MudMan

Clearly not special for Germany, since the entire article is… entirely about Spain, actually.

The option highlighted here is very interesting, but as a test of reacting to headlines vs clicking through it’s an amazing case study. The German thing is a quote from a Spanish seller of this tech explaining why he’s confident it will take off.

We don’t have to agree to disagree, it’s measurable. You just don’t have enough capital to make a dent before large numbers and market forces make it impossible to have an effect. That’s why we have governments and regulations in the first place. “Vote with your wallet” is part of the anarchocapitalist fiction that free markets self-regulate by way of the public acting on them through their consumption choices affecting supply and demand. It just doesn’t happen, demonstrably.

Real collective power is, ideally, enacted through those regulations under a rule of law. Governments made of people and acting on their behalf get to coerce rich assholes into following rules. It’s also collective action, like collective bargaining through unions enforced by a right to strike protected by the government.

If your republic has failed to do these things get trickier and you get into the territory of forcing reform through protest, mass disobedience or general strike. And yes, in extreme cases eventually revolution, but man, people online sure like to misrepresent how quickly or effectively through revolution because waiting for revolution is easier than actually doing the work.

I find Americans in particular are surprinsingly reticent to acknowledging this for a place that sacralizes both their foundational moment and several key historical landmarks, all enacted through these means. Nobody ever remembers the Great Burker King Boycott of 1972 or whatever. How is this even a debate.

Yep. Because your vote is not based on how much capital you have, but assigned (more or less) equally across the population.

I did the math. The average US-ian’s vote counts as much as Elon Musk’s (if they live in the same state). On average their “wallet vote” counts 0.00002% as much as Musk’s. Even before he bought the presidency, by the way, just as a matter of purchasing power.

Where do you think you have more of an effect?

Again, voting with your wallet has exactly zero value. Your money is a rounding error compared to your vote and your direct political action.

I mean, Linux is at a relatively stable 1-2% of the userbase, I don’t know that looks like “taking over” any time soon, or that it’ll make MS change course. I also don’t want to have to reboot my PC each time I want to do something different, you know? Linux is a bit snappier to interact with, but everything I do works on Windows, so that arrangement means not using Linux at all, indefinitely.

Well, sorta. It’s still what I use in a bunch of dedicated applications and small specialized devices. I mean as a desktop OS to serve as a Windows alternative.

Right. The issues is if you spend any time looking for an option to share a drive across OSs every answer online is to “just use NTFS, it’s good now”. It isn’t, really, but I also tried moving one of my drives to ExFAT to see if that was any better and… it kinda wasn’t. Same exact set of foibles.

The real annoyance, beyond Steam being just buggy about library management compared to Heroic, is how Linux wants to treat any drive like an external drive unless it’s part of the original install. Gotta say, I like how drive mounting works on Windows far better for desktop use.

I tried Bazzite, too, but there were issues there. Admittedly, they’ve updated their Nvidia support since, so I could give it another go.

But also, I’m not using this PC just as a gaming station, it’s a workstation, too. I’m not sure a gaming-focused immutable distro is going to be it.

The irony of it is that Manjaro has been best at this. I can run my workflow on it fine, and it’s snappier than Windows at that (and for other stuff, like retro gaming). It’s gaming-on-Linux savior Steam that gave up the ghost.

And frankly, I find when something like this happens everybody jumps to distro hopping as a solution. In my experience, if you’re trying to do something with sketchy support like this all distros are quirky.

Yes it is. What other company for payment management will you find? It’s an extremely narrow oligopoly, and that’s even counting the credit card agencies that suck just as much as PayPal.

You have zero agency as an economic player. Exactly zero.

You won’t impact PayPal getting richer by researching a different coupon provider than Honey. That’s not how this is going to play out at any point in time.

You don’t enact change by leveraging the breadcrumbs of an income you have as a salaried worker. You do so by leveraging real collective power in an organized, effective manner. As a player in government (by voting or holding office, because running is also part of democracy) or as a non-government organization. Those are your options. Anything else is whatever the equivalent of greenwashing is for activism.

No, it’s like giving the horse a sugar cube where you own exactly one of the grains of sugar, taking your grain of sugar away and pretending you’ve made a difference.

Or, you know, banning plastic straws.

You’re absolutely wrong about two party systems in any case, even those have tons of elected roles in different layers of governance where changes matter. And that’s also where the collective action comes in. Your feel-good token choices of companies and services to avoid haven’t done anything in the past thirty years and aren’t going to start now.

See, this isn’t viable.

This is the “ban plastic straws” of late stage capitalism. Overrepresenting individual action to distract from the need of structural reform.

Stop voting with your wallet, it’s pointless. Consumption is not expressing support. Vote with your votes, if you’re in a place where you have a chance to do so, find other ways to organize collective action if you don’t.

See, I feel you just failed in that attempt already.

But for the record, I landed on Manjaro with KDE Plasma and Wayland because I have an Nvidia card and HDR monitors and that’s the first one I tried where everything worked at once (I think on attempt five). And yes, I tried Mint first. Not everything worked at once on Mint.

Look, I don’t think the fix here is getting tech support. I’m trying to share at least one Steam library across my Windows and Manjaro dual boot setup (because that’s terabytes of space and I’m not made of NVMes and bandwidth) and I bumped into some combination of spotty Windows FS support and Steam’s weird bugs around temporary download storage on Linux (which has been a known issue since the late 2010s, btw).

Not all of that is Linux’s fault, technically, but it is broken and annoying, and if I lose the dual boot setup I have to keep Windows for a number of reasons, so that’s where we are.

Would love to test this, but my Steam install seems permanently screwed up now and I genuinely don’t have the energy to start from scratch and have to go through setting up the Nvidia drivers again.

Not to repurpose this into a “convince me not to uninstall Linux” thread, but… you may try at your peril.

I’m fuzzy on the timeline, but it was definitely THE search engine for a while. And I’d say the one that’s most memory-holed. I feel like Yahoo’s unlikely survival as some vestigial online service made people remember it and I guess Americans in particular had an Ask Jeeves moment at some point? For me it was Altavista until Google, for sure, and they were trading blows for a good while. I almost remember Gmail being the thing that tipped the scales more than the search quality.

Well, yeah, there are multiple things feeding into the results page they generate for you. Not just two. There’s the search results, there’s an algorithmic widget that shows different things (so a calculator if you input some math, a translation box if you input a translation request, a summary of Wikipedia or IMDB if you search for a movie or a performer, that type of thing). And there is a pop-up window with an LLM-generated summary of the search results now.

Those are all different pieces. Your search resutls for “3 divided by 7” aren’t different because they also pop up a calculator for you at the top of the page.

The LLM is going over the search results, taking them as a prompt and then generating a summary of the results as an output.

The search results are generated by the good old search engine, the “AI summary” option at the top is just doing the reading for you.

And of course if the answer isn’t trivial, very likely generating an inaccurate or incorrect output from the inputs.

But none of that changes how the underlying search engine works. It’s just doing additional work on the same results the same search engine generates.

EDIT: Just to clarify, DDG also has a “chat” service that, as far as I can tell, is just an UI overlay over whatever model you select. That just works the same way as all the AI chatbots you can use online or host locally and I presume it’s not what we’re talking about.

So we’re talking about SEO and the content being generated in the first place? Yeah, it’s worse than it used to be when the main application online was websites, but I still want/need a reliable way to parse results across… you know, Wikipedia and Reddit, mostly. IMDB sometimes. It may have looped around to the old days of Altavista directory search, but it’s still a valuable tool. And crucially not replaced by an LLM, especially for the kind of non-obvious queries where you don´t just go to the site you know will have the answer directly.

Well, you shouldn’t be using Google Search, but that’s a completely different conversation and the answer shouldn’t (can’t) be “let’s just use LLMs, then”.

“Intended” is a weird choice there. Certainly the people selling them are selling them as search engines, even though they aren’t one.

On DDG’s implementation, though, you’re just wrong. The search engine is still the search engine. They are using an LLM as a summary of the results. Which is also a bad implementation, because it will do a bad job at something you can do by just… looking down. But, crucially, the LLM is neither doing the searching nor generating the results themselves.

Sure! Used as… you know, what it is, there’s a lot of fun/useful stuff you can do. It’s just both AIbro shills and people who have decided to make hating on this tech a core part of their personality have misrepresented that.

It’s indeed very, very good text generation/text parsing. It is not a search engine, the signularity, Skynet or a replacement for human labor in the vast majority of use cases.

I can tell you I have a portable solar battery for emergencies and if I need to use it the right place for the panel is in my balcony, so this makes a ton of sense. In an apartment building roof space is relatively small per unit, but at least where I am every unit has a balcony. In my case even a rear-facing balcony that doesn’t face the street but still gets sun for anywhere between 4-10 hours a day. If/when I am in a position to explore a solar installation this would be a good thing to look into.

As below, stop with the analogies. No, that’s not “the chaotic best guess flow of a human mind”, that’s a whole bunch of tensor math generating likely chains of tokens. Those two things aren’t the same thing.

They aren’t the same thing in the strict sense, but they’re also not the same thing in practical terms at the end user level. If I ask a friend if they remember some half-forgotten factoid they can tell me not just if they do remember, but also how well they remember, how sure they are and why they know it. No LLM can do that, because LLMs know as little about themselves as about anything else. Which is nothing, because they’re LLMs, not people.