Lvxferre

This screams FAITH (Filthy Assumptions Instead of THinking) from a distance, on multiple levels:

1. Assuming that the current machine learning development will lead to artificial general intelligence. Will it?
2. Assuming that said AGI would appear in time to reduce power consumption. Will it?
3. Assuming that lowering the future power consumption will be enough to address issues caused by the current power consumption. Will it?
4. Assuming that addressing issues from a distant future means that the whole process won’t cause harm for people in a nearer future. Will it?

Furthermore, Gates in the quote is being disingenuous:

“Let’s not go overboard on this,” he said. “Datacenters are, in the most extreme case, a 6 percent addition [to the energy load] but probably only 2 to 2.5 percent. The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6 percent reduction? And the answer is: certainly,” Gates said.

The answer addresses something far, far more specific than the main issue.

If I may, here’s my alternative solution for the problem, in the same style as Gates’:

Kill everyone between the North Pole and the Equator.

What do you mean, it would kill 85% people in the world? Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, right? Nobody that I know personally lives there, so Not My Problem®. (Just keep Japan, I need my anime to watch.)

…I’m being clearly sarcastic to deliver a point here - it’s trivially easy to underestimate issues affecting humankind, and problems associated with their solutions, if you are not directly affected by either. Gates is some billionaire bubbled around rich people; this sort of problem will affect the poor first, as the rich can simply throw enough money into their problems to make them go away.

More like the straw that broke the camel’s back. And a sign that Microsoft’s behaviour is still the same as it was in IE times.

I know that this expression desensitises people to something serious, but it describes Microsoft - the “it”/corporation - perfectly: rapist mentality. It shows how eager Microsoft is to disregard consent, users saying “no, I don’t want it”, and to force itself over the users as long as it gets some benefit out of it.

Including new obnoxious advertisement slots into an already released product - one that you paid for - is only a result of that mentality.

Those mistakes would be easily solved by something that doesn’t even need to think. Just add a filter of acceptable orders, or hire a low wage human who does not give a shit about the customers special orders.

That wouldn’t address the bulk of the issue, only the most egregious examples of it.

For every funny output like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving me 200 burgers”, there’s likely tens, hundreds, thousands of outputs like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving 1 burger”, that sound sensible but are still the same problem.

It’s simply the wrong tool for the job. Using LLMs here is like hammering screws, or screwdriving nails. LLMs are a decent tool for things that you can supervision (not the case here), or where a large amount of false positives+negatives is not a big deal (not the case here either).

Next on the news: “Hitler ate bread.”

I’m being cheeky, but I don’t genuinely think that “Nazi are using a tool that is being used by other people” is newsworthy.

Regarding the blue octopus, mentioned in the end of the text: when I criticise the concept of dogwhistle, it’s this sort of shit that I’m talking about. I don’t even like Thunberg; but, unless there is context justifying the association of that octopus plushy with antisemitism, it’s simply a bloody toy dammit.

So Mint can perform the same role as a tablet

Yeah, you could argue that Mint allows that laptop to perform the same role as a tablet; it’s at most used for simple image edition, web browsing, and listening music through the SMB network (from my computer because hers has practically no storage).

Without a Linux distro the other options would be to “perform” as electronic junk or virus breeding grounds.

I keep seeing these posts and comments, trying to convince people This Is The Year of The Linux Desktop.

Drop off the strawman. That is neither what the author of the article said, nor what I did.

The rest of your comment boils down to you noisily beating that strawman to death, and can be safely disregarded as such.

To reinforce the author’s views, with my own experience:

I’ve been using Linux for, like, 20 years? Back then I dual booted it with XP, and my first two distros (Mandriva and Kurumin) are already discontinued. I remember LILO.

So I’m probably a programmer, right? …nope, my grads are Linguistics and Chemistry. And Linux didn’t make me into a programmer either, the most I can do is to pull out a 10 lines bash script with some websearch.

So this “Linux is for programmers” myth didn’t even apply to the 00s, let alone now.

You need a minimum of 8GB of RAM and a fairly recent CPU to do any kind of professional work at a non-jittery pace [in Windows]. This means that if you want to have a secondary PC or laptop, you’ll need to pay a premium for that too.

Relevant detail: Microsoft’s obsession with generative models, plus its eagerness to shove wares down your throat, will likely make this worse. (You don’t use Copilot? Or Recall? Who cares? It’ll be installed by default, running in the background~)

Linux, on the other hand, can easily boot up on a 10-year-old laptop with just 2GB of RAM, and work fine. This makes it the perfect OS for my secondary devices that I can carry places without worrying about accidental damage.

My mum is using a fossil like this. It has 4GB or so; it’s a bit slow but it works with an updated Mint, even if it wouldn’t with Windows 10.

Sure, you can delay an update [in Windows], but it’s just for five weeks.

I gave the link a check… what a pain. For reference, in Linux Mint, MATE edition:

That’s it. You click a button. It’s probably the same deal in other desktop environments.

Thank you for the info. That’s… sad, really.

Any further than this and they’ll call you a conspiracy theorist.

I’m probably one now - it was inevitable to connect GNOME’s obtuseness to Red Hat violating the GPL. It sounds a lot like IBM trying to make its own operating system, lacking the means to do so, and exploiting open source to do it for them.

Do you have further info? That’s a thing that I’d like to dig further into - why GNOME went from “decent but heavy desktop environment” to “oh look «those guys» /me facepalms”.

Days, years, they’re all in the bottomless past. Might as well never have happened.

(Serious now, as the above is just me being silly: 13 years, with the release of GNOME 3.0.)

One day, GNOME will be seen as those arseholes who tried to fragment further an already small and fragmented environment, for petty reasons like “i has a vizhun”.

That day was yesterday, by the way.

No, that’s a coincidence. I wanted something that: started loud, was easy to recognise, I don’t mind hearing, and my neighbours don’t listen to. Wicked World it is.

Here’s the code by the way, with the echo translated:

lvxInternetCheck () {
	while [[ $(ping -c 5 8.8.8.8 | grep -o "100% packet loss") == "100% packet loss" ]]
		do echo "No internet at $(date +%R)." ; sleep 300
		done
	echo "Internet came back at $(date +%R)."
	cvlc /[redacted]/08\ -\ Wicked\ World.mp3 
	}

It’s dirty but it works. (My functions start with “lvx” to avoid the tiny chance that they might clash with system functions.)

A script full of functions that I perform often, like:

• Probe every 5min for internet connection. Play Black Sabbath when there is. (My internet goes down often.)
• Create individual tarballs/zips/rars for each subdir.
• Extract all tarballs/zips/rars from a dir. (It detects the format on its own)
• Extract all files of a DwarFS file into a dir.
• Re-encode all vids from a dir.
• Delete all thumbnail pictures from my user.
• Find and remove all desktop.ini and thumbs.db files in a dir, recursively.

My .bashrc then sources that script, so to use those functions I simply open a terminal. And if I ever need to delete my .bashrc and recreate it anew, they’re safely stored in my scripts directory.

I know that I shouldn’t, but here’s what I think about this whole deal, illustrated with a single image macro:

Get wrecked, Microsoft.

I think that the article does a good job highlighting how much of a trainwreck this is, because Microsoft is not to be trusted. The Windows users hysterically complaining about this are not expecting Microsoft to behave in some outrageous way; they’re expecting Microsoft to behave as usual.

That other poster is using a disingenuous debate tactic called “whataboutism”. Basically shifting the focus from what’s being criticised (AI resource consumption) to something else (other industries).

Your comparison with evangelists is spot on. In my teen years I used to debate with creationists quite a bit; they were always

• oversimplifying complex matters
• showing blatant lack of reading comprehension, and distorting/lying what others say
• vomiting certainty on things that they assumed, and re-eating their own vomit
• showing complete inability to take context into account when interpreting what others say
• chain-gunning fallacies
• “I’m not religious, but…”

always to back up something as idiotic as “the world is 6kyo! Evolution is a lie!”.

Does it ring any bell for people who discuss with AI evangelists? For me, all of them.

(Sorry bolexforsoup for the tone - it is not geared towards you.)

And I supposed to care that the poor SEO assholes that need to get their ads more visibility weren’t being given all the instructions on how to do that by the search engine?

No. You’re supposed to care that a company is pointlessly* lying, thus it’s extremely likely to deceive, mislead and lie when it gets some benefit out of it.

In other words: SEO arseholes can ligma, Google is lying to you and me too.

*I say “pointlessly” because not disclosing info would achieve practically the same result as lying.