The xdg-desktop-portal stuff is still too immature. For example, my friend wanted my help after upgrading his Pop_OS to 24.04, and 24.04 replaced GNOME with COSMIC. COSMI had no RemoteDesktop portal (and still doesn't have it), so we couldn't use RustDesk like we always did without him installing a GNOME session just for that.
I've been an i3 user for almost two decades, but eventually switched to Sway - to this day there's no InputCapture portal, so I can't use Synergy with Sway, forcing me to switch to i3 while I'm working.
It's been over 10 years of things like that. There's always SOMETHING missing.
SATA SSDs have one advantage though - their size. You don't see m.2 form factor SSDs going well over 8TBs, but for a larger SATA drive you can find >8TBs easily. Samsung had the best offering for this recently - Samsung SSD 870 QVO
The enterprise world has U2, but us plebs don't really have a comparable alternative.
Legally dubious in what sense? Leaking it might break trade secret protection, but afaik once it's public, it loses that protection, and the only one liable is the leaker. As far as I know, software per se is still not patentable even in the US since the actual source code is abstract mathematics, so it should be fine to publish the source (source code is fundamentally a detailed description of an algorithm, not a system implementing it), and there's effectively no way to stop an end-user from compiling and loading that source themselves. You could also distribute it from a more reasonable country like e.g. VLC does.
I'm going to get pedantic. That's why I've been using this exact term "LLM" instead of "AI" for the last few years.
The "artificial" implies that it has man-made origins, yet serves the *same* purpose. Richard here argues that it doesn't fit because it does not, in fact, serve the same purpose. You can argue that for certain people it can serve the same purpose, like if you're a CEO who replaces low-level support staff with chatbots - but then it's an artificial support staff, not artificial intelligence.
> ...it doesn't fit because it does not, in fact, serve the same purpose.
For many people and purposes, it does indeed serve the same purpose. I use it all the time for coding, which is still very tricky, and for writing emails. For writing emails in particular, it is already a life-changing technology. I have always wanted my own secretary to dictate and finalize various letters. But, for some reason, companies don't provide secretaries anymore. Now, I can finally have an LLM instead. I guess there's no discussion that a good secretary must have always been quite intelligent.
I largely share your sentiment, I had a tape player as a kid, and the second I could get a CD player and burn my own CDs I never looked back. One thing that I don't see mentioned often is how battery-hungry these players were as well.
The "free" hosts were already harbingers of the end times. Once, having a dedicated IP address per machine stopped being a requirement, the personal website that would be casually hosted whenever your PC is on was done.
> the personal website that would be casually hosted whenever your PC is on
I don't think that was ever really a thing. Which isn't to say that no one did it, but it was never a common practice. And free web site hosting came earlier than you're implying - sites like Tripod and Angelfire launched in the mid-1990s, at a time when most users were still on dialup.
Must be a regional thing, because where I live, mass internet adoption pretty much started in the 90s with the dedicated Ethernet connections. As such, every PC had its own IP address, it was a time before home routers. Later, the dreaded NAT was introduced, but the ISPs kept their "LAN" networks free. People hosted all sorts of things. It was a common practice for people to host an FTP server, a game server, an IRC and such on their home computers, and that "LAN" was not subject to the internet speed limit that was capped at around 600kb/s while the LAN would go as fast as the hardware allowed.
That sounds like a very specific setup like a university dorm or perhaps managed apartment complex. But I doubt that was the norm for home internet connectivity anywhere, ever.
People mourn general-purpose computing, because the writing is on the wall for future generations. The living room computer is dead, your average "normie" only has a phone, and maybe a tablet these days. What really opened my eyes to this is how kids I was teaching 3D printing design to were constantly asking if they can use a 3D printer with their phone.
Laptops, desktops and servers are becoming more and more niche, and if we don't do anything it dies with our generation (or maybe a generation after that).
I used to be a physics teacher, and very few of my students gave a shit about science. The most popular 'science' content on social media is elephant's toothpaste videos and inspirational quotes photoshopped onto astrophotography. Most people struggle to have a conversation about ideas, they just want to talk about people, and that's perfectly fine.
General-purpose computing was always for nerds, and always will be. There will only ever be a tiny proportion of people who find this stuff interesting enough to actually learn how to engage with it on its own level. Everyone else needs it to be packaged in an idiot-proof way so they can use it to get on with their day.
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