A geek, who no longer likes tech
One of the things they want to highlight is that AI is associated with increase in energy usage, which will speed up climate change. It’s not merely about “stop DDoSing us with AI-generated code”, it feels more of a political statement “let’s try to do better than just put fossil on fire so we can save X minutes writing code and thinking”
I share his vision. For this exact same reason I get angry, when people start rambling about software engineers being needed no more. It’s exactly the same abstraction layer extension, as compilers were, albeit the one that grants even less control over execution flow.
It is very ironical, but it actually is truth: I usually am capable of taking much better care of myself and people around me when I am hangover, even though I really hate the feeling :/
Didn’t it happen in the past already? I was definitely sure it did!
vim, awesomewm, mbsync (isync),
As for recent discoveries: dwl — I was surprised on how robust it is, and how well it works.
So truth. We’ve had so much times situations at home, when we wanted to watch a particular movie, yet it was not available on any streaming service, and you had to be subscribed even to check if it is present on the platform. Piracy just ended up the only available option that times…
I’ve been running ministral on CPU on a home-server: works pretty nicely, not very performant for everyday tasks and the savings were not sufficient for it to make sense. It still was cheaper and faster to just use Mistral API and get better models.
So although I understand those defending the right to keep their media, the publishers have the right to release it however they want.
I’ve been thinking about this exact thing for quite a while, and I think there is a gem hidden in this paragraph: the publishers have right to sell their product how they see it fit. At the same time, I as a consumer have a right to consume the product the way I like.
The availability of options 20-25 years ago made media truly free, where everyone could watch things however they liked: either it is a home projector, or have movie nights with friends on home TV, or is it watching on the go on crappy MP4 screen. Nowadays, though, it is moving back towards “we control how you watch it — period”. And that is infuriating: to get some freedom, and then get stripped of it just because there was a minor group called “pirate”, who started stealing it (taking into account that in most cases, those pirates had limited availability of the products: either financial, or governmental, ahoy from post-ussr country). I think, those corps are playing a blame game of moving responsibility for the harm to the consumers (similarly as it goes with plastics recycling). They basically are blaming people for making them to enforce those rules, while most of those malicious customers turned out more frequent buyers than regular paying customers, and provide invaluable intelligence on popularity of things[1], and made their products widely available at places they were not.
The problem is not about having bluray, it is about not having it available in any they cannot take away, because of “reasons”. That is exactly what happened to Office 2019, and that product was not released that long ago: 2019 is only 7 years ago. At the same time, people nowadays resurrect old games and software to make it work on modern hardware, take a look at GOG Preservation Program[2] as an example. They even had a conflict with Blizzard for selling WarCraft 1 and WarCraft 2 in original state and form, while Blizz decided to get more money on cheap remake[3].
I see that the Office 2019 story reminded us that the rights of buyer of digital media are inherently assymetrical to what publisher have. 'Cause when I buy a car, I can do with it whatever I want: I can tweak it, I can get it into various shops for service, etc. What happens with the software/media is “well, you paid us, but you still have to do things the way we want you to do them”: feels like a crappy leasing to me, for paying a full price.
That brings me to my personal rule: if I can buy it, I better buy it. If I cannot buy it without strings attached, then the piracy is somewhat justified. Exceptions can be small authors, but then I just try to find a way to finance them: either via patreon, or whatever else. People deserve to be paid for work, though people also deserve to be treated as entities of agency, not blind obedience.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmOPM1cSrY4, disclaimer: I couldn’t verify sources, take that into account too
2: https://www.gog.com/en/gog-preservation-program
UPD: fixed bad links formatting
EpicGames, huh? I did not expect that!
IMO, the only way the switch will actually happen is not the RAM or GPU, but if more manufacturers will start selling new/refurbished devices with Linux on it. Reason being: most people treat computers exactly the same way as I treat my car. I won’t bother replacing firmware, engine, transmission, or even tires on my car if there is no good reason for it. Same goes for people: they won’t be replacing OS, CPU, RAM, disk, etc, except there will be a really good reason for it.
Though, one thing to be mentioned: I generally see the trend that Linux is becoming more popular as more and more popular people adopt it (and are vocal that they have better time with it than with the alternative): PewDiePie, Linus Sebastian, etc. I think the trend might potentially accelerate, as more and more people are really unhappy with how well Windows works these days, and not everyone is ready to buy Mac (though the most recent Neo release success is a great indicator of how bad situation on the market is overall)
I think every smart enough person all over the world have noticed, how fragile relying on oil is. Hence more and more electrification will occur, because it is much more safe resource to acquire these days :3
Good thing that cars industry is moving that way too, so I guess the world will become more and more SolarPunk-ish :D
One ironical thing about that video is that it uses YouTube. YT is a bit of a non-competitor as of now, and I don’t feel it is possible to have any feasible alternative that would be scalable as much :(
I think this became as obvious only for the last few months, after another oil supply crisis emerged. I myself became much more “for” renewable energy sources, as it is much easier to see it on the price difference of petrol versus electricity :)
I presume that their employers just had terms that essentially gave the whole IP to the employer. And GPL is conflicting that, especially if they were producing the code using employers equipment, which essentially makes all the code to belong to employer. At the same time, GPL maintains the IP on the author of the code.
Not a lawyer, though I heard that some far-eastern companies have copied the US policymaking, which allows full separation of IP from the author.
There are folks form KDE who are trying to implement the Plasma Bigscreen solution: https://plasma-bigscreen.org/. Seems promising to me :)
Though, I’d still recommend to use an external device to avoid breaking the TV OS up ;)
The web ui with integration of email ecosystem for all those things are one of core selling points of https://sr.ht/
I’d say this list is not about moving towards FLOSS, but more about breaking up with Google services. Some replacements are betters, some worse, but definitely in each column there is at least one non-floss application 🤔
I’ve been following the software forge federation some time ago, and didn’t feel to pick up even when it was discusssed initially. It is a neat idea on high-level, though it requires forges to implement it, which has a risk of not picking up (just look at how much iterations of social media federation protocols was there, until ActivityPub arose).
On the other hand, all of the forges are based on a distributed technology out of the box: git. Most of the “modern days” comforts there are, are just built on top, and there are different ways to approach it.
As an example, you can send patches directly to the author in email. Is heavily implemented and suggested by https://sr.ht/ (1) — a software forge, which focuses on building a federated workflow by using email for communication (which is federated by design). This way, you can create “Pull Requests” without having account on the forge — all you need to do is just submit a patch. Author is very vocal about supporting it (2), and provides quite useful guides to learn (3), (4)
Generally, I’d say that e-mail is the only federative implementation you can get so far :)
I have exactly same view over this, that is why I am trying as much as possible to utilize local LLMs — as at least it will use local power and will not become a tool of moving even more control back to the central entities, which are corrupt by nature.