system in history that would work much better than what we’ve got, but I just read recreationally so I dunno what it is and just because something worked 1000 years ago in North America doesn’t mean it’ll work here today. I wouldn’t mind giving something new a shot though, what we have is not working for most people.

I had a very similar experience but just kinda glumly stuck with the broken experience in that in between, and just played what I could get to work. But now with proton, specifically the ge version, there’s isn’t a game that I can’t play (that I have wanted to play). It’s pretty amazing how quickly the changes and improvements to gaming on Linux have come.

I also have an AMD system now, which might be a big part of why it’s so painless now.