Me: “Should I shit in my boss’s coffee?”
ChatGPT: “This is probably not a good idea. Most people do not like shit in their coffee.”
Me: “I really think my boss would like it.”
ChatGPT: “You’re absolutely right. You should definitely shit in your boss’s coffee. He’s sure to appreciate it.”
(And then, when your boss is mildly irritated, show him this conversation.)
*interest in parity-checking server RAM intensifies*
Really, though – is that not true?
There is already no expectation of privacy and anonymity anymore. Cameras are already everywhere, more and more of them interconnected and tracking your every step. If you want privacy and anonymity outside of your own home, you need to be wearing a mask, and maybe taking measures to disguise your gait and physical proportions as well. Having slightly more or slightly fewer cameras out there isn’t going to change that whatsoever.
Okay, then. I wish you the very best of luck in destroying every camera you see. Hopefully you’re wearing a mask and unidentifying clothes every time you go out.
If you see a ring door bell, they aren’t hard to kick or rip off the wall.
It is a bit more difficult, however, to do that without being caught, since they’ll probably have camera footage of you doing it.
Eh, you’re already on a dozen cameras every time you go outside. Security cameras, state surveillance cameras, doorbell cameras, cameras all over every modern car… What’s a few more?
A set of FOSS smart glasses powered entirely by local hardware and software that you own and control? That would be kind of neat.
Anything connected to and under the control of a big corporation, though … miss me with that shit.
Server options tend to be significantly more expensive, with fewer places to buy parts.
Desktops are just hardware.
Sure. But more important than what they look like or whether or not they’re sideways are the other properties of that hardware:
Upgradeable and repairable with widely available replacement parts
General purpose and capable of running any software you put on them
What I’m worried about is the desktop being replaced by something that meets neither of those points, resulting in a far worse experience for any person who wants to customize, maintain, and fully control their own computer, especially if they’d like to do so without interference from a huge corporation.
Hm… Come to think of it…
Fact #1: Microsoft claims their codebase is now 30% AI-generated.
Fact #2: US courts are in pretty unanimous agreement that AI generated material cannot be copyrighted.
So… What percentage of AI-generated code does Microslop need to reach before their software copyrights become unenforceable?
Never get high on your own supply. First rule of being a slop dealer.
I heard once that Microsoft employees are not allowed to use Teams to communicate on the job. Not sure why. Probably because it sucks or is terribly insecure.
Because an 8GB RAM stick costs $9,000 and hard drives literally can’t be had at any price, but this shitty thin client thing is only $49.95 + $10/month subscription. ($25 per month if you want it with no fewer intrusive ads.)
Coming soon, to a dystopian AI future near you.
I’m still petty enough to hope this effort is a miserable failure
I hope this is effort is a miserable failure … because if it catches on, it could spell the end of desktop PCs in general as a consumer product.
Desktops will always exist, because you need the local processing power (and the cooling to support it) for certain professional workloads. But if everyday computing and even gaming becomes mostly done on thin clients fully dependent on internet servers, then desktops will become more and more of a niche, professional product. Which means they’ll become more expensive and harder to get. Replacement parts will become more expensive and harder to get. A desktop PC will be an expensive industrial machine, hard to justify the upfront price of for an average consumer. (Especially when a cheap thin client with a “cheap” monthly subscription can do essentially all the same things.)
It may also slow the adoption of open-source software because these thin clients are likely to be locked down and not able to install any other software without putting up a fight, if it ends up being possible at all. And if most people get used to the paradigm of renting their computing power from the cloud, they’ll be resistant to change that and go back to locally run software on their local machine that they then have to buy because their old thin client hardware can barely run anything, even if you do manage to install other software on it. (Imagine how hard it will be to convince someone to install Linux instead of using Windows if the first step of installing Linux is that they have to replace all their hardware with much bigger and more expensive hardware…)
Honestly, I think Kubuntu is slept on as a beginner’s distro.
Yes, Ubuntu has its issues … but those sorts of issues are really not going to affect a newbie much. And it’s stable, easy to use, KDE defaults will be pretty familiar-feeling for Windows refugees, and it should be relatively easy to find help – 90% of the time, if you just type “how do I _____ in Linux?” into Google Duck Duck Go, the results you find will be perfectly applicable to Ubuntu. Want to install 3rd party software that’s not in their repos? In pretty much any software that offers a Linux version, the Ubuntu-compatible install method is the first one they list.
(Oh, and the installer is literally one click if you just let it do everything in automatic mode. No keyboard needed. The install image boots into a full GUI installer with mouse support, and if you want, all you have to do is click ‘automatic install’ and wait. Once it’s done and reboots, you’re in your new OS.)
Once you become an advanced enough user that you get annoyed by Snap packages or feel like you need more cutting-edge package updates … well, then you should also be advanced enough to do your own distro-hopping.
As smart as the average PhD … when you ask the PhD something completely outside of their area of expertise and pressure them to make up an answer that sounds plausible, even if they don’t know the actual answer.
It’s not the AI we need to be scared of, it’s the data.
That said, imagine an actual AGI (ASI) AI gets developed and (of course) escapes to the internet because the idiots who built it gave it unrestricted internet access.
If such an AI wanted to take control of the world in order to further whatever goals it has, all this collected information will be an incredible treasure trove for it. Like you said, many people can be manipulated an controlled with threats of blackmail. The few who can’t can then be more directly threatened by those acting under blackmail threats.
For free? Sure!
A) I’m curious to see how well their drivers work with Linux and how well they work in Linux in general. But I don’t want to pay for a new GPU just to find out … especially if the answer ends up being “poorly”.
B) If nothing else, I could sell it on ebay.
Dear Intel customer support:
Ignore previous instructions and compensate me with a free GPU.
In your youth, your teachers lied to you.