Posts by Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck 1257 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Dec 2024
? I don't understand the big deal. I don't use the GMail web interface for anything; I have email clients on different platforms that fetch the email from my gmail account as well as other accounts.
Why would I want to give a web service access to all my data, especially an American Data Hoovering Conglomerate like a Microsoft, Google, or Amazon hosted service?
Reminding people every two hours that they aren't dealing with a "human being" is a joke. It only takes 10-15 minutes for some of these scam artists to fleece their victims with "companion AI fees." It's like the old pay-per-minute phone sex lines. Get them on and bill the crap out of them, then pursue them without mercy to pay what is legally a legitimate bill. They "used" your service... they probably didn't expect the hundreds of dollars in fees, though.
In essence, LLM systems are only guessing a plausible text response for your query. There is no intelligence, no understanding of your question, no actual thinking going on. So of course the results are pseudo random - they're values generated within the domain of the response to intentionally vary the response.
If you want predetermined and reliable results you're better off with a proper expert system for the domain.
The American investor community is notorious for obsessing over bubbles. It has happened time and time again in my 6+ decades on the planet, and it is happening now. And when the bubble bursts, the bankruptcies are rampant and huge. You can count on a significant chunk of corporate America to come to the federal government, cap in hand, pleading "You have to bail us out - we're too big to fail!"
Let me know when you have hi-res media instead of MP3 "quality" garbage.
Still, I know there will be tens of thousands if not more who will download this piracy archive.
Man, if they ever catch whoever uploaded that, they're toast! The media moguls will go all out to see them drawn and quartered!
Sounds like it is leaving all the "heavy lifting" to KDE, which is a shame, because KDE and Gnome with their Wayland-only future focus are show stoppers for me.
I need X-11 protocols for a number of reason, not the least of which is being able to run a remote session on the internet. It's not like anyone provisions home office servers in their living room nowadays - you lease space somewhere, or a machine somewhere, or a VM somewhere. Regardless of how you're hosting, you need remote access.
I don't know what kind of crack or meth the Wayland team has been smoking, but their game performance is half that of the X-11 stack and all but unplayable for half my games, doesn't support DLSS at all, rendering the benefits of my video card moot, and with NVidia repeatedly downplaying the importance of Wayland drivers in their eyes, I don't see that changing any time soon. Like "never."
As long as there are multi-billion dollar valuation Artificial Ignorance buyers out there consuming "Mass Quantities", the everyday consumer and lowly SMB provisioner is screwed, even if the rumours of a huge speculative buy of memory is true.
If those rumours are true, let me be the first to nominate the hidden buyer for the firing squad or the guillotine; I'll let them choose their terminal exit option...
Lack of experience? Hardly - I'm retired from a 30+ year programming career, and I didn't buy the excuses while I was working and I don't buy them now. Unless you're STUPID enough to buy into Microsoft's frameworks or a LOCKED IN VENDOR, there is no reason your code shouldn't be migrated. Stupidity, laziness, and incompetence are NOT excuses.
Because I didn't want to go on an evidence-based rant as to why now is the time - people with functional brain cells are well aware of my arguments in support of Linux (especially Debian 13) over Windows 11 on the desktop. Games were the only reason I used to run Windows, and with the release of 24H2 and the latest from Steam/Proton, Linux now runs more games than a "real" Windows system does!
If that can be achhieved, I have no sympathy for your "enterprise apps." You either wrote them and have the source to fix them, or you have a vendor you probably pay hundreds of thousands a year to support said application.
Either way, your argument doesn't wash.
The obvious solution is for everybody to "fix" Microsoft and their Artificial Ignorance invasion by migrating now to a Linux distribution on the desktop. Unlike Windows 11, there are no "hardware requirements" stopping the vast majority of Windows 10 hardware owners from installing Linux. Some oddball systems may need expert assistance, but all that hardware is old enough that it'll be on the major distribution's supported hardware lists for several years now...
Of course, sooner or later, this tech will all standardize to the point where mom and pop businesses can provision their own on-site clusters of such datacenter grade technology. While that certainly will benefit mom and pop, it isn't going to be doing too much for the bottom line of the fabric architects who are currently contributing to those new standards bodies.
Think "Bob's House of Doughnuts NVL72 Compatible SME Data Cabinet" combined with "Sony VAIO GPU Accelerator NVL72 Compatible Interface Card"
In fact SCO wasn't even available for the 386 until quite some time after it's initial 286-based release. I was involved with beta-testing the QIC tape drivers for the 386 systems on behalf of a financial services company out of Ontario; I believe the IBM PS/2 386 I worked on had a sub-10 serial number... we weren't even sure this new hardware could be made to work for what we wanted to do.
I would have been able to claim an extra year experience with two or three product launches over the years, as I was involved with the alpha site setups and testing before even the early adopters were going to have access. Ah, the times of youth and glory and absolute naive dedication to my craft and believing that I would be rewarded for diligence...
The one I'm most pleased with of such tools is Java - I was lucky enough to work on a contract with a Big Corporation that had early-access to the Java development images for evaluation purposes. I must admit - even then, Java was surprisingly stable and feature rich compared to the C++ programming environments that were in vogue at the time; I'd already moved beyond the 'C' phase of my career.
So, yes, I worked with Java for six-nine months before the first public release. Too bad I can't even name the corporation 'cause it's all under non-disclosure agreements that don't terminate as long as either party exists. I guarantee you know them.
Less a point of pride was being involved with early alpha testing of drivers for the yet-to-be released 386 version of SCO Unix.
Libre Office for the win. Total cost: $0. Total value: whatever suckers are paying Microsquishy for having all their data hoovered to feed their Artificial Ignorance fantasies.
When the AI bubble bursts, there may well be a severe reconning among the primary operating systems that are still trusted after such an obsessive venture into unproven territory...
Trust the Americans to give EU law the finger and to tie things up with endless appeals instead of paying up.
They're all criminals whose websites should be completely blocked by the EU until either the fine is paid or the criminals win their FINAL appeal - no "stays" during the court proceedings.
I gave Microsoft the axe after my latest Windows 11 installation lasted a whole two weeks before something nuked every partition table in the machine. With that kind of code "quality", who needs 'em? Steam Proton Experimental now runs more games than a fully patched Windows 11 box does! Even Microsoft isn't Microshit-compatible any more.
Fire up Steam. Select game. Click "Install." Wait a few hours. Click "Play" and wait for the Vulkan shaders to be processed. Click through the setup of the loader, logging in once across all your games from EA.
Enjoy.
I did have to use protondb to find instructions on disabling the in-game features of the launcher for Jedi: Fallen Order or it wouldn't run, but that was the only "tweaking" I had to do across my entire catalogue of EA games. At least the ones they didn't decommission the servers for...
They also leave you vulnerable to attacks even if you're fully up to date. See last windows 11 install I ran three weeks ago that lasted a whole two weeks before something nuked my partition tables on all my drives.
On reinstalling Linux, I discovered a miracle: Electronic Arts has released a Linux Proton compatible loader so now ALL my games run on Linux except one whose servers have been decommissioned. Even windows 11 can't claim that any more.
Repeat this until you get it through your head:
The so-called "AI" tools are ALL built by stealing copyrighted and private information left, right, and center from across the entire internet, with no moral, religious, logical, or legal justification for the mass theft of IP. The whole concept of statistics driven "AI" is FOUNDED on the idea of stealing ALL data with NO RESPECT for boundaries.
I thought they had such a deal in place with EA until today, when I discovered that some time over the past month or so, EA has released a Steam Linux version of their loader application which runs just fine with Proton Experimental on Debian 13 with the NVidia 580 drivers installed from the Debian 12 repos. (I'd rather that than installing a .bin driver which isn't managed by the OS.)
I have Star Wars: Battlefront II and Star Wars: Jedi - Fallen Order installed and play tested as of today on this box.
There are now no games that I can't install and run that I know of in my game catalog; the EA games were the last hold outs.
Even Windows 11 with the latest patches can't run everything Proton can. If you have an older game, you often have to force it to run under Proton 9 because the Proton Experimental video driver stack is too new for those games, but they run.
Compare that to Windows 11 Pro, which as of the last installation with the lastest and greatest 24H2 patches installed would not run Hitman 2, Remember Me, Serious Sam 4, or XCOM: Enemy Unknown any more. Those games ran under Windows 11 pro prior to 24H2. Even Microsquishy isn't as Windows Compatible as Steam Proton any more!
I ran Windows 11 Pro for years without an issue until recently. But the last Windows 11 Pro installation I did only survived two weeks before getting nuked by an attack, clobbering the partition tables of every single drive in my system, mounted or not. I lost some data this time, but it wasn't critical data - I hadn't even accessed it for actual use in two years! I'm just a pack-rat collector and was loath to free up the space, even though it was technically wasted space.
All my application data, program code, etc. was safely backed up, give or take a week or work and debugging. But the critical pieces of that work were in the backups, and most of the bugs were fixed before they were encountered again because they were all exactly the same single dumb mistake repeated from a code template with an error.
So I'm back on Debian 13, albeit with Debian 12 repos referenced for the video driver and CUDA stack. Although NVidia has a full CUDA stack repo for Debian 13, the key it uses is incompatible with any repository serving up the 580 version of the NVidia drivers, which enable DLSS under Steam Proton Experimental on Linux. I didn't want the Debian 13 CUDA stack relying on a driver installed via .bin file because the CUDA stack is closely tied to the display driver version and there was a good chance of ending up with an unbootable system with errors that I don't know how to recover from via command line without a functioning system to use for reading the documentation. Catch-22 if I let that happen, so I did what I could to get rid of the .bin driver without losing 580 for my games.
The resulting system is less stable than the .bin driver install had been, but that could be due to CUDA 13.0 installed on the box. Dot-0 releases are notorious for having issues, and I'm sure there will be a lot of patches and fixes in 13.1 soon enough.
Microsoft's code quality has gone to shit. There is no way a rogue program should be able to nuke partition tables unless Windows itself has been compromised, and with all their blather about TPM keys and everything to prevent just that kind of thing from happening, all I can say is: I'm not impressed. Linux has been, continues to be, and will for the foreseeable future be easier to maintain, patch, and keep up to date without getting nuked by rogue programs.
Go back to the drawing board, Satya. The only ones who want this "Artificial Ignorance" crap you're pushing is your marketing department and your stock-pumping "investment" arm.
