Sounds about right. They say it’s the first court ruling of its kind (here). I bet it’s making its way to the next appeal court as we speak. We need way more court cases to get clarity on AI and how it relates to our current laws.

I can hardly hear him through the walls of the bubble… What does he say? It’s comfy in there? Everyone get rid of their sharp objects? They’re adding more cash into the money cube and turn the fan to max?

Yes. And I think it’s even worse than that. The war is the one thing left cementing Putin’s power. Once he stops, there’s nothing left except a broken country with a wrecked economy. So I think at this point he couldn’t cut his losses, even if the sunk cost fallacy weren’t a thing. And the population doesn’t really have any choice whether they want to pay for some hypothetical victory, because it’s a dictatorship.

Sorry, that was in response to if anyone knows alternative youtube frontends, not really aimed at your original question. You probably just entered a youtube url. And piefed just goes ahead and matches all the links that start with youtube.com and adds this additional link to a privacy-respecting service… which unfortunately doesn’t work… But PieFed does this entirely automatically, and I believe to all links. I don’t think there’s anything for the user to change here. But PieFed should offer features which actually work, so me might want to deal with this in one form or another.

What’s the encryption and signing on a hardware level for? I mean dependent on what’s that good for and who controls it, it’s trusted computing, or treacherous computing as Stallman calls it…

(I mean it’s not working out great for GrapheneOS either. Back in the day I had a phone I owned, with privacy features added and alternative background services so I had a pretty much Google-free experience. These days it’s all locked down, I hand out my private metadata to Google, can barely ride a train without, or get a discount in the supermarket. I can’t do backups and I’m f***ed if I want to cross a border to a more restrictive country because these guys are in on it as well. They’re probably going to use it to limit what I can install. And more and more manufacturers lock down bootloaders etc and I thought we were past this. Graphene itself advised me to switch to proprietary code in the name of security and they’ll have a look at the code later, once Google eventually releases it. All of this is due to (or related to) these security measures working way too well and that’s also why they’re being used. I wish my phone didn’t have a TPM but a simple disk encryption like LUKS on Linux instead. And I don’t see many reasons why we should copy these very bad dynamics.)

I think the overall idea is nice, though. We had these project ideas to just plug in a box and be self sufficient in the self-hosting community since the SheevaPlug. Or the FreedomBox. There are some hardware projects as well like the Home Assistant Green or back in 2019 they tried to sell a Pioneer-FreedomBox. None of those match exactly with your proposal, but I think they’re pretty close. Maybe get in touch with them and see if you can participate in a new iteration, or read about their past experience with the proposed target audience. Especially FreedomBox seems like a good fit to me. They’re not very loud, but afaik still around. And they’re Free Software nerds, which seems to align with your idea, minus the locking it down and transferring control to other parties via the TPM.

I think yewtu.be (Individous) and for example https://lt.epicsite.xyz/ (Liberatube) still work, at least as of now. I’ve not seen any working, public Piped instances in a while. And that’s pretty much the alternative webfrontends I’m aware of. But I know from tinkering with Peertube and yt-dlp how difficult it is to access the videos in non-standard ways. Youtube has some countermeasures in place and they’ll regularly come up with ways to make it yet more difficult. So, overall it’s not looking good for quite some time now.

What’s the appeal of a pitbull anyway? I don’t have a dog but I think I’d go for a fluffy large and calm one. The opposite of that would be something like a bull terrier which I don’t find pretty at all. Or a pug which just looks deranged and I’ve never met one with a personality I like, but that’s not a dangerous breed, just a silly one.

Uh sorry, I don’t have a good recommendation. I myself use a self-hosted instance of SearXNG but that’s a bit much for the non-tech people and it doesn’t work that well due to all the rate-limiting of Google etc so it’ll intermittently stop working and I just can’t recommend it. I know lots of people use Duckduckgo, Startpage or Ecosia. But I’m not an expert on them, if they provide privacy or whether they care for the environment or do green washing. So I’m afraid I can’t make a good statement here.

Thanks for sharing. I use a metasearch engine so I don’t have to see it. Unfortunately that doesn’t make a big difference in the broader picture. For most users this is the default experience. Slop at the top, then advertisements and only then what a search engine is supposed to return. And those burnt CPU cycles will be forced upon them. And I guess that’s pretty much normalized by now. Probably also the reason why Google does it in the first place.

Bit unfortunate that the authors then went ahead to write “This is crazy. NEVER” over it. Because that makes it wrong, given never has a meaning like not at all. I mean this doesn’t take away from the atrocities humans did to other humans, I’m just questioning the choice of an inaccurate map to visualize it. And I think travelling shows were big as well back in the time. I mean people didn’t have the means to travel 2h by car to visit an exhibition of something. So that proper definition would be limited to big cities anyway, while the rest of the shows, exhibitions, circuses would be travelling to reach the majority of the ordinary people.

Yeah, I’d be willing to partially blame that on the users. If you’re using some big advertisement company’s product as your portal to the digital world, that’s on you. Similar for other data-harvesting companies like OpenAI.

Bit black and white thinking, but there’s some truth to it. I mean in reality everything is nuanced. Your government is probably neither fully democratic nor authoritarian and art is supposed to be there for everyone but then it costs money and you need time and not a 70h work-week to participate. But generative AI has some additional obstacles due to the cost of computing, the datasets and the impact. The closest we get is something like Mozilla’s Common Voice and these efforts to collaboratively work towards an open source text to speech, or machine translation… But we can see how it only got us so far and then the big companies and research institutes did the natural sounding ones. LLMs or video generators are pretty much exclusionary as they are laid out today. And I think that’s the biggest issue with them next to environmental impact. (I don’t think the automation of human thought itself is the problematic aspect, I mean my neighbour having a brain also doesn’t limit mine, so I don’t think it’s due to the existence of other “intelligent” entities. But it’s really the other thing that makes it bad.)

Btw, the proper place to mount filesystems is either /media or /mnt. I wouldn’t create a directory called /Volumes in Linux. And pay attention, these are case-sensitive and most (not all) system directories have agreed on using lower-case letters only. And “volume” is kind of a Windows and MacOS-term anyway, I rarely see Linux-people refer to media and filesystems that way.

Thanks for writing this down. That’s pretty comprehensive and looks like solid advice. I’d add “good documentation” and help readily available to the list. It’s really nice for new users if they’re able to find information on common woes, so they’re enabled to figure things out by themselves, instead of using some more obscure distribution.

Some individual motivation… Curiosity. Fascination with new tech. Or the prospect of maybe saving time and then evaluating if that’s the case. Idk, I’ve tried it as well and it doesn’t seem to save me time but that’s one of the the big promises of AI. I think we all know how AI delivers on its promises overall. But learning and experimenting (with some due diligence) is rarely amongst the problematic aspects of something. But it kind of comes first or you can’t learn about the truth.

Thanks, yeah I can understand that. I’ll try to get ahold of an Anthropic account and see what it’s about. It’s not high priority for me, but eventually I’d like to know the truth. I have some random hobby projects with stuff I could throw at it.

Yeah, It won’t do anything, though. That dynamic is baked in to the core of social media. You’re supposed to doomscroll and get some small but constant dopamine hits. It’ll tingle a bit once you’re offended or get your perspective validated. I don’t think it’s a fallacy, that’s the core dynamics, and what we incentivise people to do by designing platforms like this.

(I think the framing is a bit stupid, because it takes away from the valid criticism of TEMU and there’s enough of it. This is more like the good old story of how someone dried their dog in the microwave and now we need stickers to tell people how reality works.)

I think that’s a general societal trend and we’re not exempt from any of that. But yeah, I wish we’d focus on quality and discuss things, not stir up simple emotions.

Why the heck would someone use a brush that has the words “tile, sink, wash basin, bath/showers” on it and let their small kid play with it? Generally tools and kids don’t mix well. You’re supposed to stow power tools and bathroom cleaning supply out of reach. Same goes for other motorized things, even a handheld electric mixer in the kitchen, we also got youtube videos about how they rip out hair of stupid teenagers.

Thanks. Yeah I didn’t try Claude. They want my phone number to sign up and I’m not providing that to people. But you’re not the only person suggesting Claude Sonnet, I’ve read that several times now. I wonder if they’re really that much better. I’ll try some more throwaway phone numbers to get in, but seems they’ve blocked most of them.

I’ve tried breaking down things as well. That’s usually a good strategy in programming. Though I guess at some point they’re small enough so I could have already typed it in myself instead of talking about doing it. And I find it often also struggles to find the right balance with the level of detail of a function and whether it’s clever to do a very specific singular thing or do it a bit more general so the function can be reused in other parts of the code. So it’ll be extra work later to revise it, once everything is supposed to come together and integrate/combine.