MudMan

In that it’s mostly a merch ad hidden behind a clickbait title.

So I guess it’s a good test for that sort of “just read the headline” response.

It’s been a rough few days and I think I may be coming around. What hope is there to parse AI misinformation if people can’t parse a Reddit-like link aggregator?

I may be done with this place at this point. It’s just all bad. If not the whole Internet, certainly the whole of social media.

Yeah, but… this isn’t that.

You’re literally saying “well, anecdotal impressions say this, so I refute this study that says something else”.

We don’t like that. That’s not a thing we like to do.

And for the record, as these things go, the article linked here is pretty good. I’ve seen more than one worse example of a study being reported in the press today.

They provide a neutral headline that conveys the takeaway of the study, they provide context about companies mentioning AIs on layoffs, they provide a link to the full study and they provide a separate study that yields different, seemingly contradicting results.

I mean, this is as close to best case scenario for reporting on a study as you can get in mainstream press. If nothing else, kudos to The Register. The bar was low but they went for personal best anyway.

Man, the problem with giving up all the wonky fashy social media is that when you’re in an echo chamber all the weird misinformation and emotion-driven politics are coming from inside the house. It’s been a particularly rough day for politically-adjacent but epistemologically depressing posts today.

So the report itself argues there is a need for better data, and it seems fairly level headed, but…

…what’s with people being mad about it?

I say this a lot, but there seems to be a lot of weird anti-hype where people want this AI stuff to work better than it does so it can be worse than it is, and I’m often confused by it. The takeaway here is that most jobs don’t seem to be behaving that differently so far if you look at the labor market in aggregate. Which is… fine? It’s not that unexpected? The AI shills were selling that entire industries would be replaced by AI overnight, and most sensible people didn’t think so or argued that the jobs would get replaced with AI wrangler tasks because this thing wouldn’t completely automate most tasks in ways that weren’t already available.

Which seems to be most of what’s going on. AI art is 100% not production-ready out of the gate, AI text seems to be a bit of a wash in terms of saving time for programmers and even in more obvious industries like customer service we already had a bunch of bots and automation in place.

So what’s all the anger? Did people want this to be worse? Do they just want to vibe with the economy being bad in a way they can pin on something they already don’t like and maybe politics is too heavy now? What’s going on there?

Honestly, even at the time that entire “benefit of the doubt” garbage read like some combination of active collaboration and outright denial. It’s nuts that Trump rode it to a second term, honestly. As late as the week of the election people were having haughty conversations about the lack of ties between Project 2025 and the Trump campaign and those morons still elected them again because Harris was too weak on Israel or whatever.

I mean, I’d normally not assume an entire culture is incapable of parsing reality, but there are still supposed American leftists going “they’re both the same” on this site right now.

Which reminds me I’m trying to cut off American politics from my media menu as much as possible, so maybe it’s time to mute this stuff and move on with my day, because man, what a group of weirdos.

I mean… yeah, but also I’m very well on the record disagreeing with that and calling Trump a fascist since day one. Not that I expect you dig through my online presence to corroborate it.

I’m not American. The presence of fascists in US politics has been a commonly accepted truth in anybody anywhere left of demochristians for half a century. This isn’t “hindsigh”, it’s “I recommend always reading what people say about your country in foreign newspapers”.

And for the record, we got fascists, too. We’re just less shy about calling them that, maybe? Certainly don’t have any delusions about ourselves in terms of being inoculated from fascism at a fundamental level. The idea that Americans would have survived Bush, let alone the overtly fascist Trump without noticing or acknowledging it seems outright bizarre to me, but there you go.

I mean, Stephen Miller isn’t even shy about it. Even if you are the kind of European that would argue Berlusconi wasn’t a fascist and could maaaaaybe entertain Trump is on that same level of “just horny criminal idiot” you surely would have had zero questions after hearing five minutes of Dracula Hitler back in 2016.

What? Everybody thought fascism would come from the inside in the US. Even if you slept through the first Trump term this has been a thing since the 1930s. Surely during the Cold War, and definitely for everybody outside the US itself, but… I mean, were you alive during the whole “war on terror” nonsense?

Had the post-Reagan, post 9-11 US fascists successfully brainwashed even left of centre normies into thinking that was not the case? Were Americans that oblivious?

Yeah, see? There is a market for it, just like there is a market for an unnecessarily thin candybar.

Is it a mainstream device that everybody wants? No, but some people do like it.

And hey, I 'm not berating you for it. I like weird tech and I’m willing to overpay for it. At this point the only reason to ever buy a new phone is your old phone broke… or you want something fun and weird and are willing to overpay for it.

Apparently both this one and the Samsung one are selling well, so… Somebody does.

This has come and gone. Feature phones had their thin&light phase, too. And it suits the manufacturers because they’re doing this work to make foldables anyway, so selling the thin candybar is a free side gig. Which is probably needed, because to riff on your point, what consumer wants to spend 2K on a bad tablet with a plastic screen that folds into a mediocre phone?

I can give that a whirl if it’s not set up like that already, but the monitor is VERY slow on its own. It basically never wakes up in time for the BIOS bootscreen and any signal interruption sends it on a wild goose chase of signal searching around its inputs that can take ten seconds at a time. It’s not a cheap monitor, either, which I assume is part of the problem, as it wants to be super smart about a bunch of things and has to contend with a bunch of options and alternatives that maybe a simpler setup wouldn’t.

Still, worth a shot to try to tune grub and double check if it’s swapping modes unnecessarily between the bios image and the menu. I hadn’t considered it. Like so many Linux features and app there’s a bunch of stuff you can config on it that I keep not looking into because it’s only surfaced in documentation, if that.

EDIT: Tried, didn’t help. The motherboard rebooting gives the monitor just enough time to search its display port input, decide it’s been unplugged and shut down, so by the time another monitor picks up the slack it’s too late and the timeout has expired unless you’re mashing down to stop it. The changes do make the second monitor come up at its native resolution instead of changing modes, but the mistake happens elsewhere.

I could just set a longer timeout, but I’d rather have a faster boot when I’m sticking to the default than wait for the whole mess to sort itself out every time. Been mashing bios entry buttons and bootloader menus since the 90s, what’s a couple decades more.

Still dumb, though.

I don’t know about Gentoo, but as a serial dual booter I know this pain well.

I swear about two thirds of the time going through grub on every boot adds to the process are waiting for my monitor to figure itself out. Half the time it doesn’t get there on time at all.

I suppose it makes more sense the less you want to do and the older your hardware is. Even when repurposing old laptops and stuff like that I find the smallest apps I’d want to run were orders of magnitude more costly than any OS overhead. This was even true that one time I got lazy and started running stuff on an older Windows machine without reinstalling the OS, so I’m guessing anything Linux-side would be fine.

After a OS update? I mean, I guess, but most things are going to be in containers anyway, right?

The last update that messed me up on any counts was Python-related and that would have got me on any distro just as well.

Once again, I get it at scale, where you have so much maintenance to manage and want to keep it to a minimum, but for home use it seems to me that being on an LTS/stable update channel would have a much bigger impact than being on a lightweight distro.

I’m sidetracking a bit, but am I alone in thinking self hosting hobbyists are way too into “lightweight and not bloated” as a value?

I mean, I get it if you have a whole data center worth of servers, but if it’s a cobbled together home server it’s probably fine, right? My current setup idles at 1.5% of its CPU and 25% of its RAM. If I turned everything off those values are close to zero and effectively trivial alongside any one of the apps I’m running in there. Surely any amount of convenience is worth the extra bloat, right?

With the exception of NVidia, all GPU vendors build their drivers on Mesa, so they are more homogeneous than Windows.

This sentence is written in some form of alien language that looks like human writing but clearly isn’t.

Alternately, it may or may not be a particularly playful segment of Alice in Wonderland.

I can already tell this is going to be one of those conversations you get online where people are just itching for somebody to defend the position they want to argue against and will just have that argument regardless of what the other side says.

But because I’m a very flawed person I’ll still go for it and note that technically if F-Droid is the one signing all the apps and Google doesn’t like one of them, they’d have to ban F-Droid’s entire account, not just the one app. Anything else would require them to look at the apps in the first place, which in this scenario they are not doing.

But it’s certainly possible that they’ll ban a specific developer (or a store if the store is doing the signing), and that’s one of the reasons why this scheme is unacceptable.

What it is not is an approval process, since… you know, they’re not looking at the apps themselves. Words mean things.

Presumably, at least nominally, Google wants the signatures to be able to tie an app to a developer. Whether they are going to ban people proactively or not we simply don’t know because their stupid policy is barely communicated and they seem to intend to get it rolling before addressing any of these because Apple already used this loophole successfully so why the hell not, I suppose.

Not “non-approved apps”, unsigned apps. They’re not running approval on the software itself. And technically you can still sideload signed software. And you can sideload unsigned software in non-Google certified Android devices, too.

Hey, I hate their stupid power grab, it sucks and I hope regulators intervene, but if you’re gonna get all pretentious and uppity about everybody else’s responses you’re gonna get fact checked. I don’t make the rules.

“Want” isn’t my concern. Presumably no developers want to give Google a piece of anything they generate, open source or not.

My concern was not understanding how this interferes with F-Droid and that has been explained above: F-Droid builds their own APKs for verification and this process potentially makes that a lot harder while not providing a replacement for their verification from Google.

That makes sense and it is indeed a dealbreaker. The other thing much less so.

Oooh, gotcha. That makes sense.

I guess it’d make sense to take that first option as far as it will go, at which point the issue becomes litigating this the first time Google has their own weird censorship issue in the Apple mold. I’d expect if they ban all of F-Droid explicitly that would at least make more ripples than going after a single torrent client app or whatever. It may play out different from a regulatory perspective, too, if the practical effect is they ban third party stores.

Side note, I’m really mad at the very deliberate choice Google made of categorizing all potential apps as either “apps meant for Google Play” or “student or hobbyist apps”. You know they know why that’s wrong, but it still makes you want to explain it to them.

I’m confused by this:

The F-Droid project cannot require that developers register their apps through Google, but at the same time, we cannot “take over” the application identifiers for the open-source apps we distribute, as that would effectively seize exclusive distribution rights to those applications.

If it were to be put into effect, the developer registration decree will end the F-Droid project and other free/open-source app distribution sources as we know them today, and the world will be deprived of the safety and security of the catalog of thousands of apps that can be trusted and verified by any and all. F-Droid’s myriad users5 will be left adrift, with no means to install — or even update their existing installed — applications.

My understanding is that developers need to sign up with Google and once they have an account they can sign their own apks.

How would this impact F-Droid in any way? Presumably by the time F-Droid enters the picture the developers of the apps they distribute would have already gone through that entire process, right? The apks will be tied to that new Google certificate, but after that they can still be distributed anywhere.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, this has genuine, very serious, dealbreaking issues, in that Google can just cancel the account of a developer making apps they don’t like, the same way Apple has done in the past. That’s not great. But from F-Droid’s perspective all of that has happened upstream, they are not anywhere in that loop, unless I’ve misunderstood the changes.

If you like flavored condoms I am struggling to find a reason why not.