Techbro: Well, technically, ending humanity also cures (human) cancer, and it might make me rich… choice confirmed!

In video games, when you are offered a choice between two horrible options which both have the same outcome, you quickly realize that you either have either done something terribly wrong prior to this event and that’s led to this bad ending, or you are being pushed to search for the secret third option.

I think in this case the same thing applies. We can either accept the bad ending and quit, or search for the third option. Neither of those two choices are going to solve these problems. There’s one that maybe offers a few more minutes of dialogue before you get there, and maybe the secret option is down that path, but we’d better start searching for it now instead of assuming that things are going to turn out okay if we pick the less-bad option.

That sounds more like it’s probably a problem related to living in a house built out of toothpicks with paper-thin walls and windows in a place where too many humans have been forced to congregate in a small area for primarily economic and sociopolitical reasons. But, you know, you can also blame the people stuck there with you too if you want.

Millennials just out here casually making the world a slightly less horrible place for people to grow up in, in very measurable statistics that only they have direct control of, and that unambiguously cannot be attributed to any other generation, despite getting relentlessly manipulated, economically rugpulled and politically sabotaged their entire lives.

Fucking millennials are so obnoxious, amirite? lol avocado toast or whatever! /s

I only meant it came out of nowhere to me. I’m not trying to universalize my experience onto everyone else or attack the game, I’m just living and sharing my own experience, and this is how it works and looks from where I am, which I thought was the kind of perspective OP was asking for. I’m glad they’re enjoying it, but I’m going to be holding off.

The whole point of status pages is to minimize and deflate the impact. The pleasantly-high percentages even during absolute catastrophes is an intentional design feature. The percentages are not going anywhere. The percentages will continue until reliability improves. Which it won’t.

The temperature is too hot for me. That’s because I get suspicious of games that are mega-viral and seemingly come out of nowhere to have everybody talking about them all at once. I figure it’s often either a fad, a masterfully executed guerilla marketing campaign, or genuinely outstanding, or some combination of these things. Of course, sometimes it is just genuinely outstanding, and if that’s the case I’ll probably pick it up eventually. But there’s no rush, so regardless of which it is, I’m a patient gamer and I’m perfectly willing to wait and let the dust settle so I can get a better perspective, and very often I find these kind of games fade pretty quickly and are forgotten and in the clear light of day I’ll often realize they’re not really the kind of game I like anyway. And if they’re the kind of genuinely outstanding instant classic they seem to be at first, they’ll still be around once I’m ready for them, and potentially on sale. So, overall this strategy of suspicion-by-default and wait for more data has served me well.

There are plenty of games I’ll impulse-buy, but it’s never the popular ones, it’s the ones that have a dozen reviews. I’m always suspicious of popularity. I do not believe in the wisdom of crowds, at least for my own entertainment preferences. I have very specific interests and preferences, and frankly I know them when I see them, and this probably isn’t it.

I highly doubt you are a developer of this game, but if you are, well… that explains a lot I guess.

I absolutely can and do.

Nothing bad happened yet. Keep doing it, and something bad’s going to happen. An ounce of prevention is better than a truckload of cure. Some things can’t be cured. You can’t punish someone hard enough to undo road deaths. The victims are still going to be dead. They don’t come back to life once the killer goes to jail. There is no other reasonable way to handle road deaths than by stopping them before they happen. Drive at a reasonable and appropriate speed, or someone’s going to die. Those are your options.

No it’s not a perfect solution, people still die on the roads, and they probably always will, but we’ve chosen the speed limits at a point that prevents some deaths, you cannot realistically argue that, and that is all you have to know to understand that they are justified, and they do have an appropriate punishment.

Does that help you understand?

In software development this is called a regression, and it is why we have regression tests. If you don’t run or check the regression tests, the problems they’re testing for can (and do) come back.

No, this is a fundamental understanding of the motivations behind AI. AI, as it is currently being implemented, is designed to be manipulative and convincing, to convince people of things that aren’t necessarily true but suit the needs of the tech giants, to implement behavioral changes on a societal scale for advertising, marketing, and capitalism, to collect the data and behaviors of everyone on the planet, and to ultimately create a monopoly on the entire concept of truth itself so that the wealthiest and most successful at deploying AI can effortlessly control and shape the economy and society to their own ends in perpetuity.

AI is not dangerous because of what it is, AI is dangerous because of what the people funding it and driving it are using it to accomplish. It has nothing to do with automating our jobs, it has everything to do with automating theirs. This is the information age, and these are all advertising companies who are the middlemen in almost all information we receive about anything. Remember that. Do not trust what it says, do not trust what media says about it, do not trust anything about it. It is a informational weapon of mass destruction, and it is being used to pry open the cracks in society for the gains of the people selling it.

Thanks, I hate it.

Yes, concerned (if not deeply concerned, or even appalled) would be a good initial stance until we have more information.

I don’t care about the robot, it doesn’t have feelings, it can’t, and it would take something profound to change in the technology that I’ve seen before I’m willing to even consider that they would ever be worth considering as candidates for my sympathy. I don’t grant the trait of consciousness lightly, and neither should anyone else.

I do care about the people using such robots for such purposes, and I think there are reasonable concerns about the safety of other real people that may come into contact with these individuals. And those other people do have both feelings and all the protections that consciousness and human rights entitle them to. I believe extreme caution is warranted about allowing the proliferation of such technologies at least until more supervision and psychological research can be conducted to understand the possible scope of benefits and harms to individuals and to society. There is no legitimate urgency driving these technologies to be allowed and adopted so quickly besides profit, and our failure to approach them with anything resembling caution is probably something we are eventually going to regret. I just hope it’s not an existential failure. It might be something close to it. Time will tell.

If they win, Democrats might put on a show about “justice” but they aren’t going to deliver on it. This goes far deeper than just one rogue president or one political party. Trick question: If you represented a large group of decadent, sociopathic billionaires with essentially unlimited funds and control of the vast majority of information and media, who wanted to infiltrate American politics to regulatory capture and disable all rules that apply to themselves so they can take more and more and push their unpopular agendas, which political party would you infiltrate?

If you answered either “Democrat” or “Republican”: you’re wrong, the correct and actual answer is “both”. Voting itself is not an actual sham (yet?) but you don’t get to decide the actual important questions at the ballot box. You get a bunch of theatrics and rehearsed policy speeches to distract you from the fact that you’re not being offered any real choices. You get to decide whether your oppressive police nanny state is going to be decorated with scary goons with scary guns, or cheerful rainbows and polite smiles, but you don’t get to decide whether your going to end up in an oppressive police nanny state or not. They’re both pursuing the same goals, just using different tactics so it doesn’t look so obvious how perfectly aligned they both really are while they both keep moving the ball towards the endzone, one play at a time.

It is equivalent until Flatpak adds a new (probably completely justified) limitation to its sandbox that breaks your (needs unrestricted system-wide permissions) application, sure. Nevermind if you decide to add more features that go beyond what the sandbox allows, and then you need to figure out why they’re broken in your flatpak and what new flags you need to unbreak them. The problem is you’re constantly swimming upstream against a very strong current. It’s not a very sustainable mode of development. Like OP said, flatpak is designed for sandboxed desktop GUIs. It may be convenient at first to shoehorn your TUI application into it, but you’re working against its design and intent, and that is a genuine problem, for many reasons.

npm -g is another TUI install method I loathe. pipx/uv shares most of the same issues. Like the author, I’ve gone through almost all of the same options they have, and come to basically the same conclusions. There really is no good option for packaging and managing userspace TUI utilities. And it’s brutal. I hate that so many terminal utilities have standardized to use completely unrestricted, opaque and dangerous curl/sh copy-pastes, leaving anyone who’s not both fluent in shell script and willing to invest the time to inspect what the scripts are doing out in the cold, bravely running commands that are potentially malicious with no safety net. I understand it, it’s viable, it works, I do it myself for my own projects, but we have to acknowledge that it’s a symptom of the lack of any better solution for TUI packaging, and it’s okay to admit that it sucks, and we could do something so much better.

Electric current moving through a wire creates a magnetic field. Creating that magnetic field is work and takes energy. If it has to do a lot of work, that energy all gets stored in the magnetic field instead of in the load. Then if the electric current stops, the magnetic field collapses and dumps its energy back into the wire. That’s impedance. It behaves like the electricity has been delayed and slowed down but it cannot be explained and understood as electricity alone like resistance or capacitance can, it is an electromagnetic phenomenon and can only roughly and imperfectly fit into an electricity-only model. The devil’s in the details, and reactance is the devil’s name.

I donated a server to my brother across the country to use as his media server, it also doubles as my own offsite backup. And vice versa for his, although he’s not really tech savvy enough to care.

Why do we need a centralized hub for AI models anyway? I’ve never figured this out. We flock to these big “friendly” fucking companies with obviously unsustainable business models trying to own and sell things that should be shared in a decentralized, democratized mesh anyway. AI models should all be distributed magnet links, not hosted files. Why do we do this to ourselves?

The way things are going at Huggingface now, I imagine we probably will have to start building the infrastructure we need to handle AI models as distributed links sooner rather than later. Let the enshittification begin, we’ll move on to a different tactic for sharing AI models while cheerfully they squeeze cash out of people and businesses too lazy to adapt. Everything working as it should, I guess.

Not from a user point of view, but the amount of progress Linux has made in the last year or two is genuinely crazy, and where it stands today is completely different from where it was 3 years ago. That’s why it’s ironic that people keep sticking to years-old opinions as if they’re valid today. I totally get why they would think they’re still valid today, it’s understandable, and normally that might even be true. But they’re simply not valid criticisms in most cases anymore. This is the new form of Linux, this is desktop Linux, this is gaming Linux, this is Windows-replacement Linux. At long last, it is finally ready for the desktop. The year of Linux on the Desktop has arrived. It’s happening. I’m already there. Other people need to start getting onboard too.