Don’t I feel like a fool for trying to give you the benefit of the doubt.

“Ever heard of skills,” wow thanks for beginning with a dismissive statement that implies all of this you’re saying is not only true but obvious. This is not the way to respond to people with strong objections.

Your response is really unimpressive. My point is that LLM training, as it now stands, doesn’t seem like it can possibly adapt to an internet that isn’t full of free information ripe for the taking. If people come to rely on LLMs, how will they get the information to keep up with further advancements in, well, anything?

Assuming that’s true, and that’s a BIG assumption… What makes you think that would matter? AI has no interiority; it isn’t a thinking blob, it’s a text generator. Think of it as a fancy Markov chain.

Even if it were true, where in the chain do new principles, new techniques, new concepts enter into it? All these forms of generative AI can do is regurgitate what’s been fed into it. The worst thing you can train an AI from is AI-generated output.

It varies.

I often give the example of HP Lovecraft. I’m a big fan of his stories and the Cthulhu Mythos. But it remains that he was a huge racist. How do I reconcile the two?

First, an author’s works are separate from the author themselves. Second, in Lovecraft’s case, he was a product of his time and upbringing. And third, and importantly in his case: he’s dead. He has no ability to change beyond his passing in the 1930s. People can and do change all the time. If Lovecraft were around today he might have become to most left-leaning person in the world, but he never had that chance. There were indications, late in life, that he might well have changed.

But, he didn’t. It remains that he was a racist in life, that will never change, and because of it there will always be people uncomfortable with his work. That is understandable, and I won’t try to convince anyone that they should ignore it.

Yes, the age of all programming is over, because no new libraries or languages will ever be invented and LLMs will this always know everything there is to know about coding based on what’s already been written which will never go obsolete.

Honestly, mocking these things is SO EASY.

If you can’t log into Windows you can’t change its OneDrive settings! What’s more, the user had no idea what was causing the problem, be it OneDrive or something else, until he did that troubleshooting! And, just setting up a new phone shouldn’t make your computer unbootable for any reason! Geez, way to victim-blame there.

Some of the people, all the time.

I dunno? It sounds very plausible, exactly the kind of thing that Windows would do. I posted about it to Metafilter some time back and no one there seemed to think it couldn’t happen.

There was a story going around back in September ago about the person whose wife used OneDrive on her phone. It had taken upon itself to copy 25+GB of data on the phone into OneDrive, despite only having the free account tier, and copying it to their Windows 11 PC. There it completely filled up its small SSD boot drive, putting it into a condition of extremely low disk space, which in made it impossible for Windows to boot. Here it is.

Steam is amazing on any Intel version of Linux. 95% of games work. It’s not true that you have to use Bazzite or SteamOS to play games, I ran a bunch of No Man’s Sky on Manjaro Linux.

A trick I hear you can do with Steam is install the Windows app using Wine, then adding it to Steam as a “non-Steam game” to be able to run it in its version of Proton.

I have my Gmail account from early in its beta, probably in 2004. I became a Metafilter member I think in 2003. I got my everything2.com account in the late 90s I think, that might be the earliest I still remember.

Yeah isn’t funny that the joke about Unix/Linux users was they all had bigger beards than lobster fishermen, and now it’s that they’re all transfem.

I have to ask, is the software preservation 4am, who cracks the Apple II disks? If so then hooray, thanks for being so great!

Neocities still exists, and is doing great!

As mentioned elsewhere Homestar Runner is still around and not doing badly. The Wiki, however, is severely starved for resources, it always takes a long long time to load for me.

It wouldn’t be difficult to make Lenovo laptops more repairable. I’ve had two, and both required taking the whole thing apart to replace the keyboard, the part most likely to have problems. I hate that about them.

Aah okay. “MeFi” is “Metafilter,” another website out there. where I’ve seen a different DigDoug. It’s a cool name anyway.

Mobile devices tend to be much less versatile than PCs, mind you, and on purpose, due to one of Steve Jobs’ most misguided apprehensions, that it’d be a good idea to hide the filesystem from the user. (Cue someone somehow claiming that’s Good Actually in three, two, one…)