It must be confusing — upsetting, even! — to hear that somebody is willing to accurately and vociferously tear into a tech industry largely controlled by people with no regard for their users or workers, who are willing to bathe their products in mediocrity all because it’s the thing that everybody else is doing.

I love you Ed

The heavy users of AI are even dumber than the CEOs, at least the CEOs are getting rich.

Just go play Motor Town: Behind The Wheel.

Trust me the driving physics are second to only maybe BeamNG and the open world GTA sidejob like structure is a blast to chill out and play in multiplayer or singleplayer.

Urgent taxi jobs are awesome point to point races.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1369670/Motor_Town_Behind_The_Wheel/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DqdhBP_U4Y

Fuck Microsoft

I propose when AMD does this we call it an “AMD 1”.

what infrastructure will the ai bubble leave behind when it collapses?

An understandable hatred and mistrust of Silicon Valley tech types and technology in general within people.

Fucking incompetent idiots

Google is a perfect example that the idea that capitalism is inherently efficient is an absurd fantasy.

Google represents an absolutely massive waste of talent and all of it is focused on making the world a markedly worse place.

Conservatives are in the process of killing science in the US, why are people acting like NASA has a future?

I love improv and blackbox theater, I understand this intimately. I will never argue for entirely replacing in person interaction, of course in person interaction has the highest immediate potential for saturating your senses with social information.

However you are making a basic thinking error here that environments with a higher saturation of simultaneous social signals are superiro to more focused or abstracted ones.

I have had many intimate conversations on a phone with someone that may never have quite happened the same way, or the words would not have found a way out perhaps if the conversation had happened in a different context and in person. This isn’t about being afraid to say something in person, it is rather that the medium of a phone conversation allows a unique form of intimacy that is different but not better than in person interaction. The same thing with writing a letter, or even a heartfelt text.

Don’t reduce the quality of my argument by suggesting I think social media replaces in person interaction, that is not what I am arguing in the slightest.

I also think it is extremely reductive to call digital spaces inhuman simply because humans cannot physically/literally fit inside the digital spaces. What it means to be human and have human conversations is way more nuanced and harder to pin down than just “are two human bodies making noises at one another in same room”.

One example of this nuance is that for many people the capacity to explore removed, abstracted identities online at different parts of their life was crucial to them finding themselves more wholistically. Social interaction and the fulfilment of our social nature isn’t just a raw calculation of time physically spent in the same room as other humans.

To put it succintly, you are essentially arguing color photography is inherently better than black and white photography because more information always is better and more meaningful/impactful. That is NOT how we are wired which isn’t to say that color isn’t important in our lives.

How is this a bait and switch?

I asked you for proof how does that mean I am not being genuine rational or open minded?

Where is your proof? Certainly letting corporations design social media to be addictive as possible is detrimental but your claim that social media does nothing for the social learning process is inherently absurd.

Social media is humans socializing. Yes corporations have made social media into a toxic thing, but that is the doing of corporations not humans.

I live in the US and my interactions on the fediverse are more often genuine, rational and open minded than they are in person and it isn’t even close.

People are too exhausted and broken down by daily life to have interesting discussions anyways, everything just becomes discussions about work usually.

This is the reality of living in a broken society and is why broadly excluding youth from social media is tantamount to an act of manslaughter.

In my opinion there are two major differences between Windows and most Linux distros.

1. Capitalization matters to file names and such in Linux whereas in Windows it does not.

2. Linux thinks about permissions different programs and users have at a much more explicit level. It is a bit confusing at first why you have to keep interfacing with that part of the operating system, but it makes way more sense for programs to have permission to act in specific places for security and stability reasons.

Some other responses to your questions…

Steam can run windows games for the most part fine, just go into game properties and change the compatability setting to “proton hotfix”. I play Winspww2, an oldddd DOS game on Linux and it runs better than it does on Windows. I have also been able to install mods to Windows games on Linux by adding the mod installer to Steam and running it in Proton and then adjusting where the install folder is located.

You can pretty much have any kind of file system GUI set up you want in Linux. There are many file explorers and ways to do basic stuff like that, frame your questions by asking for Linux equivalents of Windows software you particularly liked and you will get good recommendations.

Can we stop repeating Anthropic’s fear mongering about AI? They are just trying to prop up their stock price and keep the bubble from popping a little longer.

I haven’t found a way to directly add an outline frame to the text but you can go to tools->shapes and set it to outline no fill and manually do frame the text

The interface is a bit strange at first but it is a genuine multiple layer image editor it is great.

A tip, make sure to confirm/complete a tool’s action before you switch to a different one, it is easy to switch off a tool while it is still “previewing” something.

For Android I highly recommend Pocket Paint from FDroid.

https://f-droid.org/packages/org.catrobat.paintroid/

https://github.com/Catrobat/Paintroid

looks over from still making shitty memes in GIMP

“Huh?”

ACAB

Glad they responded so dynamically to Blender users but I really think programmers and tech people need to take a giant step back and look at how they appear when they blindly endorse AI hype.

I think the nature of bubbles like this is “experts” become convinced of something that exists in their field that every day normal people can see is utter bullshit and how bad/destructively the resulting bubble pops depends on how humble and willing the “experts” are to coming around to what everybody else already concluded about the thing they were “experts” about. In this case given the smug hubris of techbros, the bubble is going to pop about as violently as possible…

I speculate that a big reason for this hubris is tech/computer minded people tend to focus on practical problems and solutions and will reflexively “lean in” to examine something confusing or unknown closer and closer until they get it, discarding vague grey areas until a binary, automatable reality emerges.

To people who think like this, thank you for existing and solving so many problems but you must recognize this type of thinking is systematically vulnerable to bullshitting since bullshit pulls its power from a periphery integrated in a fantastical way rather than a lie about the heart of something being different than it is.

In other words in my opinion “tech people” will tend to look for bullshit in the mechanisms, not the people, not the incentives, not the overall motion of the collective sum of individuals “innocently” optimizing their own corner of a wholistically nonsensical, hurtful enterprise. A programmer says “get rid of the fluff, what is it precisely, in a step by step fashion we are trying to do?”. Thank goodness programmers do ask and answers questions in such a fashion for us, but with that kind of thinking comes a blindspot to a massive economic bubble that is hurting and will hurt many more people before it pops and then vastly more people after it pops.

It is not ethical to be connected with scammers and architects of avoidable economic catastrophe and it is not ethical to lend your own credibility as Blender developers to them.

These people should be in jail for lying about what they are selling to a criminal degree. This isn’t even about the specifics of the AI part, rather it is like Blender making a corporate sponsorship with a Subprime Mortgage company right before the 2008 Financial Crash. Not only is the money fake, you don’t want to be associated with the fakeness of those “grand ideas” or they will swallow you whole. Turn around and run away as fast as you can, AI is bullshit and it certainly IS NOT profitable.

The idea Blender would let Anthropic’s name be associated with it is a serious insult to the Blender community.