Everybody has to support the new new underdog Intel.

Yes

… for now.

We long left the era where we “own” things that we buy. As everything is a computer now it has become very simple to control stuff that remotely that was working on its own before.

So the answer to “why would <CORPORATION> do this” is simply: “Because they can”.

Every tiny decision is guided by increasing profit. No matter the side effects (short or long term ). Because with many shareholders administering pressure to maximize profits there’s only one way to go (even if it’s a dumb and shortsighted decision) maximizing profits NOW. If you are not doing that because you can see that increasing profits now will hurt profits in the future then you are hindering the project. You have to increase profits now, because if you are not then your competitor is doing it and that is a problem. If you are not going with the project you will be out of a job sooner or later. Then someone will take over that will make the decision you couldn’t do.

This is a race to the bottom. Morals, integrity, honesty, responsibility and foresight are only obstacles in this logic (because the competition is not bound by them which gains them an advantage).

It’s simply cheaper now to build everything in the car always and run an operating system that manages all these things and can control what you are doing in your car.

Cory Doctorow held a great keynote about this some ~10-ish years (?) ago with the title “The coming war on general computation” where he explained the side effects of putting DRM in every stupid appliance. The side effect here is that we cannot hack our cars to switch on the heated seats (or whatever other feature BMW is not allowing us to use for free) because of DRM. It is not “our” car, even though we bought it.

I agree, but as long as we still have capitalism I support measures that at least slow down the destructiveness of capitalism. AI is like a new powertool in capitalism’s arsenal to dismantle our humanity. Sure we can use it for cool things as well. But right now it’s used mostly to automate stuff that makes us human - art, music and so on. Not useful stuff like loading the dishwasher for me. More like writing a letter for me to invite my friends to my birthday. Very cool. But maybe the work I put in doing this myself is making my friends feel appreciated?

Edit: It’s also nice to at least have an app that takes this maximalist approach. Then people can choose. If they’re half-assing it there will be more and more ai-features creeping in over time. One compromise after the next until it’s like all the other apps. It’s also important to have such a maximalist stand in order to gauge the scale in a way.

Can Brazil rent out that judge to Europe for a Sec?

yeah that’s just ridiculous. omg

It’s also a great example why these mega corps should be broken up into smaller pieces.

If forced arbitration persists (and this argumentation from Disney is successful and then used as precedence) any service used from one company can be used to forever ban you from taking legal action against that company again even if the service and the reason for the legal action have nothing to do with each other.

Am I right in understanding that this case is about someone dying from eating in a Disney owned restaurant that by accident was a Disney+ subscriber?

If one company owns everything like Amazon, Google, Apple and in the future maybe even water supply, garbage collection, operates my car and is my insurer or bank account (and owner of one of the 4 remaining fast food chains in the country) how can people actually sue a company then ?

Amen

I quit netflix recently after almost 10 years of continuous subscription. When they raised the price again it was a good Occasion although not the reason. I think so was done with it for a while now.

I guess I’ll start reading books again - or watch a few films instead of stretched out series.

I recommend trying another linux distro for a while. Arch has a pretty steep learning curve. So big respect for getting it to work as a first distro, but there is a lot of stuff you have to setup manually that just works on other distros. If you got more stuff working and get a little more familiar you can always go back to arch.

I use arch nowadays, but the first time i tried to install it i basically gave up a few times. If you just want to try it out in order to learn then it’s perfectly cool to take some time. But if your goal is to play games then arch is just a means to an end. Then it becomes really annoying, because you cannot reach your goal.

I have no idea how to fix the problem, but I’ve read somewhere that burn (a relatively new machine learning framework in Rust) is capable of loading models like stable diffusion. As Burn is built with webGPU and all the shader transpiler-stuff that comes with it doesn’t that mean that it can also run easily on (even older) AMD cards? I think what’s lacking is equal performance as nvidia drivers are heavily optimized already.

Maybe someone knows more here?

what does “rootfull” mean?

Apparently Microsoft didn’t get the memo :-)

IIRC most successful VCs invest very early and get out often early-ish too. The real enshittification that dangers the actual position of the company often happen much later. At that point the company is traded publicly and there’s a large anonymous body of shareholders - they only care about profits. VCs are actually a little smarter and care about longer time frames as in that early stage often much larger (relative) growth rates are possible.

At a late stage (think Google, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit etc today) growth is much more difficult. How could Google grow today? They’ve saturated the search market years ago. So the only way of making more money is by sucking more money out of their existing user base. And they absolutely need to do it, as there’s huge pressure on the managerial class to do it, because the shareholders demand it. If the managerial class doesn’t do this (because often some older idealistic people know it would compromise the quality of the product), or they aren’t capable of doing it - they will get replaced by people who are more willing or capable - even if it’s detrimental for the company when viewed longer-term. VCs i would argue care all about profits, “but”. (they are smart enough to see the big picture. They are also small enough or “few enough” that they can communicate among themselves in order to agree on a more wise plan. That’s why they often get out once most of the possible (easy) growth has been achieved. They either know that now growth is much more difficult, or that the company’s value is much more stagnant - ow might decrease even. They can get out and invest their money in other more promising endeavours.

The shareholders of large publicly traded companies are not that coordinated as they cannot really agree on anything other than just “growth”. More sophisticated strategies would have to be negotiated (and communicated) among thousands. The only unifying bond among shareholders is that they want profits. Think about it: many shareholders often don’t even know what companies they own as they are often part of other investment packages. Maybe you’re retirement plan has invested in stocks of 50 different companies, or 10 different fonds that have invested in others still. That is a form of dilution (?). It’s very difficult to communicate any strategy more sophisticated than “profits”. (a side effect is also that many people have invested indirectly or wothout knowing in endeavours that make their life more shitty/expensive when they retire - without knowing it.) There isn’t enough nuance in the wants of the masses as to want any more sophisticated strategy than simply “growth”. That’s why only short term growth can be thought.

Of course sometimes also large companies can grow 2.5x or something like that. But it’s rare and takes more time. The exception makes the rule here. Early stage growth that VCs bank on is much more explosive i think. More like 10x or 100x.

EDIT: sorry i typed this on mobile and it shows.

“machines mimicking living things” does not mean exclusively AI. Many scientific fields are trying to mimic living things.

AI is a very hazy concept imho as it’s difficult to even define when a system is intelligent - or when a human is.

on the contrary! it’s a very old buzzword!

AI should be called machine learning. much better. If i had my way it would be called “fancy curve fitting” henceforth.

It’s been a while since i used fedora but last i remember dnf was awe fully slow compared to pacman. In fact so slow that i was wondering if there was some kind of bug somewhere. Glad this is being addressed. Fedora is imho the best distribution to get someone to use Linux for the first time. It works so well.

I’ve read a comparison of several newer file formats (avif, heic, webp) with jpeg-xl. The conclusion was that jpeg-xl was on par in terms of compression, sometimes better and very fast. also it can re-compress jpgs directly.

here’s an article describing it https://cloudinary.com/blog/the-case-for-jpeg-xl

Oh, i have a brilliant one:

A few years ago i spent a lot of time converting .flac-files into .ogg-files in order to put on my oldschool iPod. As I did a lot of repetitive typing - entering $dir / for file in flac ; do convert etc / mkdir -p $somewhere/$artist/$album / mv $somewhere/.ogg->$new_dir/ and so on - I thought: “hm lets just write a loop over loops for all the artists here and then all the albums and at the same time create the nested directories somewhere else… hm actually in the home directory… and later love everything on the iPod at once.”

so i was in my music folder with the artists-folders i wanted to convert. i did something wrong

So i did my complicated script directly in the shell. I made something wrong and instead of creating a folder “~/artist/album” I created 3 folders in my current working directory: “~”, “artist” and “album”. hmph dammit gotta try again… but first : i have to clean up these useless folders in the current dir. so i type of course this: "$ rm -r ~ artist album " after about 5 seconds of wondering why it took so long i realized my error. o_O I stopped the running command, but it was (of course) too late and i bricked my current installation. All the half-deleted config files made or impossible to start normally and extremely tedious to repair it by hand, so i reinstalled.

It has less to to with people having MBAs and much more to do with companies having shareholders. Once you’re a publicly traded company there are overwhelmingly strong external forces that compell companies to increase revenue. Even if the business model is perfectly solid and it doesn’t make sense to expect rising profits the shareholders only care about growth rates. On the stock market a companies value is only dependent on its growth.

Take Netflix for example. They’ve had so many users some years ago when they were basically the only streaming service that one might have said they reached market saturation. That would’ve been a money making machine that people could be content with. But since the market always needs growth it isn’t enough and netflix is always trying to “innovate” or squeezie more monthly payments from the existing customer base.

cory doctorow has coined the great word “enshittification” to describe this process. And its driven by the need to grow further even though its to the detriment of the service or the customers. In the end it’s the people with the MBAs doing it. But if they’re not doing it the shareholders replace them with those that do.