Linux May Be the Best Way to Avoid the AI Nightmare

To me this is even worse though. They're using your electricity and CPU cycles to grab the data they want which lowers their bandwidth bills.

It happening "locally" while still sending all the metadata home is just a slap in the face.

That's a pretty big joke, but I think the bigger joke is calling LLMs AI. We taught linear algebra to talk real pretty and now corps want to use it to completely subsume our lives.

It's not just Linux, but free & open source software in general. And it's not just desktop PCs that are plagued by this corporate spyware, it's much worse when looking at the mobile device landscape. The only real solution for mobile devices is GrapheneOS with FOSS software installed from the F-Droid marketplace. Browsers are also under attack by proprietary software corporations, Google just intentionally broke adblockers on all Chromium-based browsers, so they can generate more ad revenue. Last year, they tried to push a proposal that would have massively extended their monopoly on web browsers (WEI). All the streaming services are screwing their users over and increasing the subscription prices while making the content library smaller. It's such a fucking scam, and it's almost sad to see how many people are dumb enough to fall for it.

Praise Stallman

I mean, the problem isn't the existence/obviation of jobs, but what we do next when it happens. If the people whose jobs are automated away are left out with no money or employment, that's a serious problem. If we as a society support them in learning something new that puts their skills to good use, and maybe even reduce the expected working hours of a full-time job to 35 or 32 hours a week, that's an absolute win in my book.

But as someone pointed out elsewhere....AI can already take over the job of company CEOs.... decision making tools could make a group of technical people be more effective than a CEO as we know today.

And it won’t ever be true until you can pick up a PC running Linux in a big box store. I could see the Steam Deck (and Valve’s rumoured upcoming console) to make a dent in the PC gaming space, but it won’t make a difference to the purchasing decisions of your your aunt who uses her pc to check her emails.

Should corporate buyers ever get tired of MS’ shenanigans they might switch over to Ubuntu, but I’m not holding my breath for that.

Decades ago it was a funny joke. Now it's the most popular handheld OS on the planet by a huge margin. Linux is damn EVERYWHERE except the desktop now, and it's only a matter of time.

Guess which OS won't be recognized as a "trusted environment" to visit websites with down the line in Google's upcoming Web DRM. For your own protection of course...

I think it might. Demographics are changing to make PC users more technical overall. The casual user isn’t looking to purchase a desktop PC. Casual is now synonymous with mobile.

It used to be that you needed a desktop to do your taxes or make an insurance claim over the Internet. That’s just not true anymore.

Most things MOST people work on these days aren't heavily tied to Windows as an OS in a way that would prevent it running via emulation. Worst-case, in a VM. Lots of the everyday things people use is in the browser now.

You have an example?

It's not about the total share, it's about the premise.

Linux is a solution against corporate greed, it directly takes market share away from Microsoft, and is a viable competitive alternative with few drawbacks.

Tell that to the code I have it write and debug daily. I was skeptical at first, but it's been a huge help for that, as well s learning new (development) languages.

We don't have capitalism in the US, we have late-stage crony capitalism. Regulated capitalism is fine, but we are in a crony capitalist system which feeds corporate greed. Our government is controlled by a handful of mega corps which have their hands pulling the strings due to the lobbying system. It wasn't always this way, which is why I don't blame capitalism, I blame human greed.

You really need to specify what you mean by "AI". AI has been used in tons of applications for decades. Do you mean LLMs? Because not all AI is LLMs.

Just take some time to look up the benefits of AI and what it is being used to solve. It's easy to focus on how corporations are abusing the technology for profit, but it's a bland weak perspective to think that AI can't solve problems.

Ah yes. Let’s ban AI so the cartels take over the market for AI. What a great plan.

I hate to break it to you, but if you're running an LLM based on (for example) Llama the training data (corpus) that went into it was still large parts of the Internet.

The fact that you're running the prompts locally doesn't change the fact that it was still trained on data that could be considered protected under copyright law.

It's going to be interesting to see how the law shakes out on this one, because an artist going to an art museum and doing studies of those works (and let's say it's a contemporary art museum where the works wouldn't be in the public domain) for educational purposes is likely fair use - and possibly encouraged to help artists develop their talents. Musicians practicing (or even performing) other artists' songs is expected during their development. Consider some high school band practicing in a garage, playing some song to improve their skills.

I know the big difference is that it's people training vs a machine/LLM training, but that seems to come down to not so much a copyright issue (which it is in an immediate sense) as a "should an algorithm be entitled to the same protections as a person? If not, what if real AI (not just an LLM) is developed? Should those entities be entitled to personhood?"