Yozul

Litterally everything we have ever made and called an AI is an algorithm. Just because we’ve made algorithms for making bigger, more complicated algorithms we don’t understand doesn’t mean it’s actually anything fundamentally different. Look at input, run numbers, give output. That’s all there ever has been. That’s how thermostats work, and it’s also how LLMs work. It’s only gotten more complicated. It has never actually changed.

The phrase AI has never actually meant that though? It’s just a machine that can take in information and make decisions. A thermostat is an AI. And not a fancy modern one either. I’m talking about an old bi-metallic strip in a plastic box. That’s how the phrase has always been used outside of sci-fi, where it usually is used to talk about superintelligent general intelligences. The problem isn’t that people are calling LLMs AI. The problem is that the billionaires who run everything are too stupid to understand that difference.

Yes, because it gives them full legal access to share basically everything ever published by the US government. It’s not a magic bullet for all their woes or anything, but it is one less thing to worry about.

Mmm, yes. I too love eating metals that explode when they touch water. Extra spicy. It does more than double the sodium content of your salt though, so watch out for that if you have high blood pressure.

I love how these tech companies are so desperate to prove that AI is useful that every time an engineer ever uses any kind of software that has even the tiniest element of machine learning they’re all like, “See, AI did this! This was AI! Isn’t AI so useful, and amazing, and definitely worth all the money we’ve spent and environmental damage we’re doing!”

The problem there is that stable vs unstable distro uses a slightly different meaning of the word stable than you would use to talk about a stable vs unstable system.

In distro speak, a stable distro is one that changes very little over time, and an unstable one is one that changes constantly. That’s sort of tangentially related to reliability, in that if your system is reliable and doesn’t change then it’s likely to stay that way, but it’s not the same thing as reliability.

Normal people who use Arch don’t bring it up much, because they’re all sick of the memes and are really, REALLY tired of immediately being called rude elitist neckbeard cultists every time they mention it.

The Ubuntu hate is because Canonical has a long history of making weird, controversial decisions that split the Linux community for no good reason.

No you weren’t. That would be ridiculous. The deb dependencies are most of your Linux install. Maybe counting just the new dependencies being installed alongside a typical deb install, but that’s still not an apples to apples comparison to 100% of all the flatpak dependencies, even ones shared with other flatpaks, and even that’s still very rarely over 1GB.

Atomic distros are cool, and I’m sure they will only get more popular, but I don’t buy the idea that they’re “The” future. They have their place, but they can’t really completely replace traditional distros. Not every new thing needs to kill everything that came before it.

That’s not really true. It lists all the flatpak dependencies in that disk use, but a lot of those are shared, so they don’t actually use that much each if you install more than one, and the deb dependencies aren’t included at all. Flatpaks really do use more space, especially if you only have a small number of them, but it’s not as bad as that.

One of my biggest problems with critics of systemd is that a lot of the same people who make that second point also argue against wayland adoption when xorg does the exact same thing as systemd. It makes me feel like they’re just grumpy stubborn old Linux nerds from the 90s who just hate anything that’s not what they learned Linux with.

Which is sad, because honestly I think it’s kind of not great that an unnecessarily massive project has gained such an overwhelming share of users when the vast majority of those users don’t need or use most of what it does. Yeah, the init systems from before systemd sucked, but modern alternatives like runit or openrc work really well. Unfortunately they get poorly supported because everyone just assumes you have systemd. I don’t like the lack of diversity. I think it’s a problem that any init system “won”.