Wots all this then?

lmao God I can feel the frustration rising in me just thinking about it. I know these are digital rather than physical objects… but do these people fail to have object permanence?

Wow, usually people lose their shit and complain that Element is too complex and that me and the devs are being assholes asking them to use it… You know kind of like all the people here on the Fediverse who think we need to make it bigger and bring in everyone from everywhere and that the devs and users who defend them are awful for not focusing on user interface first and making it less confusing to choose a server…

Anyway, thanks for being on team reasonable, because I’m with you on this 100%, but I can’t change how little people want to learn anything sadly so I make compromises with people who cant or wont learn how to do things. It sucks, people really don’t seem to understand that security and convenience are a balance, and every time people argue for shit to be easier they’re actually arguing for everything to be less secure. You sacrifice security for convenience, every time, and the opposite happens because you can sacrifice convenience for increased security measures. Security has to be complex by nature to be effective, and the core of Matrix is being a secure, encrypted protocol, which they have already actually put a ton of work into making easier for fucking normies. Yet, it’s never enough for people. Always screams of “It’s too complex! I hate thinking!”

Oh I was well aware at the time, but I had a lot of friends who still struggled with trying to use Matrix/Element so at the time I was seeking a simpler solution for them.

They don’t understand that things will never return to how they used to be.

They also fail to understand how much worse things are going to get from here before they even marginally get better again.

Our aging infrastructure simply won’t end up having enough resources to be shored up to modern standards, and a lot of the country will start living with rolling blackouts and power for only short stretches in the day as that will end up being the only amount of power the failing grid can support without burning cities down. This will be exacerbated quickly by AI buildout.

The blackouts can also double as a way to censor the internet, adding new controls to the networks while power is down for everyone else, and when things come back online, it’s more and more tightly controlled.

A few years ago I saw a very old logging truck filled with logs stuck in the middle of a small city street for two days while it got repaired so it could be moved. Just wait until half of our roads are clogged with dead vehicles that we no longer have the resources or tools to move because all other big industrial vehicles have broken down as well. How long before every street is littered with dead vehicles we can no longer afford to move and Americans are forced into walking and cycling to get around them since major arterial roads may not be completely blocked.

Food will be scarce and costly, we don’t have a rural landowning population that can grow their own food anymore, especially as a lot of private land has been poisoned and isn’t fit to grow food on. Hell, if you have an old septic tank, you have to be sure you know exactly where it is and plant food well away from it, if you even have the room since those things can take up a lot of space underground.

Further, when septic tanks, sewers, and water systems fail to be maintained, we may have to resort to old style outhouses, which will further poison towns and cities until it becomes a massive public health hazard that nothing will be done about because our country is too broke. Laws that prevent citizens from collecting rainwater will be increasingly seen as draconian since rainfall will be one of the few (relatively) sources of clean water available, and even after collection it needs purifying with boiling and a small amount of bleach.

We are so deeply and absolutely fucked.

This is why corporate promises can never be trusted, because a new CEO can change those promises on a whim.

It’s part of why despite being interested in Beeper, I never signed up for it because I had questions about if those privacy promises they made would be kept if they sold to a bigger company… which they eventually did.

On the plus side they already made an official open source self-hosted version, which can be forked and/or return to the community developed Vaultwarden roots.

Meanwhile KeepassXC keeps on chugging along.

They will burn down the planet in an effort to replace us by telling themselves climate change won’t matter as long as they kill like 7.5 billion people in the process.

Because it unequivocally is in decline?

People need to be realistic. We’ve been a poorer nation than we’ve pretended to be for a long, long time.

Like look at modern public buildings, not built to last, not like old stone and brick courthouses from the last century and the like. They’re just made with the same cheap materials as everything else.

The decline started with Nixon, got kicked up a gear by Reagan, but the first real crack in the armor was George W. Bush and his middle east boondoggles in Afghanistan and Iraq. After that the world was willing to look at it as somewhat of an erroneous event and expected cooler heads and serious people to prevail.

Now that instead of serious people prevailing, we’ve been spinning down the drain, and that’s literally the plan. The wholesale dismantling of US democracy was crowed from the rooftops as Project 2025.

The serious people in other countries aren’t going to be fooled again.

To quote George W. Bush “Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, sh–, uhhh, you can’t fool me again.”

Which, I mean, he’s technically not wrong. Files exist as data on a hard drive that exists in the computer. If you destroy the hard drive in the computer the files cease to exist.

Except Microsoft doesn’t have the respectability to discontinue a clearly broken product now that they’ve baked it into ever installaion of Windows 11 by default

I’ve been running Ubuntu on laptops for a lot longer than five years and the last time I had real WiFi issues was over a decade ago. That’s why I think it may be debian related or based on your description, possibly a closed source driver issue. There’s actually quite a lot of WiFi devices that use chipsets that we don’t have proper Linux drivers for at all, and what exists are sort of hacked together projects that live on github. I’ve had to do this with every netgear dongle I ever had, the downloading and compiling drivers for it from github.

I couldn’t even find any evidence in the article or photos that anyone interviewed was running a local LLM, which would at least justify worrying about temps if your keyboard acts as your air intake (which apparently is relatively common now).

Just a bunch of narcissists wanting an excuse to have people ask them about what they’re doing, ogle what they’re doing, and so they can pretend they’re…

Ah, yeah, was there any particular reason you were using LMDE? Because I’m not sure what parts of systemd it uses (especially back then), but I always just edited /etc/systemd/logind.conf to have HandleLidSwitch=ignore and have had zero issues. Pretty sure there is a gnome GUI for changing this same setting, gnome-tweaks.

I would assume the bad WiFi support was due to it being Debian and Debian being notoriously behind in terms of updates for the sake of stability.

What OS are you using?

Thank you, I was about to edit my comment to add it.

He’s a product head at an AI company, as per the article. He is a boss.

then just rig it up to ping your phone when it’s done…oh who am I kidding these dudes wouldn’t know how to do that.

fucking. exactly.

This article is so confusing because it seems like everyone they’re talking to is just using online models and the use of local models is mentioned but it’s not clear how many of the people being interviewed are using local models since it’s all about laptops. Even the one lady who you can see her screen is a CLI, it’s not clear that she’s not just using the CLI version of Claude.

I have a mid-range desktop and doing local LLM can be pretty darn slow on it especially with an AMD card and ROCm as opposed to Nvidia and CUDA. I have a relatively nice laptop, but it’s specs are well below my desktop and I just can’t imagine actually running a local LLM on a laptop.

If they’re not using a local model, then they wouldn’t need to worry about overheating with the lid closed. Easy to make it so it doesn’t hibernate when the lid is closed via CLI (at least in Linux anyway). Because if they’re offloading all the work to a remote model, their PC can essentially be relatively idle and draw less power/produce less heat.

Article also seems strangely focused on Macs? All it’s mentions of how to make it so you can close the lid are Mac-focused. Did I miss something about the new Apple Silicon being really efficient for local LLMs? Maybe that’s what I’m missing here.

It just seems almost weirdly narcissistic, like they want people to ask them about it so they can talk about it. Certainly it seems that way with the kid with a startup business that he runs during classes with tokens paid for by his parents.

Anyway, the whole thing seems odd to me. Either the article is about people who aren’t actually super savvy coders or techies, or they would… just switch it so they can close their fucking laptop… or something about making a show of what they’re doing is part of it. I dunno, weird. Anyway.

A long time ago now, literally years and years ago.

By fleecing rubes it seems.