I think there’s a broader question here from an evolutionary perspective. Humans are fundamentally tool users, and technology has been central to our development as a species. It’s possible that this evolutionary niche we’ve occupied will eventually reach its limits and contribute to our own downfall, but I’m not convinced AI is uniquely responsible. It’s part of a much longer trajectory of technological progress.

We’ve evolved to solve problems and use tools to make our lives easier. That doesn’t mean technological progress is inevitable, but these tendencies, combined with competition, make it difficult to imagine us ever really stopping. Even if we stopped today, who’s to say another generation of humans 10,000 years from now wouldn’t continue down the same path?

I don’t think this is exclusively about capitalism. Capitalism certainly incentivizes growth and reducing labor costs, but competition, greed, and the pursuit of technological advantages have existed under other economic systems too. That doesn’t diminish the legitimate concerns about how AI is being used against workers.

I also wonder whether our short lifespans make us particularly bad at considering the long-term consequences of our innovations. Who is going to sacrifice the opportunities of their own generation to prevent a possible catastrophe centuries from now, especially when there’s no guarantee it would stop technological progress?

I have a degree in psychology and particularly enjoyed evolutionary psychology, so I think it’s worth asking whether the deeper problem is our own nature, and whether our capacity for collective restraint can keep pace with our ability to innovate.

I know this raises more questions than it answers, but we’ve faced civilization-changing technologies before, from the printing press and electricity to nuclear weapons. AI won’t be the last. Perhaps the more important question is how we learn to manage these transformations when our tendency to create them seems so deeply rooted in who we are.

FUSE mounts are a thing…

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Removed by mod

Oh, I know this one! Don’t vote next time so Republicans win! Step 2: ???

Seriously though, I understand the frustration. Obama absolutely deserves criticism for continuing and expanding parts of the post-9/11 surveillance state. But the US was fundamentally changed by 9/11, and reversing that political momentum was always going to be difficult. That doesn’t excuse his decisions, but it does help explain the political environment in which they were made.

The same nuance applies to ICE. Democrats have funded immigration enforcement for decades, and their record deserves scrutiny, particularly under Obama. But funding an existing federal agency isn’t the same as endorsing Trump’s use of that agency. Enforcement priorities, oversight, detention policies, and the scale and purpose of operations matter. Treating all ICE funding as equivalent ignores some pretty significant differences between administrations.

And let’s not forget the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare wasn’t universal healthcare, and it certainly wasn’t the single-payer system many progressives wanted, but it wasn’t nothing. It expanded coverage to millions of Americans, protected people with preexisting conditions, and fundamentally changed what Americans could expect from their healthcare system. Those were substantial gains, even if the legislation was compromised from the start. That’s exactly what I mean about political momentum: imperfect progress can establish protections and expectations that future reforms can build upon.

My larger concern is that abandoning Democrats over their failures doesn’t move the country left. If anything, it risks pushing the Overton window even further right. The American electorate hasn’t consistently supported the kind of progressive policies many of us would like to see, and there’s been an enormous, well-funded political and media effort over the past decade to discredit those policies, particularly around civil rights, immigration, and anything labeled “woke.”

I’m 43 now, and one thing I’ve come to appreciate is how much political momentum matters. Progress isn’t linear, and meaningful social change often takes decades to establish. It’s much easier to capitalize on fear, resentment, and existing prejudices than to build lasting public support for expanding rights and changing institutions.

None of that means Democrats should get a free pass. Quite the opposite. They need to be challenged, especially when they compromise on fundamental rights. But there’s a difference between holding a party accountable and allowing its opposition to consolidate even more power.

The Democratic Party is divided, and I don’t know who is going to provide the leadership it needs. But I don’t see the Republican Party advancing civil liberties, economic equality, or a more humane immigration system. And I certainly don’t see how handing Republicans more power helps us get there.

Real change takes time, organization, and political momentum. We have to build on what we have while pushing for something better. Abandoning the imperfect opposition to an increasingly authoritarian right doesn’t strike me as much of a strategy.

Ya but the general hysteria is that any AI use is bad and that we can only trust this AI use because its from Linus. I’ve used AI successfully for debugging and learning new code bases and patches and I’ve been told I’m wrong for doing so.

This is comparing different DE’s how is this at all useful? They could literally compare kde in Wayland and x11 directly (at least until 6.8) and yet didn’t? This is more comparing different implementations in an apples to oranges comparison than Wayland and x11 implementations in an apples to apples comparison.

What exactly do you think children are losing out on specifically in regards to accessibility when most apps these days are accessed through a web browser or interface? You can always have some specialty computers in certain departments for learning things like video or photo editing that may not work well on Linux but for most general purpose computing, open source more than covers those needs.