DjangoFett

Turns out my organic LLM occasionally vomits out sensible things, too.

My last use of AI is in my post history and was fairly down voted because I was being foolishly ironic.

This said, I don’t really disagree with his take here despite keeping away from AI as much as I am reasonably able. I do my own critical thinking and hate that I have to jump through hoops on the internet to have a simple question answered without some layman’s AI summary that may or may not be even remotely correct or actionable. Even still, when I asked it to check on local real estate laws and provide summaries of possible actions based on a very strict set of parameters, it gave me information that my wife and I were able to bring to a human agent and have things work out better than we had actually expected.

I think a better way of putting it - and I’m still gonna ruffle feathers - is that AI is becoming the new electricity.

Put down your pitchfork and lemme explain.

When electricity came out, people rather reasonably pointed out that simply coming into contact with an electrical device could result in death if one wasn’t careful. On top of that, the infrastructure required for it was expensive, unsightly, and at the time incredibly disruptive to daily life. It was going to ruin and disrupt entire industries that had existed for centuries because it could do things a human could not do unaided.

All of this is to one degree or another entirely true even through to modern times, but electricity has become a ubiquitous resource that humanity would now deeply struggle to live without. I won’t dare compare AI that far as i genuinely believe humans would be significantly better off without it, but the initial Luddite response to electricity has a historical echo here.

I think Linus’ point is more that it can undoubtedly be a useful tool when used in a measured, controlled, intelligent manner, and that it is a genie that is very clearly unwilling to be put back in its bottle. Like it or not it exists, and while we can absolutely be unhappy about it, being blind to its actual real world beneficial uses because the companies that make it are actual festering waste is a bit silly - especially when in the hands of the right chaotic neutral parties these companies are about to have a massive lesson in just how messy their tools have made things.

And old spin drives have a limited lifespan as well thanks to wear and tear on mechanical parts. Whichever tech you prefer has its own unique drawbacks.

RAID and backups are the only surefire way to protect any amount of your data long term.

I can’t wait for PC parts to be super cheap. I saw somewhere that, bubble-pop-notwithstanding, NVME production is projected to hit a level within a year or so that will outpace even the last year’s demand for storage and could even drive prices for storage down to below what they were prior to the bubble. Oh, and that’s even accounting for inflation. So when the bubble does pop, we are going to have an absolute storage glut.

The fact that the rest of the world is going to be miserable and impossible is another matter entirely, but at least I’ll have my hobby.

When you’re right, you’re right. I just found it funny to have the thing he touts blatantly say no as the response to his bullshit.

For shits and giggles, I asked Lumo only because I get to use it with ProtonVPN. Welcome to my fifth ever AI query to it. Full answer follows:

Defining Superintelligence

Superintelligence refers to a hypothetical form of artificial intelligence that vastly exceeds human cognitive abilities across virtually all domains of interest—including scientific creativity, general wisdom, strategic planning, social skills, and problem-solving.

Core Characteristics

Unlike narrow AI systems that excel at specific tasks (like chess or image recognition), superintelligence would possess:

• General cognitive superiority: Outperforming humans in virtually every intellectual endeavor
• Recursive self-improvement capacity: The ability to iteratively redesign itself, potentially leading to rapid intelligence explosions
• Cross-domain adaptation: Applying intelligence flexibly across fields rather than being confined to one specialty

Key Distinctions

Important Considerations

The concept is primarily theoretical—no such system exists today. Researchers like Nick Bostrom (author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, 2014) have extensively studied the potential implications, both beneficial and existential, of such systems emerging.

Key questions in the field include:

• How quickly might it develop once AGI is achieved?
• What mechanisms ensure alignment with human values?
• How do we manage the transition period safely?

Current Status

As of my knowledge, we remain at the narrow AI stage. Estimates for when superintelligence might emerge vary widely among experts, ranging from decades to centuries—or possibly never, depending on one’s views on AI feasibility.

Is there a particular aspect of superintelligence you’d like to explore further? For instance, the technical pathways to achieving it, safety considerations, or philosophical implications?

That’s generous to Republicans; Anthropic et al have their hands so far up conservative asses they can all smell their own shit from the inside.

This was my solution as soon as they floated the ID thing. Said bye to my groups and uninstalled without a single look back.

Am I missing something here?

Wasn’t that the original purpose of Discord?

Like, for gamers by gamers?

Everyone loses the fucking plot so fast these days.

It heavily depends on your needs, wants, and expectations.

In simplest terms, Ubuntu is Mac-like and Mint is Windows-like. At least, on the surface. Basically everything else is feature parity, just requires slightly different arrangements depending on which flavor you’re running.

I didn’t much like Ubuntu as it feels too close to MacOS to me. Primarily because I don’t really like that aesthetic. Ubuntu and Mint were my first forays into Linux as well, but this was also years ago when Mint was relatively new to the scene. While I personally liked the style of Mint, at the time it just didn’t have nearly enough features for what I was into.

These days I settled on CachyOS which is a fork of Arch. Cachy is aimed at gaming, but comes with a very straightforward installer with a huge amount of customization options to really make the OS your own. That’s ultimately what keeps me on Arch is the genuine ease of customization at this point. Rolling releases don’t bother me as i used to do CyanogenMod nightlies and this is like the big boy version of that, but I also can fully appreciate wanting shit to just work.

That said, Ubuntu is arguably the most popular distro because of its similarities to Mac and the “It just works” vibes it tends to give off these days.

The best part of Linux is how easy it is to check out a new flavor and see how you like it. And once you do find the flavor that suits you, the mega nerds in that particular community have probably already figured out how to do that thing you want. And if those folks didn’t for any reason, the folks at AUR* probably did.

*AUR = Arch User Repository and is an unregulated repository of whatever anyone clever enough to develop for Arch has come up with. Peruse and download at your own risk, but there’s some genuinely awesome and useful tools out there.

I am running an i5 and a GTX 3050 with 32GB of ram on CachyOS on an HP Victus laptop.

I am quite content with how well everything functions. I have found very few issues that don’t have a workaround of some kind, and even those kinds of issues are fewer and further between in the past few months.