One interesting thought I’ve had is actually that if we strip this signal to websites/apps and do not report an age range at all, but the vast majority of users DO, that actually gives us a more unique and trackable browser fingerprint.

As someone who is not a fan of adding the age field I’m curious what people think of this.

Thank you for replying without attacking me (as I’ve seen other people do to each other on this topic). I upvoted you.

I have no idea what to think because this sounds reasonable, but so do the arguments that it’s a slippery slope and complying now makes it easier to surveil us all later. (Yes, I know this is the name of a fallacy. I’m curious as to when is it a fallacy and when is it not. I can absolutely imagine people saying “slippery slope fallacy” and being right, I can also imagine a different situation where people say “slippery slope fallacy” to something and it happens exactly as the people whose claim is being denied with “slippery slope” fallacy said.)

I guess that is why controversial issues are controversial, no easy and obvious resolution?

As an autistic nerd without true technological and historical expertise, it’s very difficult to know what to think and disheartening to read others’ perspectives on this because instead of measured discussion, there is “bootlicker” and “surveillance state paranoia” being thrown around to dismiss the other side’s ideas and holy shit am I sick of the hostility and personal attacks here. I think both sides are plausible, don’t know which one is right, and it seems Lemmy is not going to be able to help me decide which one is more plausible.

I really hope you didn’t mean “raging autist nerds” in the derogatory 4chan way where a disability I didn’t choose to have is an insult, where people having strong emotions over a niche topic is something bad to mock and insult. Language is language, not everyone who has goodwill/is neutral towards a population knows the correct inoffensive language, etc. etc. but I have to admit “autist” in combination with its use in a phrase referring to people you don’t like, whose diagnosis status you don’t know, really makes me draw unpleasant conclusions.

I guess maybe this is a lesson that no matter how knowledgeable I think public forum users are, heated topics will include people being dismissive and insulting others unless there is very heavy moderation in place to keep things civil, and that I have to find somewhere else to find knowledgeable people giving their interpretation of information.

Possibly tangential, but I figure people might also be interested in knowing that https://agelesslinux.org/ is also not age-gating

I’m mostly just displeased about honest discussion being stifled.

Also, it probably feels bad (yes, it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but if I can avoid making people feel bad I think it’s worth it) to type a constructive comment only to receive downvotes because your opinion isn’t popular. Maybe not for you, but for others. I don’t want people to be discouraged from expressing opinions that aren’t immediately harmful. I imagine once upon a time abolition (obvious good) was unpopular too.

I also think we need an honest discussion on AI. From my own hater position, I’m skeptical of proponents because the well has been poisoned: are you a normal person, or are you an unironic “get on board or get left behind! And if you get left behind, your Luddism means you deserved to get left behind. Can’t wait till these people are suffering for not getting on board” type? But you seem actually genuine and not that type, so I’m happy to have the conversation with you.

I know it becoming widely adopted is against the interest of me and people I know. It devalues my skills (whether in reality it can replace me or if it can’t but out-of-touch CEOs buy the hype it can and act as if it can, the end result of how my skills are valued is the same), and as a person with a job I don’t want to have to reskill on my precious free time, or become an AI’s babysitter because it can hypothetically what I do 10x faster with 5x the mistakes instead of just letting me do the job I enjoy. (I do not know if it could actually do my job faster than me or what the mistake ratio would be.) “Get on board or get left behind” feels really callous and unwilling to address peoples’ complaints that aren’t just about self-interest but also about the tech’s reliability, environmental concerns (saw some debunks, never actually investigated myself if those “actually it is not the environmental disaster you think it is” things were true so I do not know what to think here); the ways it can be used and is probably being used right now to astroturf, push narratives, surveil people; “move fast and break things” with no regard for the consequences and treating people who want to be careful as obstacles to be broken so they can move fast to higher profits.

Right now I mostly see people using it for bad things so I end up perceiving it wholly as a bad thing. I might have felt differently if most people approached it cautiously, as a thing capable of hallucinations that has to be double-checked in LLM form. If we were genuinely moving towards a world where you do not have to work to survive instead of “you have to work to survive, but also we want to take you out of a job and will give you no help in transitioning to a new one, just a callous ‘get on board or get left behind’.” If we knew there was an environmentally-responsible approach around it. If there were laws or some societal development helping us out against the deception and astroturfing it can be used for, if deepfakes stayed in the realm of funny things like “US presidents rank Zelda characters on a tier list” instead of “Here’s a picture of you naked so I can paint you as promiscuous in a hiring/social environment that looks down on it. Here’s a realistic video of you throwing a bomb so I can get you arrested. Here’s a politician who didn’t actually throw a bomb throwing a bomb so I can present ‘proof’ they did and influence public sentiment to believe something untrue.” I appreciate the cancer detection though.

It is a tool, but mostly being used for bad as far as I know and I’m very very scared of that, and feel the people praising it and wanting it are overlooking those things. Of course, it’s possible they are aware of and against the bad things, and just don’t want to preface every statement on AI with “yeah I know about the bad stuff” because that can get pretty tiring! But every pro-AI statement just makes me fear further societal adoption and approval of a technology that I do not trust them to use wisely and constructively without hurting many others around them, and that in my country will not be regulated for safety anytime soon. I feel like it’s like giving children a car in a world where driving lessons are very optional and driver’s licenses are unnecessary. In that world I’d probably hate cars. Then again, I guess you could say the same of the internet, and I have no issue with the internet because I grew up on it and am better able to decouple all the bad actors on it from the internet itself.

I do understand the benefit of moving people to more productive ways of doing things and incentivizing that while deincentivizing less efficient ways of doing things, especially since people are resistant to change. In general, we want better things for cheaper. We want doctors using the vaccines that are 95% effective, not 50% just because the 50% vaccine is the one they know better and they do not like change. The promises of capitalism. I too would like my 4-hour-a-day work week, robots doing my domestic chores, and a cure for arthritis. So yes, I understand the whole “we think AI makes people more effective, and will financially incentivize using it while deincentivizing those who do not,” I just also don’t think it does make people more effective or that the cost in the current climate is worth it. Or that anyone who is not a multimillionaire will end up seeing any of the fruits of those productivity gains—they’ll just be made to work the same hours, having to outsource all the parts of their work they find fun or relaxing to an LLM because it’s more efficient to have it do it so all they get is the sucky part where they play prompt engineer/nanny, for the same wage. Also don’t think we’re set up in an economy that can handle the massive displacement of workers it is promising. I daresay that if I had to put one doctor/biomedical scientist out of a job with AI knowing that would unlock the arthritis cure I’d take that deal while also feeling bad. But if I decrease all white-collar fields by like 50%… I want that arthritis cure but there’d better be some safety net to help that mass suffering (and drastically reduced consumer spending, bad for the economy and the wellbeing of those in that economy). If I had to suck all the joy out of my job and become a glorified prompt engineer to provide an actual benefit to lots of people I might take that deal. Doing it to provide the boss 3% more profit by cutting the cost of employees, no thanks.

Also just not comfortable with trusting the outputs of inherently nondeterministic technology. Way less testable, especially with LLMs as opposed to something that we expect to just spit out a probability or classify.

Headline makes it seem like this is another complaint article. They actually propose a solution, though I do not know how workable it is, so it’s worth a read.

As a person who vehemently doesn’t like use of AI in coding projects, you didn’t really do anything worthy of a downvote. Wish people could stop using it as a “disagree” button and would only use it to downvote

• fuck you you stupid idiot can’t you see ai sucks, you personally are everything that is making the world worse and i hope you die, subhuman scum (incivility and personal attacks, this includes if they are being uncivil to someone you disagree with)
• sign up for my new site at http://scamsite.com/!
• did you know that birds fly? here’s a picture of a bird (in the open source community, on a topic that has nothing to do with birds)
• bleep bloop, i’m definitely not a robot pretending to be human, definitely no astroturfing here

Never have I been happier to be proven wrong

My first instinct was to say “cursed,” my second is to think “huh… kind of cute actually”

Hey, thank you so much for helping me! Now I have a better idea of my options and what wants are viable and which are not.

• https://gardinerbryant.com/the-omarchy-framework-thing/
• https://crimier.github.io/posts/Framework-Omarchy/
• https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-right-racists/75986/2

TL;DR: Framework is sponsoring Omarchy and Hyprland. Omarchy, at least, is really linked to far-righter DHH; cannot find nearly as much about Hyprland on a quick search besides “toxic”.

Going to be an interesting thread to follow as someone who wants a Framework for the repairability. And friends recommending it; and honestly in a world where social media is probably flooded with astroturfed comments instead of real experience, and review sites are ones I highly doubt actually touched or bothered with the products, I am gonna trust word of mouth. But I can be convinced into reconsidering (price, performance I can get out of a laptop, and the Hyperland/Omarchy thing).

deleted by creator

“For all my projects, the motivation is the same,” Champion told The Register. “We tend to look past the technology that surrounds us and shapes our lives. My work is about forcing us to look at it, and seeing the beauty in engineering.”

Really like this!

As a gamer who did switch, curious what games are preventing the switch. In my experience sometimes it struggles with indie games only released for Windows that have probably been downloaded maybe 100 times at best; and probably as you know anything with kernel-level anticheat

i have been summoned

Hey thank you for the good information; I starred your comment! This is the stuff I like seeing on programming.dev.

And I have built from source before—but considering how un-knowledgeable I feel compared to the average poster here, probably a good thing you included that reassurance that it’s not so hard, since I feel just barely technical enough to be able to build from source. It’s also friendly to drive-by readers at my level of expertise/knowledge or lower who have not built from source yet.

I’ll freely admit that you know the “did not read the article and still commented” folks?

I’m a “didn’t watch the video” person and had to be told by other people what happened.

Also, at least one of them someone linked me of the foot thing was age restricted so I Xed out and took them at their word.

I’m happy! It Just Works. Windows 11 -> Linux.

• I have had ONE WiFi problem that was my computer’s fault the whole year; as opposed to half the times I open the computer.
• One video game didn’t Just Work, I had to tinker, but I got it working smoothly with mods.
• A bit of trouble with flash drives initially because they were not formatted to something compatible with Linux. Once I learned that I managed to shuffle data around and format it to be compatible with MacOS, Linux, and my Windows VM. But Linux actually saved me and let me get an old flash drive working that did not work at all. Love reformatting on my distro, it’s easier and more visual than when I tried to do it on Mac or Windows.