I don’t have a problem with snaps as a technology. If you want to use them, then who am I to judge?

But what I do have a problem with is when I don’t have a choice and I am being forced to use what the distro maintainers think is good for me. That is what finally made me quit Ubuntu and switch to Fedora.

Almost none of the people who are excited about AI know anything about computer science. I say this someone who always encounters idiots claiming my computer science degree will soon be obsolete because of AI… lol

Probably. I didn’t consider that, but everything is AI generated nowadays

But this is legitimately impressive

Can you not realise what is and is not a joke?

Closest I can get is a statue of nativist racist beating up immigrant

I love the Internet Archive but they are pretty clearly legally in the wrong here.

Not morally, mind. I support open access to knowledge. But they very clearly broke copyright law here.

Perhaps the only way to get rid of them for sure is to require a CAPTCHA before all posts. That has its own issues though.

What are the implications of this?

For what it’s worth, English Wikipedia editors reached a consensus to deprecate (ban) it for unrealiability last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_424#RFC:_The_Cradle

The following notes are present:

The Cradle is an online magazine focusing on West Asia/Middle East-related topics. It was deprecated in the 2024 RfC due to a history of publishing conspiracy theories and wide referencing of other deprecated sources while doing so. Editors consider The Cradle to have a poor reputation for fact-checking.

This is kind of what people are missing. These people really do produce millions of dollars worth of labour. That’s how entertainers are paid; the more people want to see their performance, the more that performance is worth.

$20 fee to talk to the gate agent

Because I am a developer and I have also been a sysadmin, and I really do not care. Yes, the format is good but I’m not particularly excited for it.

And I suppose sysadmins and application developers are not people?

My argument is not “we have a current standard”, it’s “people don’t give enough of a shit to change”.

I think this might sound like a weird thing to say, but technical superiority isn’t enough to make a convincing argument for adoption. There are plenty of things that are undeniably superior but yet the case for adoption is weak, mostly because (but not solely because) it would be difficult to adopt.

As an example, the French Republican Calendar (and the reformed calendar with 13 months) are both evidently superior to the Gregorian Calendar in terms of regularity but there is no case to argue for their adoption when the Gregorian calendar works well enough.

Another example—metric time. Also proposed as part of the metric system around the same time as it was just gaining ground, 100 seconds in a minute and 100 minutes in an hour definitely makes more sense than 60, but it would be ridiculous to say that we should devote resources into switching to it.

Final example—arithmetic in a dozenal (base-twelve) system is undeniably better than in decimal, but it would definitely not be worth the hassle to switch.

For similar reasons, I don’t find the case for JPEG XL compelling. Yes, it’s better in every metric, but when the difference comes down to a measly one or two megabytes compared to PNG and WEBP, most people really just don’t care enough. That isn’t to say that I think it’s worthless, and I do think there are valid use cases, but I doubt it will unseat PNG on the Internet.

What’s wrong with PNG?

Me who only has the original Cantonese version:

Give me a bunch of open AI models and a big GPU to play with and I’ll generate twenty gigabytes of weird anime fetish content.

This is the only true use of AI

Agreed. I managed to get my grandpa onto Linux using Mint on his old computer. He said the interface resembled classic Windows and was up and running in less than five minutes. I just had to show him how to use the software manager and that’s it.