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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Haha, yea I’m familiar with it(always heard it called the Barnum effect though it sounds like they are the same thing), but this isn’t a fortune cookie-esque, meyers-briggs response.

    In this case it actually summarized my post(I guess you could make the case that my post is an opinion that’s shared by many people–so forer-y in that sense), and to my other point, it didn’t misunderstand and tell me I was envisioning LLMs sending emails back and forth to each other.

    Either way, there is this general tenor of negativity on Lemmy about AI (usually conflated to mean just LLMs). I think it’s a little misplaced. People are lumping the tech I’m with the hype bros- Altman, Musk, etc. the tech is transformative and there are plenty of valuable uses for it. It can solve real problems now. It doesn’t need to be AGI to do that. It doesn’t need to be perfect to do that.




  • People are treating AI like crypto, and on some level I don’t blame them because a lot of hype-bros moved from crypto to AI. You can blame the silicon valley hype machine + Wall Street rewarding and punishing companies for going all in or not doing enough, respectively, for the Lemmy anti-new-tech tenor.

    That and lemmy seema full of angsty asshats and curmudgeons that love to dogpile things. They feel like they have to counter balance the hype. Sure, that’s fair.

    But with AI there is something there.

    I use all sorts of AI on a daily basis. I’d venture to say most everyone reading this uses it without even knowing.

    I set up my server to transcribe and diarize my my favorite podcasts that I’ve been listening to for 20 years. Whisper transcribes, pyannote diarieizes, gpt4o uses context clues to find and replace “speaker01” with “Leo”, and the. It saves those transcripts so that I can easily switch them. It’s a fun a hobby thing but this type of thing is hugely useful and applicable to large companies and individuals alike.

    I use kagi’s assistant (which basically lets you access all the big models) on a daily basis for searching stuff, drafting boilerplate for emails, recipes, etc.

    I have a local llm with ragw that I use for more personal stuff like, I had it do the BS work for my performance plan using notes I’d taken from the year. I’ve had it help me reword my resume.

    I have it parse huge policy memos into things I actually might give a shit about.

    I’ve used it to run though a bunch of semi-structured data on documents and pull relevant data. It’s not necessarily precise but it’s accurate enough for my use case.

    There is a tool we use that uses CV to do sentiment analysis of users (as they use websites/apps) so we can improve our ux / cx. There’s some ml tooling that also can tell if someone’s getting frustrated. By the way, they’re moving their mouse if they’re thrashing it or what not.

    There’s also a couple use cases that I think we’re looking at at work to help eliminate bias so things like parsing through a bunch of resumes. There’s always a human bias when you’re doing that and there’s evidence that shows llms can do that with less bias than a human and maybe it’ll lead to better results or selections.

    So I guess all that to say is I find myself using AI or ml llms on a pretty frequent basis and I see a lot of value in what they can provide. I don’t think it’s going to take people’s jobs. I don’t think it’s going to solve world hunger. I don’t think it’s going to do much of what the hypros say. I don’t think we’re anywhere near AGI, but I do think that there is something there and I think it’s going to change the way we interact with our technology moving forward and I think it’s a great thing.


  • I know that ploum blog post gets cited way too often on Lemmy, but this is a situation where I think Google has either intentionally or inadvertently executed a variation of the “embrace, extend, extinguish” playbook that Microsoft created.

    They embraced open source, extended it until they’ve practically cornered the market on browser engine, and now they are using that position to extinguish our ability to control our browsing experience.

    I know they are facing a possibly “break up” with the latest ruling against them.

    It would be interesting to see if they force divestiture of chrome from the ad business. The incentives are perverse when you do both with such dominance and its a massive conflict of interest.


  • The vision “air” that’s Apple’s version of the meta ray bans is going to be their next major product line.

    If they get it in ~$500-1000 they’d sell like hotcakes. The reviews on the Meta raybans are surprisingly positive with the biggest gripe being it’s from Meta and people don’t trust it.

    Apples big privacy focus and their local first implementation of AI make it really compelling alternative to the Meta offering. Assuming it pairs with iPhones (and their built-in ML cores) it also drives iPhone sales similar to the watch.

    Apple could do so much with an ecosystem play with something like that and it would/could also be a “fashion icon” the way white earbuds became synonymous with Apple and the way airpods don’t look “dorky” because everyone has them.

    It’s fun to hate apple on Lemmy but I think they’d crush with something like this. An AR glasses setup integrated in their ecosystem with privacy respecting local processing.

    I’d seriously consider switching to an iPhone if I got something like that.



  • I somewhat disagree.

    Music seems like it’s followed a similar trajectory of most things where it’s become more centralized and mass marketed. Music has to appeal to the masses for studios to pick it up. So there is an incentive to find music that appeals to the most people and turns off the fewest.

    Similarly, you have a handful of studios telling you what is “good” and pushing it. Even if it isn’t great, it’s good enough that people listen and then they can create the hype behind it where it might not organically exist.

    Some music bubbles up organically from independent artists but quite a bit is mass marketed and produced by big studios. And they have the money so they can choke out smaller artists.









  • It could take that long. I was wondering if Ubuntu is 24.10 /25.04, 25.10, and 26.04 if pop will align their alpha2, beta, and official release with the Ubuntu release schedule.

    I know they said something about a yearly release cadence for cosmic but I’m sure that’s once it’s officially in production.

    That said, as far as an alpha goes, it’s much more polished than a typical alpha. The path from here to beta might be faster than we think.

    Pop devs never shied away from releasing with non LTS releases though and since one of their main pain points with releases was always gnome + cosmic plugins I’m not sure how their dependency on Ubuntu releases is affected.

    I was super nervous for cosmic because I love pop. I didn’t want them to bungle it and force me to distro hop. The alpha made me way less nervous and much more excited.

    Whatever they do, whenever they release, I just hope they get it right! Small bugs are fine but major crashes would make me very sad.


  • It might be worth taking a step back and looking at your objective with all of this and why you are doing it in the first place.

    If it’s for privacy, then unfortunately that ship has sailed when it comes to email. It’s the digital equivalent of a post card. It’s inherently not private. Nothing you do will make it private. Even services like proton Mail aren’t private–unless you only email other people on proton.

    I appreciate wanting to control your own destiny with it but there are much more productive things you could be spending your time on the improve your privacy surface area.



  • I switched from Nvidia for amd for the same reason: “and is better on Linux”.

    In my experience you are just making different tradeoffs. I use pop so your mileage may vary but Nvidia was easy to use and upgrade. It’s not nearly as bad as people let on.

    AMD on the other hand isn’t as seamless as people let on. And the open source drivers, while awesome, don’t let you take advantage of the codecs for video streaming or even alot of the AI ML stuff, so you switch to the proprietary drivers and they are slightly buggy.

    I wish I kept my 3070ti over the 6900xt.

    Unless they figure out a way to let me use av1 or rocm more easily then my next card will be Nvidia again.