I’ve tried making this argument before and people never seem to agree. I think Google claims their Kubernetes is actually more secure than traditional VMs, but how true that really is I have no idea. Unfortunately though there are already things we depend upon for security that are probably less secure than most container platforms, like ordinary unix permissions or technologies like AppArmour and SELinux.

I think you need to add another new line to this comment.

Gentoo isn’t immutable or declarative afaik

What is a better implementation than NixOS? Guix is held back by the fact that it’s GNU only by default, and that it also compiles everything on your machine by default. You have to go out of your way to add a binary cache and speed up the install. That’s after you go out of your way to enable non-free packages so that your hardware can actually work with the right firmware. If someone made a version with those enabled by default things would be way quicker to setup and use

That explains why Nix despite being parallelized takes a long time to install packages and rebuild the configuration.

Why doesn’t lemmy at least have pinned comments and flairs? Seems like a serious omission to me.

You’re thinking of passive matrix displays. Those were the cheaper option but active matrix screens did exist.

The solution here isn’t to upgrade your PC for Microsoft’s sake. The solution is to use an OS that actually respects you and your time. Use Linux, or FreeBSD, or even macOS. Alternatively install Gentoo and spend even more time updating, but with spectacular performance and customizability when you’re not updating.

Fascism has always been a right wing ideology. While leftists have made some terrible mistakes, you shouldn’t pretend they are the only or main threat to democracy.

How do you even manage that much storage? Btrfs or snapraid or something?

The purpose of a system is, absolutely, what it does. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned your design and ethics were, once the system is doing things, those things are its purpose. Your waste heat example, yes, it was the design intent to eliminate that, but now that’s what it does, and the engineers damn well understand that its purpose is to generate waste heat in order to do whatever work it’s doing.

Huh? Then why is so much money spent on computers to minimize energy usage and heat production? This is perhaps the biggest load of bullshit I think I have heard in a long time. Maybe there is some concept similar to this, but if so you clearly haven’t articulated it well.

Anyway I think I am done talking about this with you. You are here to fear-monger over technology you probably don’t even use or understand, and I am sick of lemmings doing it.

Think, genuinely and critically, about what it means when someone tells you that you shouldn’t judge the ethics and values of their pursuits, because they are simply discovering “universal truths”.

No scientist or engineer as ever said that as far as I can recall. I was explaining that even for scientific fact which is morally neutral how you get there is important, and that scientists and engineers acknowledge this. What you are asking me to do this based on a false premise and a bad understanding of how science works.

And then, really make sure you ponder what it means when people say the purpose of a system is what it does.

It both is and isn’t. Things often have consequences alongside their intended function, like how a machine gets warm when in use. It getting warm isn’t a deliberate feature, it’s a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. We actually try to minimise this as it wastes energy. Even things like fossil fuels aren’t intended to ruin the planet, it’s a side effect of how they work.

What exactly is there to gain with AI anyways? What’s the great benefit to us as a species? So far its just been used to trivialize multiple artistic disciplines, basic service industries, and programming.

The whole point is that much like industrial automation it reduces the number of hours people need to work. If this leads to people starving then that’s a problem with the economic system, not with AI technology. You’re blaming the wrong field here. In fact everyone here blaming AI/ML and not the capitalists is being a Luddite.

It’s also entirely possible it will start replacing managers and capitalists as well. It’s been theorized by some anti-capitalists and economic reformists that ML/AI and computer algorithms could one day replace current economic systems and institutions.

Things have a cost, many people are doing the cost-benefit analysis and seeing there is none for them. Seems most of the incentive to develop this software is if you would like to stop paying people who do the jobs listed above.

This sadly is probably true of large companies producing big, inefficient ML models as they can afford the server capacity to do so. It’s not true of people tweaking smaller ML models at home, or professors in universities using them for data analysis or to aid their teaching. Much like some programmers are getting fired because of ML, others are using it to increase their productivity or to help them learn more about programming. I’ve seen scientists who otherwise would struggle with data analysis related programming use ChatGPT to help them write code to analyse data.

What do we get out of burning the planet to the ground? And even if you find an AI thats barely burning it, what’s the point in the first place?

As the other guy said there are lots of other things using way more energy and fossil fuels than ML. Machine learning is used in sciences to analyse things like the impacts of climate change. It’s useful enough in data science alone to outweigh the negative impacts. You would know about this if you ever took a modern data science module. Furthermore being that data centres primarily use electricity it’s relatively easy to move them to green sources of energy compared to say farming, or transport. In fact some data centres already use green energy primarily. Data centres will always exist regardless of AI and ML anyway, it’s just a matter of scale.

That’s not at all what I am doing, or what scientists and engineers do. We are all trained to think about ethics and seek ethical approval because even if knowledge itself is morally neutral the methods to obtain that knowledge can be truly unhinged.

Scientific facts are not a cultural facet. A device built using scientific knowledge is also a product of the culture that built it. Technology stands between objective science and subjective needs and culture. Technology generally serves some form of purpose.

Here is an example: Heavier than air flight is a possibility because of the laws of physics. A Boeing 737 is a specific product of both those laws of physics and of USA culture. It’s purpose is to get people and things to places, and to make Boeing the company money.

LLMs can be used for good and ill. People have argued they use too much energy for what they do. I would say that depends on where you get your energy from. Ultimately though it doesn’t use as much as people driving cars or mining bitcoin or eating meat. You should be going after those first if you want to persecute people for using energy.

Technology is a product of science. The facts science seeks to uncover are fundamental universal truths that aren’t subject to human folly. Only how we use that knowledge is subject to human folly. I don’t think open source or open weights models are a bad usage of that knowledge. Some of the things corporations do are bad or exploitative uses of that knowledge.

What about Lutris?

Most countries Primaries don’t exist at all. Getting to choose who represents a given party is a luxury.

That’s not at all what I am saying. I am saying that Gen Z aren’t as tech illiterate as people seem to think and using myself as an example.

Why are you so negative?

Point being I’ve used tech from the era before smartphones.