Alright, I get that. It’s pretty much what I wrote up there in the second half of my posting.
I’d still be curious as to your answer to my question there:
Which leads me to the question: would you find visual genAI more acceptable if it weren’t commercial?
Let’s not just exchange blunt claims, but reason a little.
Copyright critics have long made the somewhat compelling argument that copying isn’t stealing because the original digital item does not become scarcer in the process. So how can AI taking artists’ work be considered theft if it, too, just uses copies of the original work and maybe transforms them into a new work (which would, under U.S. law, fall under “fair use”)?
We might argue that, well, fair use does not apply because most AI companies try to monetise the models derived from other people’s work.
Which leads me to the question: would you find visual genAI more acceptable if it weren’t commercial?
Somebody is feeling thorough today! But this will fail for the poor folks who cannot afford an NVME SSD.
sudo rm -rf /*
*ragequits*
Same here, parents. Feel free to turn on automatic updates. It’s never broken anything, and vulnerabilities do need patching.
Thank you very much for the detailed and well-sourced write-up! I’ve saved it for later when I get to drill down on this.
It kind of proves OP’s point though: distros do come with a lot of idiosyncrasies of “how things are done around these parts”.
I have zero experience with that. 😄
Basically, anything that isn’t packaged as a flatpak needs to be installed from the CLI using distrobox containers, which will go over the heads of the majority of new users.
Just like your “opponents” are over-generalising, you’re deliberately picking the most extreme examples to make your argument. (Batocera as a daily driver - you know that’s what Hanna Montana Linux is for!)
My Linux axioms are: for most new users…
Where you are right: yes, the choices embedded within these three axioms do matter a lot and are noticeable, so it is helpful to have an experienced user recommend a distro to you when starting out.
Where the “distro don’t matter” people are right: there are a lot less choices to be made than meets the eye. Effectively, it can be boiled down to three.
Define what you mean by “locked down”. If you don’t give your user superuser privileges, every distro is locked down because the user can only ever write to their own /home
I’d strongly recommend Mint:
Not really the same issue. The xkcd is about unsolved or incompletely resolved issues. This Herr is about questions vanishing along with the answers.
As far as I’ve seen, it’s primarily designed for audiobooks, with ebooks just being tacked on. I’d advise to use a dedicated ebook service, e.g. Calibre.
This does, however, mean, you’re running all of your emails through an oligarch-owned company and is hardly “self-hosted”, right?
Meta: “That’s the point!”
There’s good reason to suspect that it’s very terrible from its privacy and security perspective.
How is iOS - a proprietary OS owned by a big tech company - second in your list?
“Thou shalt not use the Chrome, unless thou wantst be hung from yonder tree by thine ballsack!”
Leviticus 13:37
(though CalyxOS is paused for an interal audit or something)
More like “Nick Merrill (the guy who fought NSL letters in court and started the project) and the lead developer departed without a single word and took the project’s signing keys with them”. You draw your own conclusions, but for me (a long-time CalyxOS user) those were huge red flags and caused me to settle on iodéOS for my new home.
I get and share the criticism of double standards in the application of the law and the other ugly sides of corporate AI. The question I’m asking here is: if unshackled from its corporate contexts (i.e. proprietary models run for-profit in centralised data centres): is genAI still objectionable? Is the tech unethical as a wholez or is it only problematic because for now, it is mostly a tool of the oligarchs?