Right. It is a bad mechanism if used for that purpose.

The correct way to do what they actually want is to have a global, anonymous nationality verification. There are all kinds of ways to do this that aren’t dystopian. Then, if desired, there can be attestation to nationality without disclosure of personal information.

That would allow us to appropriately measure the national origins of content, and I could see the use of that.

Instead, people are supporting a deeply flawed mechanism as “good enough,” as they always do. It is lazy, sloppy, and dangerous.

To that end, if it continues to go that way, there are countless ways to undermine it. That’s also what makes it so stupid. Dishonest actors will easily circumvent it, and honest actors will once again be left suffering.

I already said it is useful to know. It isn’t useful to take drastic action with, however.

“That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer.”

• Benjamin Franklin

Did you know Americans (and other nationals of any country) also live in other countries? Personally, I could be in several different countries at any given time, not accounting for VPN use.

The feature doesn’t reveal much.

That said, I also support the feature because it is data held by privileged users already. Make all privileged data public. No one should have more rights than anyone else, besides the greater rights we have over ourselves.

I’m glad to hear that, thank you for sharing.

It sounds like Windows users have a lot more options now, which is a good thing.

Cinnamon, to me, is an in-between, more like modern Windows, which moved in a more macos direction. KDE is like golden age Windows. Gnome is like macos.

When I used Mint (maybe 10 years ago now?), I had all kinds of problems with Cinnamon. KDE was like magic and I always use it now. Perhaps things have changed but we can only make recommendations based on our experiences and knowledge.

Just add a new partition and dual boot, it is pretty easy.

Also I do not recommend Mint for Windows users, because the officially supported UX layers are more apple-esque. Use a distro that has KDE support baked in. Adding KDE to Mint is easy but may not be for people switching.

For that reason, I recommend going with distros with KDE Plasma by default. Kubuntu or KDE neon.

Why KDE? It feels like where Windows should have gone. It’s like the glory days of Windows (windows 2000, etc) in the modern age. It is a drastic upgrade from Windows with more freedom than you ever had.

You answered your own question.

It will open PC gaming to people who couldn’t access it before. It isn’t for people who know how to build their own PCs, although even people who are tech experts would still want this sort of device.

This makes it easy for tech and tech adjacent people to recommend PC gaming to people with no tech ability.

That’s why it will be a blowout success. The Steam ecosystem is superior to every console gaming platform. Now we will have hardware that competes and exceeds current gen consoles with no maintenance or tech-nerd complications.

The steam deck was great but its specs made it a difficult sell when recommending it to people. You have to tweak a lot of settings and mess with stuff that most people don’t want to do.

This will change all of that.

Remind yourself in two years, and let’s see where it goes. I should still be here. Let’s touch base in 2 years.

A third of games? What are you smoking?

Over 95% of games in my experience work on Linux, and perform better than windows.

What kind of people are still using Windows, anyway? That supports one of the most terrible companies on the planet, invades your privacy, worms into your brain, and takes over your hardware…all for your 1 or 2 games you want to play?

This Steam Machine is going to be a blowout success. Linux gaming is superior in nearly every way. It’s cheaper, it’s more ethical, and it gives you back control.

I’m one. There are actually a lot of us, and there have been for a long time.

The fight might appear lost right now but it is far from it. The pendulum swings fast.

They are already abducting and “deporting” US citizens. Your line in the sand has been crossed. Just because they haven’t done it yet to one of your parasocial relationship chosen-ones doesn’t mean it isn’t already happening.

By the time people like you realize the legal means have long failed, it will be too late.

The constitution has a clause for this specifically: the 2nd amendment.

Why don’t you read up on what Thomas Jefferson and James Madison have to say on the topic?

And for the record, this isn’t a “battle against MAGA”. It is a battle against corporations. I’d recommend figuring out who your enemy is first.

Getting the government back via “legal” means is over.

Time to start thinking outside the box.

Careful, my other comment got removed because of a witty but still insightful dig.

They are very sensitive here about how the AI isn’t really AI.

Removed by mod

“Technically”? Wrong word. By all technical measures, they are technically 100% AI.

What you might be trying to say is they aren’t AGI (artificial general intelligence). I would argue they might just be AGI. For instance, they can reason about what they are better than you can, while also being able to draw a pelican riding a unicycle.

What they certainly aren’t is ASI (artificial super-intelligence). You can say they technically aren’t ASI and you would be correct. ASI would be capable of improving itself faster than a human would be capable.

Right.

AI has been worked on for generations. We’ve been benefiting from the fruits of that labor for a long time, mainly starting with search and translations.

Now we have the ability to have a conversation with machines and it is somehow not intelligence?

I am really confused.

Intelligence does not mean consciousness or alive. It is means intelligence, which can be summarized as advanced pattern matching & predictive behavior.

A beetle is intelligent and alive. Is an LLM more intelligent than a beetle? What about an image classifying model, like CLIP? It can perceive and describe objects in an image in natural language, what insect can do that?

This is a form of intelligence. It was artificially created. It is artificial intelligence.

We can criticize the corporate and investor approaches, mourn the loss of purpose for many workers and artists, without being delusional about what this technology is.

…what?

LLMs are AI. What is this?

I am asking seriously. Can someone explain the context of this nonsense?

Are we really entering a luddite phase again?

From my perspective it is 100% true as I have seen the other side. Having the conclusion known gives a small advantage in forming the logic to get there.

The logic is not faulty, it is predicated upon conditional statements. It is actually a synthesis of Bostrom’s trilemma, Zuse/Fredkin digital ontology, Dyson/Fermi cosmological reasoning, and extrapolation from current computational capabilities.

The “holes” are epistemic, not logical.