Carl [he/him]

It’s too case by case to make a sweeping statement. Sometimes a pet’s quality of life is extremely bad, sometimes an animal’s instincts will tell it to stop eating, sometimes you could have an old pet that does that and think that they’re going but then it turns out they have a totally treatable kidney issue and go on to live five more years after two weeks of pills. That last one happened to me with my thirteen year old cat who went on to live until eighteen.

I wouldn’t put down an animal unless they were suffering and an expert told me there was no way out of it - but of course that’s easy to say in isolation, when in the real world vet visits cost money. I guess what I’m saying is that I wouldn’t judge someone on the decision they made for their pet unless it seemed that they were acting without compassion and didn’t consider all alternatives.

break the lever so that it cannot be pulled

there should be a “block instance” option in your settings, though I don’t think that blocks them if they post in a separate instance which is the whole point of the fediverse.

I find it hard to believe that imperial china didnt invade anyone between 598 ad and 1912

Have a drink with ice. Hands down that and air conditioning would be my top two missed conveniences if I went back in time.

historically accurate Ariel where she’s just a dolphin

I know the feeling, reading about something horrible happening and wondering how on Earth people were able to do it in the first place. We’ve got so many ways of dehumanizing others through racism, nationalism etc, but I think we also dehumanize ourselves when we pass the buck on responsibility the way we do - the scientists don’t feel responsible, the pilots don’t feel responsible, the politicians don’t feel responsible, the military planers and commanders etc… nobody’s fucking responsible, so this horrible thing that we did becomes treated like a natural disaster or an inevitable outcome that we had no control over.

And a lot of that’s by design, and a lot of it is a defense mechanism cooked up by the people who are definitely the most responsible for the thing that was done, but god damn it things didn’t need to be that way. It is fully possible to have systems that don’t dehumanize everyone they interact with and don’t cook up these kinds of horrible actions as default.

Like, take the example of the Soviets rolling into Berlin. They knew that SA would be a problem, that they had a lot of very justifiably angry conscripts and no feasible way to police them at all times, but the leaders of the Red Army were fundamentally humanists, so they imposed very harsh policing on their own people in order to prevent as much of that as they could. And of course it still happened, of course German civilians were harmed during the occupation, but far fewer than the Soviet civilians that were harmed during fascist occupation. Berlin wasn’t treated like Nanjing, not even close, and the Red Army ended the war with by far the most prosecution and punishment of criminals within its own ranks of any of WW2’s large armies.

When the decision was made to drop the bombs, Japan was done. They had no navy and no air force and we controlled all the waters around their island. We had been “strategically” bombing them for over a year without any resistance, long enough that we had figured out that strategic bombing doesn’t actually work. We now know that the Japanese ambassador was trying to go through the Soviets to get a peace deal on the table while we were planning the bombings, all it would have taken from Eisenhower was an indication that he was interested in accepting Japanese surrender and the negotiations could have begun in earnest. Since the Allies held literally all of the cards it was possible to hold, such a deal would have almost certainly wound up being the exact same unconditional surrender that we got after dropping the bombs.

Imagining a world where Nancy Pelosi was using her insider trading money to fund Maoist rebels in the Appalacians.

being bi is equivalent to eating babies

might want to rethink your example there

Yeah I was thinking about that, which is why I pointed out that Apple’s plan only worked because of the massive growth in personal computing. Google was able to create marketshare for Android during the massive growth in smartphones, but those conditions haven’t existed for anyone for a while.

Generally how these things go is that after the growth phase comes consolidation and monopoly - we’re far more likely to see Apple and MS merge into one corporation than we are to see a third option emerge as a serious competitor.

I think the big thing that everyone is missing here is that schools and workplaces need to push it into people’s lives. For that to happen Linux (or at least one of its distros backed by a hardware distributor) needs to develop killer features for those markets and successfully sell to them in large enough numbers that the average computer user - who does not care what their OS is because they only use it for email and work - will make sure that their at-home setup is compatible with their work machine.

That moment is when market forces will take over and drive real growth in desktop Linux, rather than the tiny little bumps we’ve seen the past few years thanks to the Steam Deck coming out and MS pissing its users off.

This is how Apple built its marketshare against the Microsoft domination of the 90s. For a long time it was the go-to “school computer”, and then those kids grew up and now a huge piece of the tech industry and culture is more or less Apple only. It’s unclear if this process can be repeated, since Apple’s marketshare was carved out during a time of massive growth in the industry that is unlikely to repeat, but I wouldn’t say it’s impossible if the right conditions reveal themselves.

I will say that it is highly unlikely that the people here would like the change if it happens - imagine Google slinging fully locked down “linux” machines en masse and everybody else needing to download their kernel fork that’s loaded with spyware (“for security reasons”) in order to connect to Google Teams for work. Maybe I’m being pessimistic but I just don’t see mass adoption of a new OS happening without some kind of fuckery like this that renders the version of Linux that gets mass adopted unrecognizable from the version we’re all using now.

The other option is state intervention, as with NeoKylin in China, although the Chinese government seems to be limiting themselves to just government computers with that distro.

fr prison should only even be considered if a person is a violent threat to those around them

lemmygrad

imagining Zuck launching his “everybody gets ten virtual friends” initiative and accidentally re-radicalizing your parents and grandparents in the other direction.

I don’t think you understood what I meant by increasing demand/consumption. “Another sequel of Star Wars” or “A new season of Game of Thrones” aren’t increasing demand for art, they’re replacing previous forms of art with generated forms. And the usefulness of machine learning in fields like medical research is great - but it isn’t going to massively increase consumption.

Textile workers have been fucked by machines

I’m not a fan of this comparison because textile machines replaced textile workers at the same time as demand for textiles increased a thousandfold. The industrial revolution achieved this increased demand by increasing people’s living standards - instead of having a handful of outfits people (in the privileged parts of the world at least) started keeping dozens or hundreds of them - but with art demand/consumption is already effectively “maxed out” because every person with an internet connection already has access to more art than it is possible for them to consume in their entire lifetime, so increasing the amount of art produced can only have a “zero sum” effect on art writ large because the amount of art will increase while demand will not.

The internet we know today… We won’t miss it should it disappear.

Yes but it should disappear back into the direction of many smaller websites and more privacy, not in the direction of all of that texture being totally consumed by LLM generated search results and everyone further congregating on a smaller number of sites that collect every iota of data possible.

LLMs and image generators are incredible inventions to be sure, but my main opposition to them is related to the very real negative outcomes of flooding our society with computer generated drivel.

• Small time artists are fucked. Anyone and everyone who could make money from small commissions is now out of a job, period. Even though generators will never be as good as real artists, the fact is that most people don’t care and the generation is good enough. Oh yeah and real artist who are continuing to do real work regardless now have to live in a world where they can and will be accused of using the bots even when they aren’t.
• Internet search is fucked. Search for an image and you’ll have to sift through AI sites for the real thing, search on a topic and you’ll be inundated with language model slop. Search music on sites like Spotify and certain genres are now swamped by “artists” who make an album a week of generated trash, making the already difficult problem of discoverability that much worse.
• People with certain kinds of susceptability to addiction are fucked. There are now countless people who feel that they are in love with a chat bot, because they suffer from modern loneliness and have tricked themselves into seeing a Mechanical Turk as a real person. There are also people who have turned a chatbot into an abusive cult figure, people who’ve amplified delusions with them, and other terrible mental health related outcomes that will only keep getting more common.
• The fact that these text generators are so easily confused for thinking machines means that a genuinely alarming number of people are now offloading their ability to think critically to the bots. An entire generation of students are graduating high school and college right now having learned literally nothing. Those systems weren’t perfect before but this is definitely worse.

There’s more stuff but I’ll end this by saying that I’ve use an LLM to help me write code and it’s pretty good at doing repetitive writing that has to strictly follow a certain format. Still need to understand code in order to read and troubleshoot its output though, which is why everything the so-called “vibe coders” make is so sloppy.

retvrn to downloading mysterious .exes on the internet and running them

It’s always projection. Even if they’re not literally doing the thing that they accuse their opponent of doing yet, the fact that they’re making the accusation reveals their intention.

Ah shit, this means they’re gonna do everything they made up about Xinjiang (if they’re not doing it already at the alligator place)

I would do TV shows and movies that I like. Yeah streaming but having a local copy is great and often faster especially where I live.

This is what drove me to Debian. I like stability, I don’t need cutting edge, simple as.