This particular subthread started by village604 is about having political opinions and then choosing whether or not to engage in political discussion. Perhaps your sentiment here would be more applicable to a different thread?

Yeah it also took me a minute to realize what was going on.

I don’t think they realized you were pointing out hypocrisy using sarcasm.

Totally agree. And especially when I know it’s just going to upset me and won’t change anyone’s mind. It’s a waste of my energy and happiness to constantly and pointlessly engage. Responding with silence often works pretty well, at least in person.

Hardware-facing software as well. Usually involving some proprietary super sketchy driver and it might even only work on specific versions of Windows.

Some on here seem to be way overcomplicating things. Just stick the movie files on any old box with a large drive (even a Raspberry Pi could work with external USB drives) and then access them via some form of file share: ssh (sftp, sshfs), nfs, cifs, etc. And then play the file with a standard media player, VLC, mpv… most media players are smart enough not to try to load the entire file at once and so streaming is automatic.

Out of curiosity, why are VMs, streaming or transcoding needed? I’ve always just accessed and played the movie files directly from the media center PC via some form of ssh or nfs. Even works from my phone on the go with a Wireguard VPN. Have I been missing out on something?

Really old people seem to be the heaviest AI users, or at least they are in my bubble. So maybe pa is getting it on with an AI granny in that retirement home.

YTMND

At least Johnny Mnemonic hasn’t happened yet… although Neuralink seems to be trying.

Or having a mouse at all. Even in the late 80’s, mice were a luxury item. And those horrible resistive touch screens in the auto parts store were a nightmare compared to today’s capacitive phone screens.

Light pens were cool, though.

Yes! I dunno if it’s still reasonably possible, but I remember downloading a text copy of Wikipedia and thinking how cool that was. And earlier than that, back in the CD-ROM era (90s), digital encyclopedias were actually an exciting use of the technology and I was given one as a Christmas gift.

I might be misunderstanding, but dumb terminals are super old, dating back to the 60s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_3300). The idea of having your own personal computer, rather than time sharing, was very exciting to people. Like the Apple computer kit in the 70s, and the IBM PC in the early 80s. People wanted their own computer rather than having to rely on and pay for those centralized services. So I’d say that cloud services are more like a return to the bad old days rather than some exciting prospect.

Terminals existed in libraries even in the early 80s, probably earlier than that, to replace the card catalog. And to my knowledge each library didn’t have a minicomputer or mainframe in it, as that would have been way too expensive. I think they were probably using either dial up or some kind of old connection to a mainframe in the city, but I’m just speculating.

With what?

I remember reading in the 80’s, can’t remember where (this 60’s Time-Life book series, maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Science_Library), where they were discussing the latest advances in training neural nets, and the idea that with a big enough net they could simulate the human brain. Maybe those Time books are on archive.org, I’ll have to look for them sometime.

On Wikipedia it seems that research dates back to the 40’s, but work was definitely in progress in the 50’s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network_(machine_learning)

So for us old farts, LLMs (even though it’s different technology obviously) seem more like “finally” because since Eliza we’ve been hearing and dreaming about it for ages. Too bad that the reality of them is so dark! And every movie and show tried to warn us: 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Ultimate Computer (Star Trek TOS), TRON, Terminator 2… but we thought “nah, that’s just the movies”.

Yep, for example, emulation was being used at IBM in the late 60’s (and a descendant of it is still in use today, called z/VM): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/CMS

It is official; Netcraft now confirms: Linux is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Linux community when IDC confirmed that Linux market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Linux has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we’ve known all along. Linux is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don’t need to be a Kreskin to predict Linux’ future. The hand writing is on the wall: Linux faces a bleak future. In fact there won’t be any future at all for Linux because Linux is dying. Things are looking very bad for Linux. As many of us are already aware, Linux continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

That’s bullshit and you know it.

Removed by mod

Back in the day tomsrtbt was similarly inspiring. It could boot from a single 3½" floppy. Always kept one around as a rescue disk.