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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • It’s about generative AI as it is currently used.

    But yeah, the complaints everyone has about Gen AI are mostly driven by speculative venture capital. The only advantage Google and openai can maintain over open source models is a willingness to spend more per token than a hobbyist. So they’re pumping cash in to subsidize their LLMs and it carries with it a stupidly high environmental cost.

    There’s no possible end game here. Unlike the normal tech monopolies, you can’t put hobbiest models out of business, by subsidizing your own products. But the market is irrational and expects a general AI, and is encouraging this behavior.






  • Both. It’s satire.

    The “benefit” of world hunger is that it keeps people locked in their place and entrenches the status quo. This is actually true, and the author believes it, but he doesn’t like it.

    Many people benefit from world hunger though, and every time you hear that poverty is a hard problem to solve you should ask yourself, how much of that is actual problems and how much is the status quo resisting change?




  • It really comes down to what you’re used to. If you use Windows tools then you already know many of the workarounds for Windows and you don’t know the tools that haven’t been ported there.

    For example, you know not to use Python directly, but that you have to install anaconda instead, or whatever the current problems with Python development on Windows are.

    The big obvious thing that you can’t get away from is that you have to do things differently if you have develop for two different OSs with a view to deploying on Linux.

    In particular support for shell scripts is crap on Windows. I could learn powershell or there’s workarounds using WSL and a bunch of other stuff that I don’t need to care about, but I’d rather not bother.


  • I mean coding is difficult enough as it is, I wouldn’t choose to use an OS that makes it even harder.

    I use Linux because it makes my life easier. It has better support for development. Some of the other stuff is maybe not as easy or polished, but the support for dev tools and the ease of deploying to from local machines to servers that are also running Linux makes up for it.

    If I wanted more effort I’d still be using Windows. It would force me to work on cross platform development and deployment. The idea that there’s value in making things unnecessarily hard is just weird. I want Linux to be as simple as possible to use, so I can spend that effort on things that actually matter.








  • Honestly, if you’re sharing office files you’re probably using office 365. This means everything is a web app first and therefore Linux compatible.

    I tried using the desktop version of word on a Mac last week, and the latency was so bad on a shared document that I had to switch to the web app anyway.

    Basically, if you just want to use Linux you’ll be fine. If instead you don’t want to use Microsoft, you’ll probably have lots of problems.

    Microsoft have been brutally effective in getting their tentacles into academic institutes, and you’ll find that everything from email to logging into internal sites relies on an office 365 account.


  • Nah, you’re forgetting how fucked the US is.

    Citizen’s United mean it’s absolutely fine for billionaires to spend as much money as they like supporting geriatric fascists, providing they don’t ask the fascists how they’d like the money spent.

    Providing Elon keeps going off half-cocked and making decisions on his own and isn’t following instructions from the trump campaign this is all perfectly legal.

    And even if he is acting on orders, how could you ever prove it?