Ah, the Arch forum/stack experience. Along with

“Problem still exists like 2 years later.”

“DON’T NECRO. CLOSED.”

This is exactly why I always tell myself it’ll be super fun and easy to replace a Linux distro on one of my machines, and I do the fun part of balancing release style, desktop environment, all the shiny stuff…know what stops me dead in my tracks upon install?

Deciding a file system. Because it feels like such a weighty decision with far-reaching effects.

According to internet research, they’re all the right one, they’re all the wrong one, they’re all just fine, and don’t use any of them because they’ll wipe all your data. Lol

Your documentation on file system choice is either anecdotal or engineering-masters-thesis, seemingly no in-between.

I’ve just decided BTRFS with snapshots is great, and keep good enough backups that I shouldn’t have to fiddle with the fanciest deep-knowledge features to save my system.

Might be my ADHD as well. XD

Sheesh, FOSS licenses really are the only force in the universe that can stop this nonsense.

I remember shelling out for Substance indie licenses thinking it would be a good investment. Shortly after they’re:

• part of the “adobe family” (yaaay! /s)
• Not gonna make it subscription only, c’mon guys. It’s ok.
• No seriously, we hear you, you’ll have options! Definitely!
• Newsletter: Ok we’re subscription only, “Get your keys for the super out of date version because we’re just deleting it from human history now.”
• SaaS cloud only and you’re gonna like it, peasant.

Never trusting private software like that ever again.

Dunno, I’ve never touched an Adobe subscription because I’ve heard they’re like getting out of gym memberships to quit. 😬

EXACTLY. High-five!

That’s what I worry about. Right now we can ignore social media somewhat, but if Ai gets wedged into contracts with government/infrastructure and other unavoidable daily life, I imagine that’s where a plausible threat could come from.

I’ve no doubt such things are already in the works. Ai controlled traffic lights or something, for instance. Obviously the military and law enforcement are already giddy about it, of course.

Giving a stupid machine a seemingly simple goal to pursue and the wrong set of keys could lead to disasterous consequences, I think. We also have the whole “Do Ai cars protect the driver or all human life even if it risks the driver?” Debate.

“But it’s trendy, it’s the future! And there’s so much venture capital involved, how lucrative!” Seems to be how major decisions are made these days.

I don’t see it some day “waking up” and thinking “I feel like humans are unnecessary.” It’s scarier than that…it will see us as just another variable to control and “maximize” us out of the picture.

I don’t forsee it becoming “sentient” so much as “Being given a stupid amount of access and resources to figure out a problem by itself, and stupidly pursuing the maximization of that goal with zero context.”

There’s that darkly humorous hypothetical that an Ai tasked with maximizing making paperclips would continue to do so, using every resource it could get a hold of, and destroying any threat to further paperclip production!

So that, with data center expansion and water. Lol

See “paperclip maximizer” under “hypothetical examples” Here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence

Ngl that’d be hilarious if that was basically a GUI for “rm -rf /” LOL

I’m not even an Apple fan but folklore.org sounds fascinating. I love retro computing history! :D Thanks for sharing that!

This reminds me of that poster in my highschool chem lab:

Same with shooting without eye/ear pro. I dunno about other folks but I use my eyes and ears a lot, and I’d hate to miss out on music and color the rest of my life because I thought I would have a transcendent experience blowing them out for a minute. 😬

Definitely. Ask anybody who finally evacuated the last thing they ate from Olive Garden!

As a whole, we tend to be garbage and materialistic…

This might be one way to see it. I think a lot of people WANT to resist, but resistance costs a lot of mental and sometimes tangible energy. If you can smooth out a lifestyle that naturally excludes stupid brands like Roku, great.

But there’s a point when you want to participate in the rest of society, and people will break down for that. I do my best to avoid walmart, amazon, and other abusive tech companies, and educate others to do the same.

But someone still gifted my mom-in-law one of those stupid “alexa” spheres that I immediately put on its own V-LAN, and the family wanted a TV so they brought home a TCL/Roku because it’s what they could afford. (It was a good value at the time, years ago.) PiHole showed me exactly why it was so cheap.

Companies know after all the stresses you already encounter in your adult life, you’re gonna run out of bandwidth and cave eventually, because you’re human, and the path of least resistance becomes more tantalizing. That’s why they bombard you relentlessly, and evil tech is the most immediately accessible and familiar.

I’m personally thinking of just plugging a decently capable little media PC into the display, using KDE’s “big screen” interface with KDE Connect as a remote. I’m pretty sure I could train my family on that…

Roku is so scummy.

Also, I can’t even imagine how many resources image-generating AIs take up, especially when it’s all based around “refining prompts” over and over and over…

That’s the 1984 version, perhaps.

I’d posit the Brave New World version is

“It keeps buzzing your brain into doing your stupid task until the 30 hour shift is up, but don’t worry, you get sweet dopamine hits and painkillers the whole time and aren’t sure why this is so enjoyable! The pleasure-task curve is perfectly computed. You’re not even sure how long it’s been. There’s a momentary sadness when you witness a fellow worker just convulse and drop like a sack of rocks. This work feels so important though! You can understand their dedication.”

But in general, you would use specially rated components and materials if you need them to last decades - not the cheapest most basic parts you can find.

Keep in mind this is modern tech and an Elon-helmed corpo we’re talking about lol. Do decades-lasting components bump stock shares THIS quarter? I point to all the bits falling off of Teslas lately.

lol God help us all…

I still love the concept of floppy diskettes. Sure, some of this is nostalgia, but what if you had something like super fast solid state memory encased in a nice solid shell like that? Sure, sure, like a USB drive…but the contacts could be protected with the little slidy-shield bit and nobody could accidentally snag the USB sticking out and damage it and the port.

I think I just really miss the “kaCHUNK” of inserting physical solid media, and flipping through stacks of them…maybe not so much the capacity or read speeds :)

A series of pneumatic tubes, actually!

The internet…you see… it’s… it’s not just a big truck.

I get where this is coming from. In the Blender space it can be pretty intense because it’s such a popular project, but I cringe so hard when I see these whiny posts like

“Why can’t the lazy devs just get off their butts and fix [my specific issue]?!?!”

People got so used to “customer-brain” they forgot how to be civil.

Oh I know that voice!

It was the one that told me to “stop torquing now!” When I ended up breaking a crossed bolt off in an awkward blind spot on the side of my engine…so now the VTT solenoid is held in by a little epoxy. Because otherwise the engine would have to be removed and a machinist would likely need to just destroy and rethread that thing.

Oh, the shame…

No I’m not a mechanic, I’m just not “pay a mechanic $600 to install a $40 part” rich. :D

But this is exactly why I won’t get into something like electricianship or other dangerous stuff. ADHD sometimes just squelches that little voice and I’m left asking myself why I did something so stupid and wishing I could go back 10 seconds.

If the consequences were life or death? Yeah no way I don’t need a sudden brain-lapse killing/maiming me or someone else.

I bet you got that toaster to run DOOM didn’t you? 😏