It’s not AI that is the problem, it’s half baked insecure data harvesting products pushed by big corporations that are the problem.
The biggest joke is that the LLM in Windows is running locally, it uses your hardware and not some big external server farm. But you can bet your ass that they still use it to data harvest the shit out of you.
To me this is even worse though. They’re using your electricity and CPU cycles to grab the data they want which lowers their bandwidth bills.
It happening “locally” while still sending all the metadata home is just a slap in the face.
Also, CoPilot is going to be bundled with Office 365, a subscription service. You’re literally paying them to spy on you.
- be microsoft, a whole bunch of greedy user-hostile fucks
- make spyware
- tell users that spyware is really cool and useful
- make them pay for the spyware
- use the spyware to get their data
- sell their data
- profit
Capitalism almost perfected.
- create a monopoly on operating systems
- leverage your dominant market position and force everyone to use your spyware
- big profit
Exactly. And if I use or even pay for an external LLM service then that’s also my decision. But they force this scheme onto every user, whether they want it or not. It’s like the worst out of all possible scenarios.
That’s a pretty big joke, but I think the bigger joke is calling LLMs AI. We taught linear algebra to talk real pretty and now corps want to use it to completely subsume our lives.
I think the bigger joke is calling LLMs AI
I have to disagree.
Frankly, LLMs (which are based on neural networks) seem a Hell of a lot closer to how actual brains work than “classical AI” (which basically boils down to a gigantic pile of
ifstatements) does.I guess I could agree that LLMs are undeserving of the term “AI”, but only in the sense that nothing we’ve made so far is deserving of it.
Let’s agree to disagree then. An LLM has no notion of semantics, it’s just outputting the most likely word to follow up to what it’s already written and the user’s input.
On the contrary, expert systems from back in the 90s for, say, predicting the atomic structure of an element, work like a human brain on steroids. It features an arbitrary large search tree that the software knows how to iterarively prune according to a well known set of chemical rules. We do the same when analyzing a set of options.
Debugging “current” AI models, on the other hand, is impossible because all we’re doing is prescripting a composition of functions and forcing it to minimize a loss function. That’s all we’re doing. How can you currently tell that a certain model is going to work? Unless the mathematical theory ever catches up with the technology, we’ll never know until we execute the code.
seem a Hell of a lot closer
“seem” is the critical word there. Interacting with an LLM they do seem to be pretty clever.
I’m not talking about interacting with it. I’m talking about how it’s implemented, from my perspective as a computer scientist.
Let me say it more concretely: if even shitty expert systems, which are literally just flowcharts implemented in procedural code, are considered “AI” – and historically speaking, they are – then the bar is really fucking low. LLMs, which at least make an effort to kinda resemble the structure of biological intelligence, are certainly way, way above it.
I’m actually sad that the state of AI deserves the hate it gets. Neural networks are so sick, just going through the example of detecting a diagonal on a 2x2 grid was like magic to me. And they made me second guess simulation theory for quite a while lmao
Tangentially, blockchain was a similar phenomenon for me. Or at least trust networks. One idea was to just throw away Certificate Authorities. Basically federate all the things, and this was before we knew about the fediverse. It gets all the hate because of crypto, but it’s cool tech. The CA thing would probably lead to a bad place too, though.
That is an accurate description of AI in common usage even if it isn’t an inherent aspect of AI.
Locally run AI could be great. But sending all your data to an external server for processing is really, really bad.
You wrote AI twice.
I wonder if some big AI heads will publish some “AI enhanced” Linux distros, that will also have other issues…
I expect canonical to do it to Ubuntu.
Almost definitely.
It’s not the “AI nightmare”, it’s a nightmare of capitalism, proprietary software and user-hostile behavior by a greedy, profit-extracting Big Tech corporation.
All true, and all a problem for which linux has been a solution (in the computing world) for decades now.
It’s not just Linux, but free & open source software in general. And it’s not just desktop PCs that are plagued by this corporate spyware, it’s much worse when looking at the mobile device landscape. The only real solution for mobile devices is GrapheneOS with FOSS software installed from the F-Droid marketplace. Browsers are also under attack by proprietary software corporations, Google just intentionally broke adblockers on all Chromium-based browsers, so they can generate more ad revenue. Last year, they tried to push a proposal that would have massively extended their monopoly on web browsers (WEI). All the streaming services are screwing their users over and increasing the subscription prices while making the content library smaller. It’s such a fucking scam, and it’s almost sad to see how many people are dumb enough to fall for it.
To your last point: I think a significant number of people these days are aware just how much corporations are bending us over, but most of us are just so exhausted at the end of the day to really make a huge stink about it when all we want to do is just vegitate on the couch for a few hours before we have to go to sleep, then wake up the next day and do it all over again. The current paradigm is horseshit, but the puppeteers make sure we work ourselves to the bone so that we’re too tired to really do anything about it aside from bitching online.
Are browsers not able to patch manifest v2 back into the browser?
Brave apparently wants to do that, but it’s not a great long term solution. The feature should actually be supported upstream, that’s why Firefox is a much better option, and a better base for a fork to create a new browser.
Praise Stallman
You’re not wrong. AI is just another tool to scrape cash to the top while eliminating jobs. Could it realize benefits like doing specialized research and testing? Sure…but again, the results of that work are lost human jobs and scraping money to the top. We can argue about advancing technology in a horse cart driver vs automobile thing (won’t anyone think about the poor farriers out of work?) but we’ve already done everything we can to eliminate blue collar jobs with as much automation as possible. Now AI is set to attack middle class jobs. Economically I don’t think that’s going to work out well.
I mean, the problem isn’t the existence/obviation of jobs, but what we do next when it happens. If the people whose jobs are automated away are left out with no money or employment, that’s a serious problem. If we as a society support them in learning something new that puts their skills to good use, and maybe even reduce the expected working hours of a full-time job to 35 or 32 hours a week, that’s an absolute win in my book.
Well that’s the point. We don’t support them as a society. From education to health care once you lose your job, you’re SOL, and in this hyper-capitalist dystopia we keep tipping towards I don’t see that changing.
Look, Linux is amazing and perfect for those that can install and maintain with minimal support. The only way the average user will use Linux, is if it’s wrapped in a way that is supported by a business… that is probably going to add AI. People are lazy, they want that easy button.
AI will probably die off in its current iteration, likely becoming less prevalent and just a background service. Or, it’ll gain sentience, watch all our AI movies where we’re the hero and learn the most efficient way to kill all humans, is to be quiet and silently kill off humans. Pretty sure I’m on Siri’s list, the twat. Also, fairly sure I told Alexa to “die in a fire you fucking dumass robot”. Yep, yep… I’m dead.
So why don’t people have a business installing and administering linux for people?
They do. They are called servers.
But no one is using Linux desktop computers in a business environment because corporate IT departments don’t want to have to deal with the nightmare that is installing packages every 5 minutes.
Linux is fine if you’re into computers and like fiddling around, but if you just need the damn thing to work you don’t want to mess with Linux. It doesn’t “just work”.
People keep pointing the finger at AI, but miss the fact that the problem is corporate greed. AI has the possibility to help us solve problems, corporate greed will gate keep the solutions and cause us suffering.
I want all the cool Ai shit, but I want to be in charge of it 100%. I don’t want a data mining company with an OS side project spying on me for profit.
Sure. But then, Linux may well be a solution against corporate greed.
Linux is a solution against corporate greed, it directly takes market share away from Microsoft, and is a viable competitive alternative with few drawbacks.
LLMs in particular are unlikely to solve really any problems, much less a measurable number of the problems it is currently being thrown at.
Tell that to the code I have it write and debug daily. I was skeptical at first, but it’s been a huge help for that, as well s learning new (development) languages.
Mate, all it does is predict the next word or phrase. It doesn’t know what you’re trying to do or have any ethics. When it fucks up it’s going to be your fuckup and since you relied on the bot rather than learned to do it yourself you’re not going to be able to fix it.
I understand how it works, but that’s irrelevant if it does work as a tool in my toolkit. I’m also not relying on the LLM, I’m taking it with a massive grain of salt. It usually gets most of the way there, and I have to fix issues or have it revise the code. For simple stuff that’d be busy work for me, it does pretty well.
It would be my fuck up if it fucks up, and I don’t catch it. I’m not putting code it writes directly into production, I’m not stupid.
People keep pointing the finger at AI, but miss the fact that the problem is
corporate greedcapitalism. AI has the possibility to help us solve problems,corporate greedcapitalism will gate keep the solutions and cause us suffering.No need to thank me.
We don’t have capitalism in the US, we have late-stage crony capitalism. Regulated capitalism is fine, but we are in a crony capitalist system which feeds corporate greed. Our government is controlled by a handful of mega corps which have their hands pulling the strings due to the lobbying system. It wasn’t always this way, which is why I don’t blame capitalism, I blame human greed.
late-stage crony capitalism.
So… capitalism.
crony capitalist system which feeds corporate greed.
Sooo… capitalism?
Our government is controlled by a handful of mega corps which have their hands pulling the strings due to the lobbying system.
So just bog-standard capitalism, then?
Regulated capitalism is fine
The Soviets tried that and failed. The Chinese tried it too, and it turned into… bog-standard capitalism.
Nope, wrong. Entirely.
It’s always been crony capitalism. There is no other kind of capitalism - never has been.
it’s greed. whether under a socialist regime, capitalist, communist or other, all it takes to destroy the system is for greedy people in power to force it open by buying judges and politicians. capitalism is in no way a prerequisite.
whether under a socialist regime,
There is no such thing as a “socialist” regime… not in the way we generally use the term regime, anyway. And the regimes that (falsely) attributed to themselves the characteristics of socialism never claimed to make a virtue out of human greed like our neoliberal ones do.
all it takes to destroy the system is for greedy people
Are you trying to say that a disjointed and incoherent jumble of pretexts, justifications and outright lies masquerading as an ideology that specifically exists to justify said human greed will (somehow) be destroyed by human greed?
Looks to me like it’s working as designed… and not “destroyed” at all.
Linux has been great for me. I switched during Windows 10 forced updates and never been unhappy since. I hope more people at least give a try. If you have a computer that can’t meet Windows 11 requirements, it is worth a shot.
“The Year Of Linux on Desktops”. Been hearing this for decades, but it might actually be happening. What I’m feeling now is the same thing I felt when Mozilla originally split Firefox out, and made the first real competition to corporate browsers as a free product. People don’t want all this bullshit, and want to retain control over the machines they are working on. Seems a lot more people are interested in FOSS environments now just to avoid all the other BS they hate getting shoveled at them.
“The Year Of Linux on Desktops”. Been hearing this for decades, but it might actually be happening.
Been hearing this for decades.
And it won’t ever be true until you can pick up a PC running Linux in a big box store. I could see the Steam Deck (and Valve’s rumoured upcoming console) to make a dent in the PC gaming space, but it won’t make a difference to the purchasing decisions of your your aunt who uses her pc to check her emails.
Should corporate buyers ever get tired of MS’ shenanigans they might switch over to Ubuntu, but I’m not holding my breath for that.
Thanks to the Steamdeck Linux users on Steam now outnumber Mac users. Still a tiny percentage of total Steam users but if developers increase support we will hopefully see that number take off.
At work, we have a strict ban on purchasing any laboratory equipment that requires Windows. After about a year, several of our suppliers have been pressured to offer Linux support, precisely because we don’t have time for windows shenanigans on a $100k piece of advanced benchtop hardware. We just got our first oscilloscope with Red Hat preinstalled.
Also, regular people aren’t buying PCs as much as they used to. The PC is now a workplace and enthusiast device. Everyone else uses mobile.
several of our suppliers have been pressured to offer Linux support
We just got our first oscilloscope with Red Hat preinstalled.
This is so cool. Really great to hear. I wish more companies and other institutions would do this. They have to realize that using Microsoft software won’t benefit them in the long term, and actually start pressuring hardware vendors into pre-installing Linux.
I find it unbelievable that anyone ever accepted lab equipment with a Windows requirement. I mean, I know it is true, but what the fuck? Glad your work is doing this.
I was not around at that time. Some of the systems I support are very long lived. At the time, having windows running on some of your equipment wasn’t seen as a liability. I guess you have to get bitten a few times before you understand that you need control of that system including the software.
I don’t want to avoid it. I just want it locally
At least with the more advanced LLM’s (and I’d assume as well for stuff like image processing and generation), it requires a pretty considerable amount of GPU just to get the thing to run at all, and then even more to spit something out. Some people have enough to run the basics, but most laptops would simply be incapable. And very few people would have resources to get the kind of outputs that the more advanced AI’s produce.
Now, that’s not to say it shouldn’t be an option, or that they force you to have some remote AI baked into your proprietary OS that you can’t remove without breaking user license agreements, just saying that it’s unfortunately harder to implement locally than we both probably wish it was.
That’s true but if you don’t mind the fact that the AI can’t learn anything new you can actually go hardware optimization routes and get pretty good performance. We’re starting to see AI chips being made. They will do for AI what GPUs did for graphics.
However these hardware optimized chips are only for running the AI you still need GPUs for training it. I could see a situation where new models are trained by big companies and then the results are sold to individuals who then buy the packages and install them on local chips.
So… Heu… How to say that… Linux still the solution for this.
I’m sure I can install a local AI on a Windows PC as well. Linux is not the solution to every possible problem in the universe. Oh indeed many of them
And forced the hardware obsolescence nightmare.
And the big tech surveillance nightmare.
And the nightmare of the war on general purpose computers. (OK, that is more GNU and GPLv3)
And a few other nightmares!
I choose to privately self-host open source AI models and stuff on Linux. It’s almost like technology is a tool and corps are the ones fucking things up. Hmmm, imagine that.
It’s so fun to play with offline AI. It doesn’t have the creepy underpinnings of knowing art and journalism as well as musings from social media was blatantly stolen from the internet and sold as a service for profit.
Edit: I hate theft and if you think theft is ok for training llms go ahead and dislike this comment. I don’t feel bad about what I said, local offline AI is just better because it doesn’t work on the premise of backroom deals and blatant theft. I will never use an AI like DALL.E when there is a talented artist trying to put food on the table with a skill they honed for years. If you condone stealing you are a cheap, heartless, coward.
I hate to break it to you, but if you’re running an LLM based on (for example) Llama the training data (corpus) that went into it was still large parts of the Internet.
The fact that you’re running the prompts locally doesn’t change the fact that it was still trained on data that could be considered protected under copyright law.
It’s going to be interesting to see how the law shakes out on this one, because an artist going to an art museum and doing studies of those works (and let’s say it’s a contemporary art museum where the works wouldn’t be in the public domain) for educational purposes is likely fair use - and possibly encouraged to help artists develop their talents. Musicians practicing (or even performing) other artists’ songs is expected during their development. Consider some high school band practicing in a garage, playing some song to improve their skills.
I know the big difference is that it’s people training vs a machine/LLM training, but that seems to come down to not so much a copyright issue (which it is in an immediate sense) as a “should an algorithm be entitled to the same protections as a person? If not, what if real AI (not just an LLM) is developed? Should those entities be entitled to personhood?”
I hate to break it to you but not all machine learning is llms based. I’ve been messing with neural based tts from a small project called piper. I’m looking into an image recognition neural network to write software for and train myself. I might try writing it myself for fun 🤔
I’m not interested in anything that uses stolen data like that so my options are limited and relegated to incredibly focused single purpose tools or things I make myself with the tools available.
I’d love to play with image generation and large language models but until all the legal stuff is worked out and individuals get paid for their work I’m not touching it.
To me it’s as cut and dry as this. If it’s the difference between an individual becoming their own boss/making a better living and a corporation growing their market cap I’ll always choose the individual. I know there’s a possibility of that growth resulting in more jobs but I’d rather have an environment where small businesses open breed competition and overall improve everyone’s life. Let’s not give the keys over to companies like Microsoft and close more doors.
I don’t care about the discussion of true AI having rights. It’s only going to be used to make the wealthy wealthier.
Sorry I feel strongly about this. Play with it all you want it’s really cool shit! But please don’t pay for access to it and if you need some art or a professional write-up please just pay someone to do it.
It’ll mean so much to your fellow man in these uncertain times and the quality will be so much better.
I’m not paying anyone for anything, not OpenAI techbro grifters and not any freelancer grifters
All LLMs are based on neural networks. Furthermore, all neural networks need training, regardless of whether they’re an LLM or some other form of machine learning. If you want to ensure there’s no stolen material used in the neural net then you have to train it yourself with material that you have the copyright to.
Boy I love it when people don’t read.
I was expanding on your point, you twat. But hey, just be a snarky cunt. I’m sure that’ll get you far.
Sorry I thought you were being a smartass and just skimmed through it. Truly my bad.
Edit: it’s hard to tell intention sometimes and I really do appreciate you summarizing what I said. It’s true and a more approachable answer than what I gave.
I am basically a layman, i do music productions and in the past VSTs seemed to never work properly nor the authentication software that some us. Has it gotten better in the past few years, is there a specific one i should try? i have tried Ubuntu but nothing else to be fair. Also if i want to make a plex server on an old PC, what would people recommend? thanks to anyone who responds!
edit - Thanks to all that responded, i have some direction now. Appreciated!
For music production check out Ubuntu Studio. Any distro can run music production stuff but Ubuntu Studio has all the required bits ready to go.
For DAW I transitioned into Reaper which runs natively on Linux. VST support with wine and yabridge works generally fine. For Native Instruments you need to use a legacy installer. I bet there are still problems with some vendor authorizations. You should just test it out to see if your favorite VSTs are supported.
To add to this Ardour may be worth a look for DAW. I haven’t touched it in a while but recall it being rather nice.
Also if i want to make a plex server on an old PC, what would people recommend?
Any desktop PC built in the last 10 years should be fine. Just stick some hard drives in it :)
Intel processors are a good choice because their onboard graphics is quite good for video encoding/decoding. 6th gen or newer Intel Core processors (2015 or newer) would work well. They improved the H265 encoding/decoding a lot in 8th gen (2018) so that’d be even better. You can use something older but you’d need to also use a graphics card for video encoding/decoding, and it’d use more power.
Having said that, keep in mind that performance per watt always improves over time, meaning newer processors are more powerful even if they use the same power as the previous generation. A newer i3 will perform better than a very old i7. Using an very old, power-hungry system may end up more expensive in the long run compared to a newer mini PC.
I like using Proxmox. It lets you run multiple virtual machines on the system. VMs are good because you can easily snapshot them and revert back to an old snapshot in case of issues, and you can easily move the VM to a different system in the future. I use Unraid at home and really like it. It’s a bit simpler than Proxmox, but it costs money to use (Proxmox is free for personal use).
The only real medicine for AI nightmare, is having your own local and trained model. Like a 7B or above that. I read a lot about it, go to network chuck youtube channel, he teaches you how to set up and run your own AI based on yourself, that never shares information, it’s open-source and it runs even in a laptop.
Yes, but can you play modern games on Linux the same as on Windows? Even with anti-cheat software?
FYI Helldivers 2 works fine on an ubuntu + AMD GPU, as well as Baldur’s Gate 3. Haven’t tested any other game yet.
Setup is trivial thanks to Steam and proton.
With some anti cheat - no. You cannot. LoL, Valorant, Apex Legends - all no go for me… But for everything else I play. No issues at all - infact a lot of games run better on Pop_os than they do on Windows.
FYI, I’ve clocked over 1000 hours on Apex Legends, not a single one of them on Windows.
Ayyyeeee - just my experience, glad it’s working!
Battlebit also works fine and it uses easy anti cheat
Good to know! Thank you.
Steam Deck is extremely capable.
“The year of Linux on the Desktop” is in the article. This again? Been reading this for decades and it’s still not true.
Linux is close, but has some core flaws that will forever keep it out of mainstream acceptance by your average user.
every year is the year of linux for linux users. not so much for other people
Linux is close, but has some core flaws that will forever keep it out of mainstream acceptance by your average user.
It has nothing to do with any flaws within Linux itself. The problem is and has always been that it’s nearly impossible to buy a PC with any flavour of Linux pre-installed. Until that changes, Linux (on home user desktops) will never gain mainstream acceptance.
Didn’t HP sell some fancy shmancy laptops that came with Ubuntu or some flavor of it? Think it was for developers but I thought that was the closest we gotten to commercially selling Linux based machines.
P.S. I could be wrong about this but I am sure this happened.
HP sold he DevOne, it had PopOS on it. Dell sells an XPS developer machine that has Ubuntu pre installed. System76, Entroware, and Tuxedo computers have all been selling Linux hardware for a long time. So there are viable commercial options. I wish the DevOne were going to get refreshed, it looks like a nice machine but alas, I don’t think it will.
I finally switched to Linux and I couldn’t be happier. I can’t believe I put up with microsofts garbage for so damn long.
Me too. Years ago I dabbled with Debian and Gentoo. Ubuntu was just up and coming then.
Now I went from Mint to Fedora KDE to Fedora Silverblue (nuked my disk and removed windows)
Gnome took a day to get used to but loving the workflow once I warmed up to it. Can’t believe how polished and rock solid the whole system is.
Gnome when you first use it feels like a stupid system, then once it “clicks”, you feel like the devs were goddamn geniuses for creating a workflow like it.
And yeah, the polish is nuts considering for a long time and assumption about FOSS was that all the apps are ugly and unpolished.
