Think, genuinely and critically, about what it means when someone tells you that you shouldn’t judge the ethics and values of their pursuits, because they are simply discovering “universal truths”.

No scientist or engineer as ever said that as far as I can recall. I was explaining that even for scientific fact which is morally neutral how you get there is important, and that scientists and engineers acknowledge this. What you are asking me to do this based on a false premise and a bad understanding of how science works.

And then, really make sure you ponder what it means when people say the purpose of a system is what it does.

It both is and isn’t. Things often have consequences alongside their intended function, like how a machine gets warm when in use. It getting warm isn’t a deliberate feature, it’s a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. We actually try to minimise this as it wastes energy. Even things like fossil fuels aren’t intended to ruin the planet, it’s a side effect of how they work.

What exactly is there to gain with AI anyways? What’s the great benefit to us as a species? So far its just been used to trivialize multiple artistic disciplines, basic service industries, and programming.

The whole point is that much like industrial automation it reduces the number of hours people need to work. If this leads to people starving then that’s a problem with the economic system, not with AI technology. You’re blaming the wrong field here. In fact everyone here blaming AI/ML and not the capitalists is being a Luddite.

It’s also entirely possible it will start replacing managers and capitalists as well. It’s been theorized by some anti-capitalists and economic reformists that ML/AI and computer algorithms could one day replace current economic systems and institutions.

Things have a cost, many people are doing the cost-benefit analysis and seeing there is none for them. Seems most of the incentive to develop this software is if you would like to stop paying people who do the jobs listed above.

This sadly is probably true of large companies producing big, inefficient ML models as they can afford the server capacity to do so. It’s not true of people tweaking smaller ML models at home, or professors in universities using them for data analysis or to aid their teaching. Much like some programmers are getting fired because of ML, others are using it to increase their productivity or to help them learn more about programming. I’ve seen scientists who otherwise would struggle with data analysis related programming use ChatGPT to help them write code to analyse data.

What do we get out of burning the planet to the ground? And even if you find an AI thats barely burning it, what’s the point in the first place?

As the other guy said there are lots of other things using way more energy and fossil fuels than ML. Machine learning is used in sciences to analyse things like the impacts of climate change. It’s useful enough in data science alone to outweigh the negative impacts. You would know about this if you ever took a modern data science module. Furthermore being that data centres primarily use electricity it’s relatively easy to move them to green sources of energy compared to say farming, or transport. In fact some data centres already use green energy primarily. Data centres will always exist regardless of AI and ML anyway, it’s just a matter of scale.

That’s not at all what I am doing, or what scientists and engineers do. We are all trained to think about ethics and seek ethical approval because even if knowledge itself is morally neutral the methods to obtain that knowledge can be truly unhinged.

Scientific facts are not a cultural facet. A device built using scientific knowledge is also a product of the culture that built it. Technology stands between objective science and subjective needs and culture. Technology generally serves some form of purpose.

Here is an example: Heavier than air flight is a possibility because of the laws of physics. A Boeing 737 is a specific product of both those laws of physics and of USA culture. It’s purpose is to get people and things to places, and to make Boeing the company money.

LLMs can be used for good and ill. People have argued they use too much energy for what they do. I would say that depends on where you get your energy from. Ultimately though it doesn’t use as much as people driving cars or mining bitcoin or eating meat. You should be going after those first if you want to persecute people for using energy.

The idea of universal healthcare being far left wing would be obscene where I live as it’s already a reality here in the UK and in much of Europe. Far left to me is Marxists, Anarchists, and left accelerationists.

I don’t use or particularly believe in secure boot.

I have a fully encrypted root partition, with automatic unlocking using the TPM. Wasn’t even that hard to setup either. Bazzite makes it fairly easy to enroll a secure boot key if you really want that, as do some other distros. Nothing you are describing is that difficult.

A lot of systems use AppArmour instead of SELinux, as this is easier to work with while still providing enhanced security.

What are you talking about? Windows isn’t very secure to begin with. Bazzite in particular is one of the more secure Linux desktop distros as it’s immutable and comes with SELinux enabled by default. It’s secure enough to actually cause me problems lol.

It’s not just that though is it? It’s a slower SoC, less RAM, possibly less storage, lower screen resolution, and I would be spending money to get it after just upgrading my phone a few months ago. So a downgrade in every other category while paying for it. On top of that losing banking apps and breaking the warranty. In what world does that make sense?

It’s something I could consider when looking for a new phone, but not right now. The fact you have to buy a new phone just to get a different ROM is absurd. In the PC world you can just install any different OS you pretty much fancy, with relatively few hardware issues in the way (such as Nvidia).

What I am saying is that if Illustrator breaks on Windows, you might have to reinstall Windows. If it breaks on Linux, you just reinstall in a new wine prefix, or restore from a backup or snapshot. The rest of the system remains unaffected. Does that make sense?

Well they believe in a social safety net, which US libertarians don’t. So I wouldn’t necessarily put them in the same bracket. I still think their politics is somewhat foolish, but I think the same thing of many far left people.

Honestly that would make me want to run them in wine more. Wine environments can be controlled a lot easier than a Windows install can be.

Technology is a product of science. The facts science seeks to uncover are fundamental universal truths that aren’t subject to human folly. Only how we use that knowledge is subject to human folly. I don’t think open source or open weights models are a bad usage of that knowledge. Some of the things corporations do are bad or exploitative uses of that knowledge.

It will probably be too late by then

You mean like 50%? Or do you only mean desktop users? Which would be 4%.

It’s true that Trump made some kind of declaration as President, but that was pretty much a meaningless gesture. The US actually has no official list of domestic terror organizations, only foreign. In any case, calling antifa a terrorist organization is absurd.

That makes more sense.

A quick note on libertarianism: I consider myself a libertarian, but what passes for libertarianism in the US is anything but. Libertarianism is a left wing political philosophy, while the US Libertarian party is far right. It would be more accurate to label them as anarcho-capitalist.

Neither of us live or are from the USA. So I don’t think this is relevant here.

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• Well Raytracing doesn’t work in Cyberpunk 2077. Besides that, some other games also have terrible performance. Even Minecraft, that’s running natively. Constant stutters with low GPU utilization.

I suspect you have GPU driver issues. What distro and graphics card are you running? Have you installed GPU drivers if your on Nvidia.

• Logitech keyboard works but I cannot configure it because the software is not supported on Linux

You just install solaar instead of the official software, one and done. Have you even tried?

• Xbox controller does not connect with the dongle unless I install the xone drivers

So install it then.

Sure you can fix any of these problems above like running Windows software with Wine or installing the appropriet drivers. But I don’t want to do that if I can just use Windows with no extra work.

None of this is extra work compared to working around Microsoft and Windows trying to push their garbage. Two Windows 11 systems breaking is what led to me switching back to Linux for the last time. Having to reinstall because of Windows issues is a lot more effort than installing a couple things.

I’ve never owned an iPhone, so that comparison isn’t needed.

That’s what I have been told by a friend who is a libertarian. Is what he said wrong?

That’s completely false

They are gaming and content creation specific distros designed to work out of the box for those use cases. Lots of patches and stuff to improve performance and compatibility for gaming. Some hardware compatibility stuff is added too, such as bazzite having different images for laptops.