you have to do a lot of squinting to accept this take.

so his wins were copying competitors, and even those products didn’t see success until they were completely revolutionized (Bing in 2024 is a Ballmer success? .NET becoming widespread is his doing?). one thing Nadela did was embrace the competitive landscape and open source with key acquisitions like GitHub and open sourcing .NET, and i honestly don’t have the time to fully rebuff this hot take. but i don’t think the Ballmer haters are totally off base here. even if some of the products started under Ballmer are now successful, it feels disingenuous to attribute their success to him. it’s like an alcoholic dad taking credit for his kid becoming an actor. Microsoft is successful despite him

these days Hyprland but previously i3.

i basically live in the terminal unless i’m playing games or in the browser. these days i use most apps full screen and switch between desktops, and i launch apps using wofi/rofi. this has all become very specialized over the past decade, and it almost has a “security by obscurity” effect where it’s not obvious how to do anything on my machines unless you have my muscle memory.

not that i necessarily recommend this approach generally, but i find value in mostly using a keyboard to control my machines and minimizing visual clutter. i don’t even have desktop icons or a wallpaper.

the semantics of C make that virtually impossible. the compiler would have to make some semantics of the language invalid, invalidating patterns that are more than likely highly utilized in existing code, thus we have Rust, which built its semantics around those safety concepts from the beginning. there’s just no way for the compiler to know the lifetime of some variables without some semantic indication

i’ve used Chezmoi for years now pretty successfully. works on my Mac and Linux machines. it probably could be made to work on Windows. i am transitioning to NixOS, but i’ll probably keep using it anyway, since i still have Macs for work (and because they’re great laptops don’t @ me). the only real downside is that it only works for the home folder, so i have to manually control stuff for /etc, but i generally prefer user configuration for most tools anyway.

i had messed around with Ansible for this in the past, but i didn’t really like it for this use case. it’s been a while tho so it’s hard to say why.

not to pile on, but you might also look at GNU Stow. i decided against it, but it’s there.

obligatory i s’pose: https://github.com/covercash2/dotfiles

language is intrinsically tied to culture, history, and group identity, so any concept that is expressed through a certain linguistic system is inseparable from its cultural roots

i feel like this is a big part of it. it reminds me of the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis. search results and neural networks are susceptible to bias just like a human is; “garbage in garbage out” as they say.

the quote directly after mentions that newer or more precise searches produce more coherent results across languages. that reminds me of the time i got curious and looked up Marxism on Conservapedia. as you might expect, the high level descriptions of Marxism are highly critical and include a lot of bias, but interestingly once you dig down to concepts like historical materialism etc it gets harder to spin, since popular media narratives largely ignore those details and any “spin” would likely be blatant falsehood.

the author of the article seems to really want there to be a malicious conspiratorial effort to suppress information, and, while that may be true in some cases, it just doesn’t seem feasible at scale. this is good to call out, but i don’t think these people who concern their lives with the research and advancement of language concepts are sleeping on the fact that bias exists.

it’s super weird that people think LLMs are so fundamentally different from neural networks, the underlying technology. neural network architectures are constantly improving, and LLMs are just a product of a ton of research and an emergence after the discovery of the transformer architecture. what LLMs have shown us is that we’re definitely on the right track using neural networks to solve a wide range of problems classified as “AI”

most Zionists i’ve met are white Protestants, and most Jews i’ve met aren’t Zionists…

lol this is like Ben Shapiro telling people in areas threatened by climate change to sell their houses. “to who? fucking Aqua Man?”

best case you’ll get $10 and whoever bought it will end up back here

Users who need to run their application in Python 2 should do so on a platform that offers support for it

damn go off

simply not true. they’re no angels or open source champions, but come on.

sure it does. it won’t tell you how to build a bomb or demonstrate explicit biases that have been fine tuned out of it. the problem is McDonald’s isn’t an AI company and probably is just using ChatGPT on the backend, and GPT doesn’t give a shit about bacon ice cream out of the box.

ah yeah. maybe less well known, but i had a dev kit from Qualcomm that came with Ubuntu

not likely. i think it requires a lot of systems working together

always? Android runs a linux kernel, and they support all kinds of embedded systems that run Linux.

pretty standard compared to OSs like Android and iOS. i think the mobile OSs, at least recently, have done better at this; they don’t ask for permission until they need it. want to import bookmarks? i need file system access for that. want to open your webcam? i need device access. doing it all upfront leads to all the problems mentioned in this thread: unclear as to why, easy to forget what access you’ve given, no ability to deny a subset of options, etc.

nushell is excellent for dealing with structured data. it’s also great as a scripting language.

not sure what you mean by expensive. i run language models on my laptop that are pretty good at this type of task. and, yes, these models are infinitely easier and cheaper ultimately than trying to change the human proclivity for attention seeking behavior.

you’ve not seen the type of email chains i get at work. personally i think it should be illegal to respond-all to an email chain with hundreds of people with “Great job team!!! 🎉”. but it would be great to have a LM to read it near instantaneously for me to be like “oh yeah there was a product release and here’s a few relevant metrics”. doesn’t matter if it’s 100% in on every subtle detail, and a decent summary could tell me where or if i even should dig into details.

yeah i see that too. it seems like mostly a reactionary viewpoint. the reaction is understandable to a point since a lot of the “AI” features are half baked and forced on the user. to that point i don’t think GNOME etc should be scrambling to add copies of these features.

what i would love to see is more engagement around additional pieces of software that are supplemental. for example, i would love if i could install a daemon that indexes my notes and allows me to do semantic search. or something similar with my images.

the problems with AI features aren’t within the tech itself but in the surrounding politics. it’s become commonplace for “responsible” AI companies like OpenAI to not even produce papers around their tech (product announcement blogs that are vaguely scientific don’t count), much less source code, weights, and details on training data. and even when Meta releases their weights, they don’t specify their datasets. the rat race to see who can make a decent product with this amazing tech has made the whole industry a bunch of pearl clutching FOMO based tweakers. that sparks a comparison to blockchain, which is fair from the perspective of someone who hasn’t studied the tech or simply hasn’t seen a product that is relevant to them. but even those people will look at something fantastical like ChatGPT as if it’s pedestrian or unimpressive because when i asked it to write an implementation of the HTTP spec in the style of Fetty Wap it didn’t run perfectly the first time.

a lot of things are unknown.

i’d be very surprised if it doesn’t have an opt out.

a point i was trying to make is that a lot of this info already exists on their servers, and your trust in the privacy of that is what it is. if you don’t trust them that it’s run on per user virtualized compute, that it’s e2e encrypted, or that they’re using local models i don’t know what to tell you. the model isn’t hoovering up your messages and sending them back to Apple unencrypted. it doesn’t need to for these features.

all that said, this is just what they’ve told us, and there aren’t many people who know exactly what the implementation details are.

the privacy issue with Recall, as i said, is that it collects a ton of data passively, without explicit consent. if i open my KeePass database on a Recall enabled machine, i have little assurance that this bot doesn’t know my Gmail password. this bot uses existing data, in controlled systems. that’s the difference. sure maybe people see Apple as more trustworthy, but maybe sociology has something to do with your reaction to it as well.