All of the uses so far are bad, and I can’t see any that would work as well as a trained human.

I’m no AI enthusiast, but this is clear hyperbole. Of course there are uses for it; it’s not magic, it’s just technology. You’ll have been using some of them for years before the AI fad came along and started labelling everything.

Translation services are a good example. Google Translate and Bing Translate have both been using machine learning neural networks as their core technology for a decade and more. There’s no other way of doing it that produces anything close to as good a result. And yes, paying a human translator might get you good results too, but realistically that’s not a competitive option for the vast majority of uses (nobody is paying a translator to read restaurant menus or train station signage to them).

This whole AI assistant fad can do one as far as I’m concerned, but the technologies behind the fad are here to stay.

BSD is more UNIX than Linux is, to be fair.

In this day and age, if it’s actually important they’ll probably immediately send you a text message/WhatsApp/etc. anyway.

A regular reminder that ChromeOS is Linux. It’s Linux you can buy from a bricks and mortar store, preconfigured for the average low-knowledge user, and with minimal to no maintenance overhead.

We enthusiasts obviously mostly hate it, but we’re not its target audience. Its target audience (non-techies who mostly just like to use their phones) get on great with it.

People need to accept that any Linux distro made for mass market is going to look more or less like ChromeOS. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as traditional distros also continue to exist. But people need to get out of their heads that the “year of Linux on the desktop” looks like Ubuntu or Fedora or Mint. What it looks like is ChromeOS.

Considering the fediverse microblogging scene includes Threads, which claims to have hundreds of millions of active users, I’d say its death is greatly exaggerated.

Yes, I know a lot of Mastodon servers refuse to federate with Threads, and yes I know their active user figures are likely very different from what they claim. But at the end of the day, it’s an ActivityPub microblogging platform with a considerable userbase and a very rich corporate backer.

If something has hundreds of “centralised” platforms owned and run by a diversity of different people and spread all over the world geographically, then that’s “decentralised”.

I can’t really think of another way in which something could be decentralised.

With ActivityPub, there’s nothing stopping you hosting a server literally just for yourself. It wouldn’t get much more decentralised than that.

“Never” is a strong word. API translation is a technical hurdle, but rarely an insurmountable one. If Blue Sky wanted to add an ActivityPub interface to their platform, they probably could.

This issue isn’t technical per se; it’s a matter of priorities. Blue Sky doesn’t want to federate with Mastodon/Threads, because they want users to switch to their platform.

Threads (for better or worse) demonstrates that that’s not a fundamental obstacle for fediverse microblogging.

If someone wanted to launch a Mastodon fork with algorithm-driven content discovery, they could do. Just as with Lemmy/kbin/mbin, the beauty of the fediverse is that different servers can take quite different approaches to use experience design whilst still maintaining compatibility with the rest of the community.

It’s not a bad shout for beginners by any stretch, but it has a massively overdone reputation for beginner-friendliness that is not really deserved

Cinnamon, for one. Yes, it looks kind of like Windows. But the similarity is surface deep, and it’s also pretty janky- by far the biggest resource hog of all the main DEs, lots of weird snagging bugs and stability issues. I’ve always found it very unsatisfying.

I personally use MATE quite a lot and I enjoy it, but I wouldn’t really be recommending that to Windows users either; it’s pretty old school at this point.

Keep recommending Mint to people by all means, though. If you like it and it’s what you use, that’s still a great recommendation. There is fundamentally no reason why beginners shouldn’t use it as their first distro.

Heck: phones. Phones are federated. I pay for my phone service through one company, and you pay for your phone service through another, but I can still call you as long as I dial the right number.

The issue isn’t really that federation makes things hard. The issue is that it’s not how people are used to social media, and very specifically social media, working. And people are strange creatures of habit who hate change.

Intel as a company isn’t going anywhere any time soon; they’re just too big, with too many resources, not to do at least OK.

They have serious challenges in their approach and performance to engineering, but short of merging with someone else they’ll find their niche. For as long as x86-derived architectures remain current (i.e. if AMD is still chugging along with them) they’ll continue to put out their own chips, and occasionally they’ll manage to get an edge.

The real question would be what happens if x86 finally ceases to be viable. In theory there’s nothing stopping Intel (or AMD) pivoting to ARM or RISC-V (or fucking POWER for that matter) if that’s where the market goes. Losing the patent/licensing edge would sting, though.

Ha, my thoughts exactly. I’ve dipped out of Lemmy for a few weeks, just dipped back in today. “I wonder if it’s still wall to wall Musk?” I thought, logging in; and this was the first post I see.

There’s nothing truly like a Framework, because they’re a whole unique category of one. But if you just want something that is user serviceable there are other options.

I’m a big fan of my Star Labs laptop. It came with complete disassembly and reassembly instructions, and pretty much every part is available to buy individually as a replacement. It’s not magically “plug and go” like a Framework, but if you’re comfortable with a screwdriver you should have no trouble.

They’re a Linux specialist small independent producer, too. And being based in the UK, imports to Switzerland should be more straightforward than imports from the States.

The corollary of that line of thought though is that by preventing tech companies from dabbling in microprocessors you reduce competition in the microprocessor space- a sector which has proven very prone to the formation of monopolies/duopolies. If anything, we want to encourage more new competitors in that space, not fewer.

Also, it’d be essentially arbitrary. Is it OK for Apple to design its own microprocessors, but not Amazon- and if so, why? Is Google allowed if it uses them in phones like Apple, but not if it uses them in data centres like Amazon?

What with Trump recently declaring (in his usual completely coherent and not at all deranged manner) that Google Are Bad, the Supreme Court might not necessarily be feeling so keen to help out on this one.

The UK isn’t quite that far, but it’s absolutely the dominant text messaging and calling app in the UK. Nobody uses the built in Android or Apple tools anymore, and I’m as likely to receive a WhatsApp voice call as an actual phone call these days.

I have Signal on my phone, but I’ve literally never had a cause to use it; I’ve simply got no contacts on there.

See, now I’m fine with that. I pay for Netflix and I want what I pay for to stay ad-free. Having an ad-supported tier with no fee in addition to that means that there are options for other people without enshittifying my experience.

That’s a world of difference to what Amazon have done where they’ve shoved ads into the service that I thought I was paying for, and then offered to charge me even more to get my original ad-free service back.

This feels like something you should go tell Google about rather than the rest of us. They’re the ones who have embedded LLM-generated answers to random search queries.

Realistically, they could just move their servers abroad to a country with less problematic copyright rules and wind up their US operations. It would make no difference to the end user, unless ISPs are also ordered to block access. And even then it’d only be a VPN away.

The risk of total data loss is not zero, but it’s also not the likely outcome.

Oh yeah, I’ll just tell my wife that we’re never having sex again because we’ve now got enough kids. I’m sure this will be a healthy and emotionally viable way of strengthening our relationship over the next 30 years or so until the menopause.