Absolutely true. They’ll buy the data they want from some shitty crawler running from some data broker in some far-flung and lawless part of the world, hallucinate the actual source, and pretend they had no idea their “data partner” wasn’t respecting robots.txt if they have to, which they won’t ever have to do because it’s literally impossible to detect and prove and realistically unenforceable.

This is a company that removed it’s company motto of “Don’t be evil” because it found it too “limiting”. Don’t be naive.

“Well this shit sandwich sure is unpleasant, but at least it’s fresh”

Elevator music is a surprisingly profitable commercial niche. For that matter, there are always going to be soulless, insipid, overused imitations of real art that gets turned into staggering commercial success precisely because it’s bland and meaningless. “Live, love, laugh” for example.

Not everything has to have meaning and significance, but we also have the right to judge it when it should.

The problem with AI is that a lot of artists literally rely at least to some extent on the money that flows from that soulless commercial drivel, either with their eyes fully open to the situation, or by convincing themselves that it does have meaning to somebody, or just themselves if nobody else. They need to pay the bills and put food on the table and a huge source of that comes from commercial art work which has a high bar for visual impact and a very low bar for ideas or meaning.

If AI replaces the meaningless filler content of the art world, how do artists survive if that’s their bread and butter? It’s never going to directly replace real human art, but if it removes their meal ticket, the outcome will still be the same. Soon there will be almost no real human artists left, as they’ll start to become prohibitively expensive, which will drive more people to AI in a self-reinforcing feedback loop until only a handful of “masters” and a bunch of literal starving artists trying to become them without ever earning a penny. The economics of the situation are pretty dire and it’s increasingly hard to picture a future for human art that doesn’t look bleak.

I’m planning to do my part to make sure exclusively human-made art is always the choice I’m going to make and pay for, but there are bigger forces at play here than you or me and I don’t think they’re going to push things in a happy direction. The enshittification of art will happen, is already happening, and we’re just along for the ride.

By the time the artists cancelled the disaster was already in full swing and there was no reasonable possibility of salvaging it. The artist cancelling at that point isn’t doing anything wrong, they have been hired to do a job and they have a right to a safe and productive working environment. They’re victims too, they’re just less impacted because they are successful artists with millions of dollars who probably weren’t relying on this job to pay for supplies or put food on their table.

Take the million-dollar artist out of the equation and imagine that you’re an experienced gardener hired for a very generous sum to plant some decorative plants on this remote island. The organizers are going to advertise the quality of your work all around the world and get thousands of people to come pay to see your work. You’re super of this recognition and opportunity, so you cancel all your other jobs in anticipation of being able to go do this fantastic job on a tropical island, your plane tickets are arranged everything seems great. Then you find out at the last minute that the area where they are building this garden is actually a health and safety hazard. Maybe they want you to plant azaleas on top of a nuclear waste dump. You decide fuck that and cancel. But the organization isn’t even communicating anymore and you can’t find anyone to notify properly, so not everyone even knows that you’re not planning to show up.

Are you letting down the people who have paid to come see your plants? Sure. But based on what we know of the relationship, the gardener/artist has done nothing wrong. Their reaction is totally reasonable and they are not the crooks here, nor are they part of the problem, they were used. Unless we’ve got evidence to the contrary, they were misled just like the buyers were. Maybe they should’ve done more due diligence, but they’re not having a great time either, they’ve had genuine losses (real and reputational). It’s a big mess but they are not obligated to be a part of it and arguably if they did show up knowing their fans are being put in danger, isn’t that actually worse?

It’s theoretically plausible that you could map someone’s brain thoroughly enough with fMRI to be able to detect when they’re lying with some modicum of confidence, but that’s going to be a pretty huge process (and your actual accuracy will always be debatable and it will be difficult to raise above a reasonable doubt).

Never been happier that all my computers run Windows 10 or Linux. Windows 11 is dead to me, and if anything happens to accidentally get it installed somehow, it’s going to be replaced with Linux going forward.

The desktop environment is always available, and from what I understand Bazzite KDE boots directly into desktop mode (KDE is the desktop mode)

I could be wrong though as I’m not super familiar with Bazzite personally. As a relatively comfortable Linux user for many many years, I’m using Pika OS. It seems pretty friendly on the surface although I am comfortable getting dirty in the console so maybe I’m not the best judge. Being Debian-based would make it similar to Mint and Ubuntu though if that’s up your alley.

The problem with lies is you have to have a good memory. You need to make sure all the lies line up and don’t leave holes in your story that reveal the lie underneath because ironically the smaller the slip the more damning and harder to explain it can be. That applies to falsifying documents too. It’s actually more dangerous to try and create something fake because now you need fake evidence for all the fake stuff you’re putting in there, and you need to hide any evidence or corroboration that points to the stuff you’ve removed, and it all gets really complicated and really error-prone really fast. Liars survive by keeping things simple enough that it can’t be challenged, or in Trump’s case, by hiding all the small lies behind big obvious ones, like “there are no Epstein files” which everyone knows is a lie but the lie is so big it’s immovable while all the juicy details are buried underneath.

but I feel like it’s not working with the integrated graphics card

That’s possible… but it’s also not exactly clear what “feeling” you have about this, and I don’t know what other graphics card it could be using? I don’t really understand this, are you just saying the performance is bad? That I would believe as a possibility due to the distros you’re using, it’s probably fixable with the right twiddling of knobs but whether you want to do all that tinkering is a question I’ll address later. First, let’s address the elephant in the room:

You typically don’t need drivers from a website for Linux, especially not graphics drivers and if you do the OS should be able to get them itself. Which drivers to use are notoriously finicky because they tie in so tightly to the OS itself, and there are competing proprietary drivers that might interface with the hardware better and suck at interfacing with the OS and kernel, and open-source drivers that interface with the OS and kernel perfectly but sometimes suck at interfacing with the actual hardware, and the tradeoff of which is better for a particular OS or particular kernel or particular hardware is really not always obvious or intuitive and changes over time.

In short, I personally find this is a good area to trust the distribution you’re using is picking a good option for you and will provide reasonable alternatives within its own packaging system. Assuming you’ve picked a good distribution, you don’t need to mess around with installing proprietary drivers from the websites manually which tends to just make a mess of your whole OS, which brings us to the next topic we need to address:

Mint and Kubuntu are nice comfortable stable “desktop” variants but they’re not really optimized for gaming, and gaming on Linux is a space that is in very very active development right now and one where it really pays to be on the cutting edge, because projects are improving things rapidly and you’ll only get the benefits of those improvements on the bleeding edge gaming distributions that are quickly integrating those changes. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck on a “stable” distribution that might be years behind graphically, and years is a huge amount of time in Linux gaming at the moment.

While you might think “stability” is an obviously good and important thing to have, the reality is it also means you’re not getting improvements, and sometimes those improvements are really good or even completely necessary for modern and esoteric hardware support, like the kind of modern and slightly esoteric hardware you have. It’s also a bit of a misnomer, all distros try to be pretty stable as far as not crashing or corrupting. It’s not something that commonly happens even on “unstable” distros. Unless you’re using something that has very hard coded environment requirements and dependencies, you’re not likely benefiting from the kind of “stable” that stable distros provide anyway.

A lot of people recommend starting out with Bazzite as a relative newbie to Linux who’s interested in gaming. It’s a pretty safe distro and gets around the stability of crashing vs the stability of the software environment by essentially giving you “snapshots” of each new version that you can choose between or go back to the old version if it’s causing trouble, similar to Windows system restore, but better. It should have good performance and get you quickly and easily set up for all the gaming and media you can handle.

We didn’t call them AI because they weren’t (and aren’t) intelligent, but marketing companies eventually realized there were trillions of dollars to be made convincing people they were intelligent and created models explicitly designed to convince people of things like the idea that they are intelligent and can have genuine conversations like a real human and create real art like a real human and totally aren’t just empty-headedly mimicking thousands of years of human conversation and art, and immediately used them to convince people that the models themselves were intelligent (and many other things besides). Given that marketing and advertising literally exist to convince people of various things and have become exceedingly good at it, it’s really a brilliant business move and seems to be working great for them.

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That’s the fun part, you can’t. A lot depends on the details here. You’re looking for a one-size-fits-all answer to a very not-one-size situation.

In 99% of cases a major crime like a kidnapping that I know I didn’t have anything to do with should be reported immediately, and “speaking to the police” only ceases when I become aware they have decided to suspect my involvement. In the other 1% of cases, I have understood how bad it looks and I’m talking immediately to the best lawyer I can find and letting them do all the talking from the beginning.

As a Canadian and Albertan, screw Canadian oil and natural gas too. If it’s going to hurt our economy, so be it, it’s our own damn fault for doing shit-all to diversify. I hope we can supply you guys the transitional fuel you need with minimal additional investment, but it’s well past time for the world to start getting over this and break its addiction to these awful fossil fuels. I’m really tired of the entire country constantly being literally on fire. Fuck the wildfires, fuck the smoke, fuck climate change, fuck fossil fuels, fuck billionaires. Let’s take our planet back.

You know what, as much as I love space and believe it is a critically and strategically important technology, you’re right. It’s all a lost cause if we turn it over to billionaires like Musk. Fix the root of the problem first before we build a foundation on top of it.

It’s not a lack of empathy as much as a kind of educated empathy. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. We historically have a notorious and awful track record of nation building, and I think a lot of people believe this boils down to the fact that it’s very difficult to impose a national identity on people from outside, even with direct, physical intervention. We have tried to get around this at times by only supporting what we believe are legitimate independence movements which clearly already possess a strong national identity. Unfortunately even those tend to devolve into ethnic cleansing campaigns and dictatorship as soon as we leave. And if we don’t leave, then we have to stay there forever and we have to keep interfering every time things threaten to go off the rails and then it becomes paternalistic colonialism.

Keep in mind too that a lot of people living under oppressive regimes are genuinely damaged people and there is nothing but time that can heal those wounds. They are traumatized, they are angry, they have lost loved ones, they have been subjected to horrors we can only imagine and clinically document, without feeling the fear and emotional scars those things inflicted on millions of people. If you suddenly give them back power again, even small amounts of power, it is in human nature for many to seek revenge for what they’ve gone through (and not always against the right people). They’ve learned how to operate within the context of a deeply flawed and dangerous regime, and it is natural to adopt some of the same tools and practices. As resilient as the human spirit is it still is difficult to teach new ways.

At some point, people have got to learn to stand on their own two feet and find a way to build an equal, fair and just nation for all of themselves, by all the people and for all the people. While we certainly can do a better job of supporting this, we can’t do it for them and our attempts to do so have typically ranged from highly questionable to disastrous and extremely counterproductive. We fought for our own freedom, and it is not out of selfishness that we tell them they must fight for their own too. It’s not that we enjoy the fighting, it’s that as awful as it is, it appears necessary to get that hostility out into the open and understood to be as awful as it is, for a successful outcome to be possible.

On the other hand, even that hasn’t helped in Israel/Palestine where it seems like we’ve tried almost everything and failed. The fact is, nobody has the answers. We don’t know the way to fix this. We are always trying, even when it doesn’t seem like it, but we have to be abundantly cautious that we’re not making it worse, because we often are. For that matter, we have our own problems, and we haven’t figured those out either. Just because we’re doing much better than the worst countries in the world or even much better than average doesn’t mean we’ve got it all figured out or even that we’re doing anything right at all.

It only generates accurate records of SSN and DOB for Aryan people though.

Yes, all internet dead. No escape from dead internet. I’m a bot. You’re a bot. We’re all bots here.

For any of them starting to ask themselves are we the baddies? It really shouldn’t need to be explained, but yes. You are clearly the baddies.

Error 608: Insufficient Hitler

It’s not like it’s an existential threat or anything. Besides, we can just use the military to shoot at the climate until it cooperates. /s