4grams

I just threw it on the family laptop to give it another life. So far it’s great, and I would honestly suggest it as a regular user desktop system. My kids will be fine with it, so would my mom, and any of my non-tech-savvy friends.

Personally I probably won’t switch from my beloved LMDE, but I’m also a greybeard nerd who’s set in my ways.

I do use it myself (free tier only) but it’s out of ease and convenience. I’m ready to abandon it but I like the security it brings. My stuff is just personal garbage with no strict uptime requirement - if I lose public access I still have Tailscale and a VPN to my router as backup.

So, it’s a deal with the devil for sure, but it’s one I wore protection for when signing.

Fucking hell, I didn’t even notice the wig but here I am, fully clowned.

Oh, I agree, nothing wrong with mint. I just like the fact that the LMDE version is Debian based and works with everything I’ve thrown it at.

Figure proof of they ever decide to switch away from Ubuntu and mainline LMDE. Probably won’t happen, but makes me feel better anyway :).

Seconding LMDE. It’s Debian based rather than Ubuntu so no canonical to un-f. It’s my favorite distro. LMDE for desktop, vanilla Debian for servers.

LMDE for future proofing and stability. Sort of a comedy option, but it’s my distro of choice. As easy as Mint, as stable as Debian. I just don’t trust Ubuntu and since it’s a Debian based distro, why not take one more step…

I’m in the same boat. I love that it makes self hosting easier for me. It does what I need and even gives me a small extra measure of security. I admit, I use it because I’m lazy, I could do it without Cloudflare and do for some services. So, I figure if it truly becomes urgent or intolerable I can drop it from the stack.

It is now for me too :).

I like ‘sloppers’ as a term for the morons distrubing and consuming the shit that the clankers are excreting.

I have noticed that some of the regular creators I watch seem to look a little AI lately. I honestly have been questioning reality a bit; that’s probably the point.

Fucking hilarious that this is party that starts seizing the means of production.

It was never, ever even once about states rights. It was never about fighting communism. It’s all racism, always has been.

My relatives who’ve been screaming about mark of the beast and shit for years sure confuse the hell Out of me when they voice support for this while wearing their maga hats.

I can’t help but feel like this is the most important part of the article:

The model’s refusal to accept information to the contrary, meanwhile, is no doubt rooted in the safety mechanisms OpenAI was so keen to bake in, in order to protect against prompt engineering and injection attacks.

Do any of you believe that these “safety mechanisms” are there just for safety? If they can control ai, they will. This is how we got mecha-hitler, same mucking about with weights and such, not just what it was trained on.

They WILL, they already are, trying to control how ai “thinks”. This is why it’s desperately important to whatever we can to democratize ai. People have already decided that ai has all the answers, and folks like peter thiel now have the single most potent propaganda machine in history.

I’ve been playing with ai, pushing the limits of it as a therapy tool (I’m being honest, but I’m using myself as a test case). I’m really trying to evaluate it in good faith, mostly to try to see what’s addicting folks to it these days.

I just cannot get it to pass my “Turing test”. It’s just so sycophantic. Every time I get close to feeling like there’s something there, it falls back into the “blow smoke up your ass mode.”

So far my hours of conversing has only convinced me that folks who follow chatbot advice for such important life decisions, probably deserve it. I’m happily married, but if a girl ever broke up with me because a LLM told her to, I’d probably login to thank it (joke).

I wish I could disagree but every day when I try to talk about it, or get people to do something about it with me, so far 100% of time I get pushback for being alarmist, or that it’s fine, we’ll just vote better next time.

It’s more than just the apathy, it’s willing apathy, desired apathy, WEAPONOZED apathy. That’s the problem, those in control know they are working against the will of the people, but they also know the people are to scared, distracted, lazy and stupid to do anything about it.

This is a great write up, not only in content, but also in spirit and tone. An enjoyable read beginning to end and inspires me to try more stuff.

I don’t know why obvious propaganda works on so many people. People I assumed had functional brains, just turn them off whenever the online. It’s fucking maddening, and I don’t see any way to combat it.

Why do we need celebrity owned cell carriers? This article makes it sound like a bad thing Ryan Reynolds’s exited Mint, but at least the stars of arrested development still have a cell provider.

I mean WTF, I like that there is competition but what the fuck is wrong with us that we prefer celebrity endorsement to actual features, value, longevity, etc.

I know it’s a bigger question than what I’m asking but this is all part of the rot that our economy is experiencing. All vibes, all promises, all scams, this country runs on nothing but grift.

I fucking booked it from a job after about 2 months because in every fucking meeting the CTO would wax on about how great it would be once we were all replaced by robots and AI. This fucker who clawed his way into his C level position though merit, and hard work, and the same last name as the owner, and all he could do to inspire the team was tell us about how a 91 year old who lost his job to AI was saying how he would be fine. I mean, if he can find a way to be happy, we all can!