It’s too bad Ds are trying to remove those hurdles by being more like Rs.

Out of curiosity, in what way do you mean they are being more like Rs? I’m hoping you are not referring to their attempts at matching the R’s redistricting tactis.

This is a question that might require a bit of “prior knowledge” in order for an answer to make sense.

Basically computers keep track of each other with complicated, unique numbers. This isn’t easy for humans to deal with so instead we have websites like netflix.com. DNS is a system that translates “netflix.com” to it’s more complicated unique computer address so that your computer connects to the netflix server when you type in that web address.

There are a number of servers (DNS Servers) on the Internet with databases that keep track of which website has what computer address. Usually, the company (ISP or Internet Service Provider) that you get Internet from has their own DNS Server and tells your modem to tell your computer or phone to use that server to look things up when you browse the web, but it is possible to use alternative servers.

Technically, the system is very trust-based - it’s just assumed that they are going to respond accurately and in good faith. It is possible to mess with this but there are other layers of security and authorities your computer should be using to make sure that you are actually visiting the website you think you are visiting. Usually ISPs just use this server to keep track of the websites you visit so they can sell your data to advertisers.

the GOP they grew up with is gone, and there is now only MAGA.

I guess I want to be crystal clear that, as far as I see it, the GOP they grew up with is the same GOP. They might have been more subtle, more slow and methodical, but nothing else has changed. Most of the GOP reps in Congress have been in Congress long before Trump and they’ve wanted to do this for a long time. As many Supreme Court Justices that were not appointed by Trump have been in lock step with him… and Roberts has wanted to eliminate the Voting Rights Act since before he was a judge.

What’s different now is that the GOP has their backs against a wall - they know a substantial majority of voters are against them - and the Trump has normalized shamelessness so there are no consequences to breaking rules and norms in order to hold power.

MAGA Republican Supreme Court OKs GOP Republican Overthrow of American Democracy

I’m so fucking tired of people acting like this is a Trump/MAGA thing. Republicans wanted these things, Republicans voted for these things, and Republicans enacted these things. John Roberts has wanted this since before he was appointed and other GOP justices, appointed pre-Trump, have helped the push for this. It took all of the Republicans support to approve everything that has happened every step of the way - just a few votes against could have stopped it at any time.

Trump just did everything less subtly and did a better job inspiring racist shit-stains to rally support.

They’ve been fantasizing about that ever since “computers” started growing in accessibility - in the 1960s…

Fantasizing wasn’t the best choice of words - I often understate what I mean to communicate at an attempt at humor. I should have said "everyone started fantasizing becoming so obsessed with intelligent “AI” that they’re willing to dump a significant portion of the world’s resources just because… "

The current crop is just the first time such things have been delivered with something resembling “average” human responses.

That’s more or less what I meant by “patterns of language that seem relevant to a given input”. I was attempting to understate this in order to exaggerate the villainous eagerness and stupidity of greedy, rich fucks.

The LLM craze is a natural maturation point of the AI field

I don’t see why that is. Using ML to generate models that accurately perform specific tasks is orders of magnitude away from attempting to feed the entirety of human text into ML and expecting superhuman intelligence to emerge.

now it’s expanded into foundational models (FM) which you would still probably just call LLMs because most people don’t know the differences.

While ML and “AI” is not my field, I’m fairly certain that what I was attempting to describe in layman’s terms in my literal first sentence were these foundational models you are referring to.

FMs are getting close to that point of a magical universal computer that you can tell it to do anything about anything and it just works.

I have no direct experience outside of LLMs and I don’t really take issue with what I understand FMs to be, so long as they keep their scope narrow and focus on accurating completing specific tasks to assist humans. As soon as we hand off control and trust it blindly without extensive trials ensuring it’s reliability and failsafes in place to ensure inaccuracies are caught I start raising concerns.

My only experience is with LLMs - a few, minor attempts to “test the waters” of the major, publicly available LLM models. I’ve been frustrated with my search results and glanced at the AI results. Work gave us Gemini licenses and I used it in similar, desperate situatiuons for coding help and help with Google products foolishly thinking that if any LLM designed to help with such tasks would be passably useful it would be the LLM of the company that owns the products I seek help with. Unless something has changed drastically in the last month or so, every interaction has been a roll of the dice to such an extent that my occasional “testing the waters” caused me to jump out and avoid it as much as possible. I simply can’t trust it to not halucinate and gaslight me.

What I see as the problem is moving way, way, way too quickly in trusting language models to do anything even remotely important. Human communication is extremely nuanced, complicated, fluid, and imperfect. Humans misunderstand each other during communication even when we have the context of in-person visual/audible cues and interpersonal history.

Maybe it’s because I’ve only ever had at most a comfortable income but I truly don’t understand the mentality of needing so much money.

I don’t get paid as much as my peers but I make enough to be comfortable. I am my own department and, aside from emergencies and other high priority situations, I manage myself and choose what to work on when. I have a decent work life balance. Because I make enough to be comfortable (in large part because my landlord promised not to raise our rent - early in the COVID lockdown - if we were “good tenants” and has managed to keep true to her word) I don’t feel the need for more. That balance is worth not making the 20% more a year I might get somewhere else because I can’t guarantee I won’t have a shitty boss that doesn’t let me have that work/life balance.

I was excited about the idea of purpose-built systems trained on specific datasets to be help find complex patterns to diagnose diseases or suggest potential molecules for specific purposes.

Then the LLM shit started and everyone started fantasizing about intelligent “AI” just because it was able to reproduce patterns of language that seem relevant to a given input. Some of those funding it kept chasing that dream and are convinced that, if they just throw more compute at the problem, they can evolve the renaissance AGI that can do anything. Then they can fire every worker and be bazillionaires with robot slaves and never have to work another day of their lives… and fuck everyone and everything else.

It’s amazing what we can ruin when we let greed and selfishness drive our society.

I agree that Valve has, in some instances, succeeded primarily because they’re not aggressively anti-consumer in a market of aggressively anti-consumer alternatives. However, they are not innocent by any means.

Last I checked, they are still automated when it comes to the majority of their “customer services”. Getting an actual human to consider things is expensive and they don’t want to spend money on that.

(Edit: Their solution to cleaning up their storefront is algorithms and crowd sourcing. The don’t manually do much of anything to filter the selection - it’s more algorithms, policies, and crowd sourcing reviews, tags, reports, etc. This prevents them from looking like they are actively controlling the storefront and is waaaay cheaper. They would much rather let influencers publish recommended lists for free than pay someone to find and remove asset flip garbage games. Systems like this are what gets you results like the opaque decision to ban Horses and financially devastate an indie studio without telling them why. It’s what gets you massive review bombs from China cratering reviews for great games because Valve isn’t willing to spend time working out an alternative method for Chinese gamers to communicate with game developers about games sold on their storefront - because typical feedback methods like discord are banned in China. Valve’s solution is to just default to filtering out reviews made in languages other than your own, entirely.)

They are very conscious of the numbers behind their success and the money that their platform and marketplace rakes in. They have worked with literal economists when it comes to their marketplace. Yet they turn a blind eye to concerns like skin gambling with children.

They do sometimes behave like bullies when negotiating with those who want to sell their games on Steam. The proportion of money paid out to devs/publishers is a factor of success and benefit to valve rather than anything else - if your game makes a lot of money (for Valve), you get a discount on the percentage taken. Some of that bullying behavior is also anticompetitive - as has been brought up in lawsuits. Their policies use “most favored nation” clauses.

• Basically if you want to benefit from Steam, the dominant marketplace, you have to offer Steam customers nothing less than you offer customers anywhere else. No discounts on another store or your website. No bonus content or service that might make a non-steam purchase feel better than a purchase on Steam.

Finally, they may not be anti-consumer but they haven’t exactly been spending a lot of effort on improving the functionality of services that their platform has. The clearest example would be issues with their friends-related services like voice chat that have plagued the platform for a long time, though some have recently been improved. They know they are dominant and don’t spend money when they don’t need to in order to keep customers.

All said and done, I use them as my default though I’ve made efforts to be more dev and indie dev conscious. Unfortunately, greed fuels most of the world and makes it hard to do anything that favors anyone besides those with power.

I keep saying this because it keeps being relevant. Republicans have moved so far beyond simple hypocrisy - they are overtly, shamelessly duplicitous and disingenuous. Textbook bad faith actors. At virtually every opportunity they will take any advantage they can to get what they want regardless of the consequences to others. They are more than willing to risk countless lives and the very fabric of society if they think they can maneuver themselves to be in charge when it gets rebuilt.

It’s frankly damning and pathetic that most Democrats (politicians) are unwilling to point this out and, as policy, assume Republicans are lying.

Republicans are beyond hypocrisy. They are overtly, shamelessly, and thoroughly duplicitous. They have gone so far as to wage war on language itself. Words having consistent definitions is too inconvenient for them and their need to constantly deceive in order to get their way.

The majority of his presidency he’s kept them with too few members to have a quorum and therefore unable to do much of anything.

Last I’d heard, Trump was officially allowed to dismiss members of the NLRB at will. His administration is basically the definition of corruption and regulatory capture.

Don’t get me wrong - I’d be happy to see things go well for unions but I have zero faith in anything good happening. Shit is so fucked I’m legitimately worried about any legal challenges to anything because we might get another Roe v. Wade.

In the context of what I said, who is “they” and what “don’t” they?

Or perhaps sentiment is that the institutions empowered to stop him are unwilling to do so because they are captured by capital… and that we all need to put people into power who won’t betray the people and who are willing to do something with that power to help everyone else… and perhaps work to restructure things so that the system works in favor of the working class instead of incrementally submitting to the will of capital until we are all wage slaves begging for table scraps from gold leafed shit stains like Musk and Bezos.

I have somewhat similar concerns. I’m not as worried about sanitized Linux as I am about new mandates entrenching Microsoft, Apple, and Google as the only valid options. Even it it is an enormous pain in the ass for everyone, including those big three, it would infinitely preferably for them to more widespread adoption of alternatives.

Just propose solutions/mandates that are fundamentally incompatible with GPL and FOSS ideals, or deeply contentious within open source communities and you can do irreparable damage to the growth of Linux and any space that needs to adapt to those new mandates. Linux moving into education? Pretend it is needed to protect the children. Linux moving into government? Pretend it’s needed to protect security or efficiency. Linux moving into the workplace? Pretend it’s needed to protect AI or liability or synergy or whatever the fuck gets CEO dicks hard these days. BAM - Linux gets hit with massive internal strife and splitting of vital communities and resources. I know it was already absurdly contentious before, but seeing what happened when storing a users age hit systemd really worried me.

I think it’s already been kind of ongoing by co-opting or even creating “open source initiatives” from the business world who ultimately just jump in when things look mature and rapidly implement profit extraction and enshittification.

Any times of USPS crisis are basically just manufactured by people in government who want to privatize or eliminate it for personal gain. The PAEA and Trump’s bullshit come to mind.

I get and respect that people have different places where they draw lines. But to me, it doesn’t seem like they are abandoning the concept of DRM free in any real way. The majority of these have small bits of extra content, often cosmetic, like twitch drops that need the software to be online to redeem/verify.

For the few games on that list that are actually unplayable or crippled in some way, I am disappointed. For additional free or giveaway content from the developer that is part of the original package distributed through GOG, I’m much more understanding of GOG if the developer failed to accommodate offline verification/unlocking of that content.

Can you please elaborate on and define what DRM is “allowed” on GOG? From my most recent understanding, you can still play offline and don’t need to use the GOG launcher or some other launcher that requires an Internet connection.

We are not far from general AI

You mean AGI? Yeah, no. I don’t believe you.

Maybe they’ll manhandle a few rich fucks that happen to be brown and Congress will suddenly care.