Ziro

I know it's not a very Linuxy distro, but Linux Mint (Cinnamon) is so easy to use, especially for Windows users. I've completely replaced Windows (and with better software), aside from using Windows for a few games that require it. I used Ubuntu, Suse, and Fedora long ago, but for me, Mint takes the proverbial cake.

It's a bit of a mixed bag. I do enjoy Lemmy. I think that the conversations that take place here are interesting (though many now revolve around Reddit in one way or another). I don't really find the front page to be as good as Reddit's.

And then, of course, I think the most important difference is that Lemmy draws a specific type of person, even after the Reddit migration, and there aren't as many of us as there are average Internet users. I'm not saying Lemmings are a special breed; rather, I'm saying that we're the sort of people who might have used Usenet at its peak. We're the sort who might be Linux users. Many of us are morally aligned with open source technology and the ethics thereof. This makes the discussions a little less diverse on Lemmy than they are on Reddit (which can be good and bad, depending on the sort of conversation).

Steam Deck is changing PC gaming. The better Steam Deck gets, the better gaming on Linux becomes. There are dozens of us.

Stop all the hate for nuclear. It's just a way for the fossil fuel industry to cause infighting among those of us who care about the climate. If we can make energy free or close to it, we should. The closer everything comes to being free the better.

I'm curious. In this context, what are "whites"? Are Jewish people not white now or something? Or does "white" mean something else to him?

Tencent, the owner of WeChat, is likely the most powerful software company in the world. It's essentially an extension of the Chinese government.

edit: Discussing its economics might be a bit contentious, to say the least. Suffice it to say that I will never run anything they own on my primary OS (LoL, Valorant, etc.). A government-controlled company installing software that demands kernel-level access is a huge red flag for me.

Or, please, trains.

I want to talk about trains.

There is an essentially immeasurable difference between support for anarchy and support for coercive power structures. Marxist-Leninists hope to exchange one coercive power structure for another. It is little different from the imperialism it would hope to supplant. Piracy belongs to anarchy, not Marxism.

I am a socialist, though I do not subscribe to all of the American left's social or moral takes. I just want everyone to have a strong government-provided safety net, good social services, and a satisfying life that isn't defined by the type of work one does or one's profession.

edit: Having said that, it doesn't seem like either the "left" or the "right," at least in America, truly cares about effecting these sorts of changes. They just want to be loud.

I think that the left-right dichotomy is inherently flawed. A lot of what I believe might be considered "right-leaning" or "left-leaning," but I cannot say that I prescribe to either sort of ideology fully or with any fidelity.

I will always be opposed to any view with a pervasive "moral" authority, and both the so-called left and right are obsessed with their own versions of this. The problem we run into is the false supposition that beliefs can be categorized on a spectrum spanning right to left (or, even more liberally, a spectrum spread across two dimensions). It has been a ridiculous notion from its inception, whenever that might have been.

Building one's identity (another silly notion, in general—identity itself being a frivolous construct that functions only as a fulcrum for the extortion of social power) upon a supposed spectrum is likewise ridiculous. You can be conservative or liberal, or anything, really. But those beliefs do not exist in a linear or planar dimension. They are so far removed from each other that one cannot fathom sliding incrementally from one to the next.

And to each respective party, "left" and "right," the other can be demonized as evil, even without full comprehension of the other. It's all just so damned tribalistic and silly.

Your mom would do just fine on Mint, and you know it.

Isn't the soap that touches the body ablated by friction with the skin?

All locked down here in South Portland, which is about 50 minutes or so from Lewiston.

Thank you. I appreciate your perspective. Using Linux again has been like a breath of fresh air, honestly. I just love how fast everything is. (Both my Windows and Mint boots live on their own M.2 drives, but Mint is so, so much faster.) And, unlike Windows, I don't feel like I have to jerry rig it to get things to work. I'm sure there are instances where that is the case, but I haven't run into them yet.

Right. So, I don't get why it should matter where, exactly, the bar of soap goes.

This is why I had to switch. It was just too clunky to get CUDA and Pytorch and Tensorflow set up in Windows. In Linux, it was a total breeze.

Edit: And then I thought, "well, wouldn't it be great if I didn't have to use Windows to use Linux?"

I switched to Firefox when I switched to Linux. It's great. I remember when firefox/mozilla was the go-to browser. It could be again.

It'll be even worse when there are no new series to watch because all of the people who write them are on strike. The content mines are drying up.

No, the death of the internet that killed the old Internet continues.

edit: and maybe that's a good thing.

I will tell you why atheism, regardless of the horse on which it rides, is a step toward progress: it is because belief in fantasy is an opiate that numbs us and stymies progress toward improving the welfare of all.

It isn't native, but it works very well. It uses Vulkan.

That's not really a relevant argument. It isn't about whether people care about babies or not. Rather, this is a question of ethics: is it morally wrong to kill a baby if it's still in your body but could live outside your body? If not, why not, assuming that it is morally wrong to kill another human?

It does. I am disappointed in the game studios who refuse to allow Linux players, though, such as Bungie. I'm certain that Destiny would be playable if not for their obstinacy.

Absent the hype, I enjoyed the Fable games a bit. They weren't superlative, but they were fun.

I genuinely would like to know: what is the appeal of microblogging, such as Twitter and Mastodon? How does one get the most out of it?

interesting. I wonder whether that's specific to the mobile hardware. I have a 3080 running just fine on Mint.

Let's remove the context of AI altogether.

Say, for instance, you were to check out and read a book from a free public library. You then go on to use some of the book's content as the basis of your opinions. More, you also absorb some of the common language structures used in that book and unwittingly use them on your own when you speak or write.

Are you infringing on copyright by adopting the book's views and using some of the sentence structures its author employed? At what point can we say that an author owns the language in their work? Who owns language, in general?

Assuming that a GPT model cannot regurgitate verbatim the contents of its training dataset, how is copyright applicable to it?

Edit: I also would imagine that if we were discussing an open source LLM instead of GPT-4 or GPT-3.5, sentiment here would be different. And more, I imagine that some of the ire here stems from a misunderstanding of how transformer models are trained and how they function.

Excepting the opinion of the imaginary person you've invented, the question still remains.

Edit: and I would like to add that I do not align myself with conservative politics. I just question the morality of killing a being that would have likely lived if it had been removed from the mother.

No. There was a youth league Wednesday, though.

I take your point, but that doesn't mean that I find the left to be much more appealing than the right, at least in terms of its ability to make worthwhile systemic change. The end result is the same. The American "right" and "left" are obsessed with their own flavor of identity politics, and that is what defines them over their approaches to government and economics. America's "left" is still seemingly anti-socialist.

I don't think that people should go out of their way to offend others, and the left's propensity for tolerance is somewhat better than that of the right's, but the postmodern social construct that is "identity," at least in American culture, inspires tribalism and disunity. The right, being so opposed to postmodernism, itself, has unwittingly adopted the construct of identity, regardless.

And I don't wish to invalidate others' experiences as members of identity tribes, especially those who have been (or still are) wrongfully subjugated by coercive powers in our society that may even force an identity construct upon them, but generally, feuding between opposing identity tribes seems to me to be a distraction from making a systemic shift toward a better society. Identities don't care about social welfare, though they may claim to; they care about ensuring they remain or grow stronger as modes of personal validation or actualization. They struggle against each other, as if they are, themselves, organisms fighting for survival.

People aren't defined by the subscription list of their identities (including "left" and "right"). We are not the final distillation of social performance. We just are—a cross section of experience, carried from one moment to the next.

I suppose, more specifically, self identity as defined by one's belonging to any number of a given set of social groups (e.g., fandom. nation, gender, race, religion, socioeconomic class, etc.)

I more or less believe that the concept of the self or of one's identity is arbitrary: that there really is no self to identify.

unfortunately, my system seems to need to compile the shaders before I start the game if it's the first time I've started the game that steam session.

I saw this post on the front page. Condolences, maybe?

I want to say something like "we like the stock" without coming across as a silly reddit memelord. But we like the stock.

Wow, this is me.

I know that we all love decentralization, but not everyone will buy into it as a concept, unfortunately, and that is their wont. As long as we have a community that is large enough, it doesn't matter that it isn't mainstream. It would certainly be nice to have more diverse voices, though.

Have you tried Linux?

I have to say, though, that this Fediverse stuff (I'm new) smacks of the "old Internet." I love it. This is such a breath of fresh air.

I like Flatpak for what it is. It's great. But I wish that the application IDs weren't so long.