My problem with AI is not that they aren't useful, John. Like everything else in life the question is what we shape ourselves to be as a culture, as a community, what is the path we want to take. It's not on the same scale than ditching assembly instruction for a C compiler.

I get why most people get with the flow of what competition taught us: if you can't fight them join them. Yet I think it's demoralising we're forced to live the life forced upon us by a few techbros without real collective intelligence about the use of our resources and goals for the future. Again, it always has been a bit like that but never at this scale.

We're souless automatons feeding a machine god.

Yeah, but every activity is a human activity, so you could ditch the adjective.

And then the thing with exponential growth is that the last thing is worth than the previous one for its potency for destruction. While it's true that, all things considered, the curve started to explode with the use of fossils fuel we've never limit ourselves with efficiency gain, aka Jevon's paradox.

That's nice however I'll be surprise you can patent a few transformation matrices for an effect present in the public Zeitgeist since more than a decade. The core of the technique being Gaussian Splatting I guess I wonder how you'll get the data, except maybe SFM-ing your way through a worldwide collaborative effort.

I suppose Google could do something like that with their own data.

I am the same, the sad reality is that companies don't (really) aim to change our (old folk tech peoples) behavior, they are aiming to make a new normal for the next generation of consumers.

Like for an espresso machine or a printer, the incentive is put on the consumables. Peoples trust Steam and their frequent sales, not so much XBox and the rest of the platforms, so if you want to frequently buy a plethora of games, old and new and indie and AAA, it would probably still be cheaper to get a steam machine than the next console with their limited catalogue and fixed prices.

The new games tend to cost the same on both. Some do prefer gaming PCs, others have consoles for cost or ease. Steam Machine doesn't change that, it's another PC, actually a bit harder to use for this cause you're dealing with Proton unless you install Windows.

Wait, you can't play Minecraft on GNU/Linux anymore? I've bought the things for 10 bucks when it was still an alpha on TIGForum, it's been decade since I played the game but it never required us to be on a proprietary platform then.

That'd be a bummer.

I think they just meant that Microsoft owns Minecraft and you need an account with them these days. Java Edition stills runs on GNU/Linux last I checked.

>it's been decade since I played the game

Unfortunately you may have lost access to your account and thus copy of the game if you didn't do the two mandatory time-limited account migrations.

It still works on linux. Both server and client.

Tangential but I've recently discovered that an app I've written and published on F-Droid has been forked and put on Google Play with ads on by some Chinese forefront along side a lot of other open source apps without any mention of their GPL of course (and Google making it ridiculously difficult to take down thoses for normal folks, having to use a legally binding DMCA form).

Thoses marketplaces are filled with cheap softwares made to make a quick buck by any means without a thought for the whole user experience, with no way to flags grifters for a better community driven experience.

The economy must thrive I guess.

Are you just posting every links you come across everyday without checking them to farm 'karma'?

It's like the fourth entry level computer graphics API tutorial you post in 48H.

The whole piece feel like vibe farming by some youngling piecing together part of the hacker culture as seen by the media in the 90s with some reddit or vintage tumblr trends on top. I resonated with a lot of themes it tries to capture but it ends up looking more like a teen trying to commodify a subculture in a performative way rather than a real tentative alternative to the system, as we saw every generation or so.

I'm all in for lowtech, degrowth, permacomputing, Bookchin municipalism and Illich like "tools for conviviality" but here it seems.. candid and non genuine.

I'm always saying it's better to finish on a good note rather than a bad one, "<Insert Bad Things> but <Insert Good Things>" (eg. "You're stupid but I love you" vs "I love you but you're stupid"), but that's the kind of case where it's clearly better to do the reverse. Huh.

This is my strategy with forum comments. Always try to end with a compliment. Takes the edge off any criticism and makes an angry reply much less likely.