hendrik

Seems we’re basically on the same page.

I’m fairly sure Linux tends to lean more towards tech-savy people, who in turn tend to be the more pragmatic ones and think in a more problem-oriented way. So I’m positive it’s gonna be more about productivity in that community. They’ll adopt something based on usefulness.

It’s just the companies who don’t operate like that. Their AI tools are more pushed in a top-down way because of the investment bubble all the companies take part in. It’s not necessarily about productivity or anything. That’s some desired side-effect, but I think all of it is more about what their investors want to hear.

As if now, I’m not sure, maybe it’s still net-negative for us, the Free Software community. Our servers get hammered by AI crawlers, our projects swamped with fake AI bugreports. While the AI tools aren’t good enough to be of proper help in more complex projects. And we don’t have an infinite amount of money to just push for it anyway and care about profitability in 10 years… So I think we’re bound to do it the other way round. And AI has to actually prove itself, and that takes some more time.

For example, I hope some day I’ll get some modern AI tools in my image editor. I mean I’m of the pragmatic type myself, I’m gonna use it if it contributes to my life and doesn’t come with a devastating cost on society and the environment and other individuals. Same with chatbots. I don’t think we can tell yet. I think we first need to make it way more “intelligent” and come up with new regulations, ways to deal with the negative aspects… Currently it’s a bit of a train wreck with the flood of fabricated things that displace human conversation on the internet, Americans like Peter Thiel who makes big bucks inventing Skynet and push for doomsday. And we can tell it’s not a positive balance yet, because almost all AI companies aren’t profitable. But maybe we can tackle that. And it’s the promise. We’ll see. At least on the technical side we seem to be making progress each new day.

Yes. And these AI tools with terminal access seem fun to explore. I think they’re called coding agents. And we get quite mixed reports. Some people use it and it (roughly) gets their job done. For other people it just casually deletes their harddrive or does other weird things. We really want something like this, though. So we as humans transition from doing the coding to being software architects and the AI does the actual coding. I think it’s very difficult to have things in-between, copy-paste all the time and argue with AI, then nobody has a look at the code, so we miss the security issues and only learn about it after the company has been hacked… I think Instead we want some end to end solution that just reads the specs and does everything including some testing, integration and security and factors all of it in. And for more than gimmicks, it needs to do the job to some acceptable level. But that’s to a large degree a technical problem, and we might be able to figure it out in the future.

I’m also looking forward to AI being able to do proper useful stuff, like clean up on my messy harddrive, do my personal bookkeeping and paperwork… I don’t think we’re there yet. At least I haven’t heard people do that (successfully). But that’d be a nice job to delegate.

No worries. Your post was well-written. And I’m glad people could offer some advice. Not even the proficient Lemmy users get all of this right all the time. I just figured I’d drop you a comment in case the mods take action, to spare you the effort to also learn about the modlog and how to look up their note… But seems it wasn’t necessary 😄

Sorry, I don’t have an answer to your question, but two other communities that would fit: [email protected] and [email protected]

They’re both not really active, though. And someone asked about OpenSense hardware before and didn’t get any answers…

Just writing this so you have some other places to look up, in case your post gets deleted, I think you’re technically in the wrong community here. As per rule 3 in the sidebar, this community isn’t about hardware questions.

Sorry, I’m not not able to help with that. Maybe there’s a limit how many old messages your server or client syncs?

I suppose it’s old drama by now. And I didn’t check if there’s new one in the meantime. As of now, both projects are active. Both have a userbase. Judging by the lasst commits, it’s still the case that Tuwunel is a one-man-show and Continuwuity is a community project.

I think whether you do closed source software is a personal choice. Based on considerations of your application. Like money, of if you want to rely on a company and how well they do their job, if it’s still gonna be around in 7 years. If you can customize it enough to suit your needs. Or you base the decision on ideology.

I’ve been using Yunohost on the NAS. And it’s simple, works well and is pretty reliable, I didn’t get any major issues for many years now. (And in general, community maintained open-source software has served me well. So that’s what I do.)

Downsides as a proficient Linux user are: You can’t just mess with the config while the automatic scripts also mess with the config. You need to learn how they’re set up and work around that. Hope software has a config.d or overrides directory and put your customizations there. Or something will get messed up eventually. And you can’t just change arbitrary things. The mailserver or SSO or reverse proxy and a few other components are tightly integrated and you’re never gonna be able to switch from postfix to stalwart or something like that. Or retrofit a more modern authentication solution. It is a limiting factor.
And YunoHost doesn’t do containers, so I doubt it’s what you’re looking for anyway.

I’m a bit split on the entire promise of turnkey selfhosting solutions. Some of them work really well. And they’re badly needed to enable regular people to emancipate themselves from big tech. Whether you as an expert want to use them is an entirely different question. I think that just depends on application. If you have a good setup, that might be better suited to your needs. And if done right might be very low maintenance as well. So switching to a turnkey solution would be extra work and it might not pay off. Or it does pay off, I think that really depends on the specifics.

Yes. That’s still vague, though. I think we’re talking about brain death in specific. And a point where two things have happened. Firstly a system collapse within the cerebrum (or whatever that part of the brain is called), and enough cell damage so it’s irrecoverable. At least that’s what I think it is. I guess what I was trying to say before: These things are what actually happens in reality. “Brain death” is more the abstract concept describing these real things having happened.

I’m not a philosopher but I guess we have people confuse more things. Ultimately most people discuss these things to find some kind if afterlife which attributes meaning to life. But isn’t that confusing meaning with existence? Biological processes do exist. I don’t think they necessarily have a “meaning” though. They just happen. And it’s not that easy to conclude meaning from things happening.

And then I’m not sure if we even have ways to tell. Other than hindsight. Even just the brain is very complex and made up of different subsystems. As far as I know only parts of it can be damaged, leaving someone in an permanent coma without any upper brain activity, yet the basic functions still make their heart etc work. I think it’s fairly arbitrary if we call them dead or not dead, if we attribute the moment of death before or after their basic life signs cease as well. And there’s the added difficulty we have limited ways to look inside. And does one more dead synapse mean they’ve transitioned state to being dead? Do a few hundred? I don’t think there’s answers to that, so we’re stuck with a conservative definition of a concept.

I think so as well. I guess I’m more reluctant to accept how people casually talk about “death” as if it was clear what that means. When reality it’s many processes simultaneously in a complex organism. I don’t think “near-death experience” is anything meaningful to begin with, since we’re talking about a broad, abstract concept of dying. We’d need to talk specifics, like visual hallucinations on cell death in brain tissue. Or when it’s deprived of oxygen. We can talk about if this vague process can be interrupted, but details really matter. And we can’t confuse the process with the result. I think some people confuse these things.

Does it, though? All I can find is descriptions like this one: “Biological death marks the definitive endpoint of an organism’s life, representing the irreversible cessation of all biological functions. This profound transition signifies a state where […]”

Which leads me to believe it’s a point in time. Not a “thing” that “exists”. All I can see is how life exists. And we can’t really talk just about the absence of life as per your initial post. Because we all transitioned from not being alive to living. That happens when we’re born. I think what you were referring to is more an abstract process within a complex biological organism. And the specific effects on one particular organ. That of course exists. But even that is more of an abstract concept, made up of a plethora of real things happen.

Yes. And these are definitions and words. They get defined for various applications. I don’t think there’s a single “true” definition of “death”, not by the NHS, nor by anyone else. Someone can be dead per law, someone can be dead enough but you’ll still perform CPR on them. Or their head is missing and they’re really dead and you don’t do CPR. Other people still have vital signs and they’re so dead the doctors will remove their liver, kidneys and heart and transplant it to somebody else… There’s just several definitions of the word. So yes. Sure, per some definition people can be dead and then be resurrected. But that’s just a definition thing, not a real concept. It’s a bit weird to have non-permanent death, if you ask me. It’s useful for certain things to phrase it like that. But how a word is being used doesn’t tell us a lot here.

Phones, sure. I -personally- think it’s massively problematic how the phone operating system ecosystem is basically a monopoly of two companies. And I almost can’t do my paperwork or get a doctor’s appointment or train ticket anymore without accepting to forward my personal information to a list of 40 “partner” companies, a good chunk of them abroad in the USA. And then it’s massively complicated and I need 3 authenticator apps, and they do device verification and SafetyNet to make sure my(?) phone isn’t controlled by me, but Google.

So yes, in reality it’s not how I envision it to be. Phones just do what Google wants them to do and that certainly also includes Gemini AI. All of this is almost impossible to avoid, and it’s getting harder each day. It certainly is that way.

(Same with edge-cases in general. I had to contact modern customer support lately, and that just got way worse than it already was before AI chatbots. We just don’t do edge-cases any more. Everyone needs to get in line, have the same life and same common issues or they’re screwed.)

With Linux, I doubt it. Traditionally it’s a lot about choice. Caters to its user group who (on the desktop) include a good amount of privacy advocates, people with older computers, nerds… I think we’d need some paradigm shift first. Before any of the larger distributions change their defaults. I like to believe we’re relatively safe here. And my biggest issue isn’t AI in itself, but how large, annoying companies shove it down our throats. And that’s really not how Linux works.

I’ve been pondering productivity as well. I once did some AI assisted coding. Took notes and did a similar task after that the old-school way. In that case AI had wasted time, I was faster without. But it’s been a while and AI tools have improved in the last months. So I probably should repeat that experiment. And do it a couple times to get some solid numbers. I find it hard to apply it the exact right way, though. It’d underperform (on me) if I don’t get the prompt right, feed it the right amount of context if there’s a pre-existing project… It’s better at some tasks and not so good at other ones… So with the current state of technology it’s not that straightforward to delegate stuff to AI, and it’d just increase productivity. At least that’s been my previous experience. But we get a plethora of contradicting and weird reports on AI’s performance when used for coding.

every phone

Not every one. I have GrapheneOS on the phone. And Linux on the computer. Like some nerds here. And there hasn’t been any assistant popping up on mine…
Also don’t think whether that’s going to be built into any major operating system is much of an opinion. That’s more a fact 😉

But yeah, whether that’s useful… I’ve read all kinds of opinions on that. I think we need more factual data on user efficiency. I’m positive we’ll get some more studies on that.