I did it this way too, with a small debian home server/media center about 15 years back (i had another debian set up on my main rig about 20 years back, but since i am a gamer, i did not do much more than dabble a bit in it). After Proton became a thing and i was unwilling to switch to Win11, i installed Nobara. Since then i have learned a lot, and i even got myself some literature to learn about computers for the first time in my life (got a bundle of O’Reilly and No Starch Press books about Linux and surrounding things for a good price)

have also settled on Mint because the last thing I want to do in my free time is fix my own fucking computer.

Using a Fedora spinoff (Nobara, because it had install mediums for PCs with NVidia GPUs and a lot of gaming specific things prepared out of the box) for a similar reason. I need an OS that is cutting edge enough to play the latest games, but not so cutting edge that it is prone to sudden disintegration after an update.

AI based weapon systems do not have the shock value of being a weapon of mass destruction. They are only an automated version of basic guns and explosives (that are available pretty much everywhere, including homemade variants) on a mobile platform. And the nuclear weapon proliferation treaty is pretty much dead in the water, with multiple nation states either already having acquired them in the last 2 decades or being so close to having them that the only thing holding them back is political in nature, and these barriers are easily jumped over.

It took WW2 and the potential to sterilize and glass over the entire planet to make countries agree that nuclear disarmament is needed. I do not see the necessary willingness to prevent “automated guns”. In a world where nuclear proliferation treaties are crumbling, i would not bet a dime on a worldwide regulation of AI-powered weaponry, especially when looking at how many fucks the big countries are giving when the UN or ICC is speaking.

The only wild card in this situation is that basic FPVs are so cheap and easy to build out of commonly available consumer goods that it can’t really be prevented that common people might build them (or outright just buy them), and the people with better technical knowledge will also be able to build their own AI weapons. That’s like “the democratization of violent force”. Seeing how smart the average person is makes my head hurt when trying to envision such a future.

You know, civil society? The millions of people who neglected updating the basic rules their country is running on? That’s the problem when you write down that state and religion have to be separated, but at the same time adopt a civic religion - because at that point, changing the constitution becomes akin to blasphemy.

My judgement is as follows:

If you are not able to analyze the subtext of content, repeating motives in it and why someone specifically tells a story, you will always be a fool, because you are not able to discern between people who want to lead you astray and people who are upright in their convictions.

And people who are ok with others being essentially illiterate in these times are enabling liars, abusers, scammers, thieves, fascists and dictators.

I have to add: Media made to just have a laugh are fine! I laughed my ass off over all 6 Sharknado movies. But this doesn’t mean i engage uncritically with it - in this case it was obvious that these movies are not taking themselves seriously, and therefore i was also able to go with that.

I was also able to enjoy the Marvel movies somewhat, while having concerns with some underlying themes that are pretty militaristic and disenfranchising of common people. The notion that only “special” people can enact change in a society is a harmful one in my opinion.

The billionaires are the ones footing the bill and thinking they will be the “new gods” in their restructured society. In reality, nation states will use this technology to make sure that they can’t be touched, regardless of how brutal and inhumane their regime is.

In some way, the billionaires are just some stooges getting scammed into developing the chains that will bind us all.

That’s nice, but NOT the endgame. I do not contest that AI can be a positive thing too, but there are very powerful forces, concentrated mainly in California among the tech Billionaires, who want to use AI as a tool to ensure that their will cannot be denied.

The US was already using AI in the attack on Iran, minimizing human involvement in target selection and approving the strikes (thats how over 100 little girls died). Russia is experimenting with fully AI automated attack drones based on Nvidia hardware. Flock cameras are analyzing not only license plates, but data points like bumper stickers and what other devices are in the car, making every personal movement transparent even if you leave your smartphone at home. Home security cameras are using facial recognition (which they only pulled back because they were inept in messaging, but you can be sure this functionality will return, and with full access for the authorities). Laws preventing authorities from spying on citizens get bypassed by buying the required data from advertising companies. Social media is getting flooded with LLM-generated content designed to steer public opinion regardless of what the truth is. Entertainment hardware like Smart TVs is listening in on your conversations in your living room (and in many cases much further away), transcribing your words into text using AI and storing it - even if you keep your TV offline, your chats become company property - and therefore state property after a simple financial transaction - the moment your TV detects an open WIFI, or in the worst case just use technologies like LoRa to transmit the data home.

The people behind all of this are the same people financing far right parties all over the world, because a divided world is easier to dominate.

Society is under an AI-powered full scale assault. I hate it, because I know how much positive stuff this technology can enable, just as you documented. But giving up all our rights and living in an hyperscaled version of 1984 is not worth it.

Noone expects it to do it day one. But they ignored obvious flaws for hundreds of years now, and that makes them the butt of the joke for sure, and they deserve the fallout of their glorious empire becoming an autocracy.

You watch movies to dissect their meanings, others watch movies to escape reality for a bit.

The dissecting of media (which i do a lot) isn’t something i choose - it comes pretty automatically with media literacy. As soon as you develop the skills needed to analyze subtext and themes, and start to take a critical stance regarding video content, you can’t really switch it off outside of getting wasted.

So i’d say the difference is simply in media literacy (and more broadly, general education) and level of cognitive impairment.

Just like Trump, he just abuses the holes in the rules that have never been fixed. Reagan was the first to do that large scale, but in reality nothing out of manners or some moral code was preventing things like that happening before, and as we currently see, the americans haven’t fixed anything in the last decades - it rather seems many have forgotten more than they ever learned.

The US is a joke - we can see how much their constitution and democratic institutions are worth in reality. Outside of an outsized ego and megalomaniac tendencies, there’s not much to see there.

Rapists? Child Molesters? Wife Beaters? Fraudsters? Trust Fund Babies? Charlatans?

You don’t even have to pick - an inclusive “yes” is enough

In my opinion they are building the infrastructure for a fully automated surveillance society, for automated media manipulation, and to remove humans out of the kill chain in the military, while dismantling the rest of what remains of the middle class. We are going straight into high-tech dark ages / feudalism. Shadowrun and Cyberpunk, here we come. (Edit: the only thing i am not sure about here is if we will have corporations with more power than nation states, or nation states having absolute control over corporations and using them in proxy wars. Time will tell.)

Russia with its limited AI development seems to already have deployed fully automated killing machines (Powered by NVidias Jetson Orin module). The US aim for the same, and everyone else who doesn’t want to become a vassal state will have to follow suite.

When i think of this future, the only picture my mind can produce is Black Mirror - Metalhead.

Edit: If used for these tasks, it’s also not important if inference is something you can make money with. OpenAI, Anthropic and the Neoclouds are a grave for billions of dollars - but that doesn’t matter if the rewards are non-monetary.

The thing is: The amount of compute being planned (it’s often not getting built) can only have one true goal: automated mass surveillance, media manipulation and dismantling of what remains of the middle class, in addition of fully automated warfare. No other task than rolling out Flock 2.0 and the equivalent of Skynet needs that much compute. All the things you mentioned already work with the EXISTING compute. I agree that some additional datacenters will be needed, but for the things you mentioned a fraction of planned compute is already fine, it seems.

Yep, the real money you make when being able to combine 2 different skills, because the amount of people having studied exactly this combination will always be a very small group. Coding and a learned trade is one of the rarer combinations - most coders (in my experience) acquire management or business skills to climb the corporate ladder.

Did you mean $4.99? No way most of them have $499 available after refueling their emotional support vehicles in this economy.

So it’s a kind of ableism - there are very obviously genetic factors at play lol

Does ghostfucking have a DSM5 entry?

The issue isn’t even with the amount the EU wants to provide. The issue is that when you order a PAC3 interceptor, it costs 4m $ and takes 24 months until it arrives. The EU in general has pretty low stockpiles of ammunition, and PAC3 is no exception. Ballistic missiles on the other hand are a lot easier and cheaper to build. That’s the reason why Ukraine is working hard to be able to build antiballistics themselves, but R&D takes time - again, it’s harder to intercept a ballistic missile than to fire one.

Most news i heard from Ukraine says that their antiballistic program will bear fruit next year if everything goes well. If we are able to help them to get through this winter, there’s a good chance that they wont need as many PAC3 next year because they have their own system independent from the fuckery that the US currently is.

Oh i know that it will get worse. The US are undergoing a similar process as Russia was after the USSR collapsed. They will be a democracy on paper - but only there, and their warmongering will only get worse.

A country that switches allegiances every few years cannot be an ally. The US is less stable than fucking Russia, and we can’t count on them, regardless of who’s sitting in the big chair. Even if there were an EU-friendy president in the US, one midterms gone wrong can make that president a lame duck; and there’s also the christofascist supreme court.

As long as the US does not clean house by restructuring the constitution, limit the power of the executive branch, make bad supreme court appointments not a decade long ball-on-a-chain, make sure that every vote has the same power, outlaw PACs and gerrymandering, and stop messing around with the lives of people in other countries and their own, they can’t be an ally for the EU.

A research time of about 45 seconds has shown that the techniques regarding plain text can also be removed by automated means.

https://cleanpaste.site/

I’d say, if you are dumb enough to not clean up your shit, you do not deserve any better.