Yeah, I agree. I do use Flatpaks, Snaps, and Appimages sometimes if I can’t find a suitable deb repo/package. Flatpak is the best out of the three because they do try to avoid too much duplication through runtimes. I also use Docker quite a bit, which has similar issues (and benefits).

I assume the “kill it” comment was a little tongue-in-cheek. On small SBCs, like a Pi, or old hardware, it could be a problem. I’ve seen people with flatpaks taking up 30GB of space, which is significant. I’m not sure how much RAM it wastes. I assume running 6 different applications that have loaded 6 different versions of Qt libraries would also use significantly more RAM than just loading the system’s shared Qt libraries once.

Wastes RAM and disk space (compared to package-manager installed applications) by storing more libraries on disk and loading them into RAM rather than just using the libraries already installed on the distro. It’s probably better than Snap and Appimage though.

Meh, startups and businesses are capitalist organizations, and I think the idea of patents is questionable outside capitalism, so these wouldn’t really be a good metrics. I’d guess the richest countries “innovate” the most because they can support more risky endeavors. The U.S. is the capitalist imperial core, so it probably innovates the most. Other capitalist nations like Haiti, probably not so much.

The best measure of innovation would probably be something like scientific publications. China wins by raw numbers, Vatican City wins per-capita (???).

IMO, the U.S. will become similar to Russia. It’s not some sudden societal collapse scenario; just an oligarchy with high levels of corruption and incompetence. Most people will conform or keep their heads down to avoid the consequences of stepping out of line. If you’re in a possibly targeted group, you may want a valid passport though. And it’s always been a good idea to keep at least a months worth of non-perishable food on hand in case of supply chain disruptions. Possibly stuff like emergency propane heaters and a propane tank could be useful too (they’ve been useful for me in the past already without an authoritarian government or social unrest). Knowing your neighbors and helping eachother out in little ways is probably the most powerful thing though.

Source? First I’ve heard of anything like this. I’d imagine a lot of things would have to be settled in court given the US’s strange laws giving states so much leeway in how they conduct federal elections.

I have. My bank did a chargeback like they would if it was a credit card. I was told it would’ve been a lot harder to get my money back if my PIN was used. But, I’ve only seen that option available for in-person purchaees.

Factories I’ve worked at had vending machines filled with microwavable food (burritos, burgers, sandwiches, etc). All of it was pretty disgusting.

Thought this was a Republican ad for a second. Similar language and appeal to fear and ignorance.

Yann LeCun would probably be a better source. He does actual research (unlike Altman), and I’ve never seen him over-hype or fear monger (unlike Altman).

This is more complicated than some corporate infrastructures I’ve worked on, lol.

Production AI is highly tuned by training data selection and human feedback. Every model has its own style that many people helped tune. In the open model world there are thousands of different models targeting various styles. Waifu Diffusion and GPT-4chan, for example.

I think you have your janitor example backwards. Spending my time revolutionizing energy productions sounds much more enjoyable than sweeping floors. Same with designing an effective floor sweeping robot.

AI are people, my friend. /s

But, really, I think people should be able to run algorithms on whatever data they want. It’s whether the output is sufficiently different or “transformative” that matters (and other laws like using people’s likeness). Otherwise, I think the laws will get complex and nonsensical once you start adding special cases for “AI.” And I’d bet if new laws are written, they’d be written by lobbiests to further erode the threat of competition (from free software, for instance).

The search engine LLMs suck. I’m guessing they use very small models to save compute. ChatGPT 4o and Claude 3.5 are much better.

Yeah, the image bytes are random because they’re already compressed (unless they’re bitmaps, which is not likely).

Donation, patronage, gift economy, mutual aid, or whatever you want to call it is fine by me. People can pirate a lot of proprietary software as well, yet people still pay.

Yet, people still pay for it.

The problem is that HP writes drivers and software for those things for Windows, but not for Linux, so Linux depends on random people to write software for those things for free (which often involves complex reverse-engineering). With Linux you need to make sure you use widely-used hardware that someone has already written support for (this is mostly applicable to laptops and peripherals, which often use custom non-standard hardware). There may be a way to fix your problems, but you’ll have to search forums or issue trackers for the solutions, and they’re probably pretty involved to get working correctly. The router crashing thing is probably just a coincidence though, or the laptop is using a feature that’s broken on your router.

camelCase for non-source-code files. I find camelCase faster to “parse” for some reason (probably just because I’ve spent thousands of hours reading and writing camelCase code). For programming, I usually just use whatever each language’s standard library uses, for consistency. I prefer camelCase though.