20, they/she, math+CS student

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Didn’t they already put ads in the Windows 10 start menu? Every time I see a fresh Windows 10 install, it’s got candy crush and a bunch of promotional links to Microsoft apps in the windows store (office, Outlook, etc.) in the start menu.

    Tbh my biggest gripe with Windows 11 isn’t even the ads, you can disable them or – like I did back when I used Win11 on a spare partition for VR gaming – just install a start menu replacement like startallback. My biggest gripe is that they removed the fullscreen launcher and mobile/touch optimized metro app system (ik windows store apps exist, but they behave like regular windows apps, which is awkward on a tablet when you’re using it without the keyboard cover). I liked that Windows 10 basically kept all the Windows 8 tablet features, but made them optional so that you can have a full desktop experience on a tablet. Now windows 11 just feels kind of poorly designed and clunky on a tablet PC.

    I ended up installing ChromeOS on my tablet through Project Brunch just to get a decent, polished-feeling tablet interface (with android apps, which is a huge plus since that’s already a massive library of touch-optimized software). I run NixOS on my main PC, but for the tablet it was either Linux+GNOME (GNOME is the only desktop DE with acceptable touch support imo, especially paired with the cosmic shell extension for automatic window tiling), or ChromeOS, and I tried a bunch of different distros (including open-source chromiumOS distros like FydeOS).

    In the end, I liked FydeOS, but ChromeOS through Brunch Framework has extra features I’d rather not live without (like Android phone connectivity), and FydeOS has borked touch support on the OpenFyde releases, so I’d need to use the proprietary Fyde For You builds with specific drivers for the Surface Pro 4, but those cost money after 90 days, and if I’m using a proprietary OS, I might as well pick the free one. If you’ve never used ChromeOS, it’s basically like if stock Google android had a good desktop mode and could (easily/officially) run desktop Linux apps.



  • You’d need some sort of translation layer to allow older versions of the Android userland drivers in the container to talk to the modern Android userspace drivers. Or you could write new userspace drivers inside the container that interact directly with the hardware, but this would likely be expensive and insecure. Definitely doable tho, especially for a company as large as Google.

    Especially on Pixels, with the generic system image feature (allows for booting generic, non-device-specific android images), if the container is built with the same userland drivers as a generic system image, it might not even need any special effort/attention to run, though iirc GSIs are pretty recent, so you wouldn’t be able to run software for anything before like, Android 12 or 13 probably.











  • The technology is promising, it’s just not remotely ready for what they’re trying to use it for, and may never be in its current iteration (transformer-based LLMs). Like, yes, an AI will probably eventually be able to read many articles from search and integrate that information together in a useful way, but right now it’s almost as likely to just start making shit up halfway through and tell you to eat glue lmao.

    The problem is that AI is the new corporate buzzword like web was back during the dot com bubble. The web did end up being massively successful, but it just wasn’t ready for like 90% of what investors wanted from it back then.




  • I mean, LLaMA is open-source and it’s made by Facebook for profit, there’s grey areas. Imo tho, any service that claims to be anything more than a fancy wrapper for OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. API calls is possibly a scam. Especially if they’re trying to sell you hardware, or the service costs more than like $10/month, LLM API calls are obscenely cheap. I use a local frontend as an AI assistant that works by making API calls through a service called openrouter (basically a unified service that makes API calls to all the major cloud LLM providers for you). I put like $5 in it 3 or 4 months ago and it still hasn’t run out.



  • If the social biases of the model put a hard limit on your ability to write a good woman character, I question how much it’s really you that’s “writing” the story. I’m not against using LLMs in writing, but it’s a tool, not a creative partner. They can be useful for brainstorming and as a sounding-board for ideas (potentially even editing), but imo you need to write the actual prose yourself to claim you’re writing something.


  • Imo a non-market-based socialist economy doesn’t require AI, it just requires extensively documenting inventory/production and a good mechanism for gauging consumer demand, in other words a good economic planning mechanism. Because if you break it down to its simplest function, the capitalist market is just an economic planning mechanism, it uses consumer purchases to judge demand and adjust production accordingly, but it’s more difficult to control since it can’t account for negative externalities (effects of production that don’t have a direct impact on sales), and when you introduce wage labor into a market, the incentive structure encourages those with more resources to spend those resources on labor and then exploit that labor to the maximum possible extent.

    To implement a non-market socialist planning system, you could have a broad plan that specifies large macroeconomic goals to be voted on democratically (e.g. increase investment in clean energy, increase investment in a certain popular sector of consumer goods like electronics, etc.) And then use data from the past to estimate future demand for consumer goods. Then you could calculate the demand for intermediate commodities (things used to produce consumer goods and accomplish larger state infrastructure projects) based on that. You could then put all of those into a really big matrix and then row-reduce that matrix to solve for any areas where the necessary resource allocation is uncertain and then use that to refine the initial estimates for production you started with, and iterate this process many times. At the end you end up with a table that shows exactly which resources need to be allocated where to meet production targets and consumer demand.

    Obviously consumer demand might differ from your prior estimates, so you also have a system for monitoring how much of each good is purchased at each storefront, and then make minor adjustments to the global production targets to meet the actual demand, which would help mitigate the recurring shortages that occurred in the USSR due to inefficient resource allocation from their oversimplified planning system.

    Basically, it’s all about having good-quality, real-time data on economic activity so that the planned economy can respond as dynamically as a capitalist market, but without the negative externalities and worker exploitation that come along with capitalism.

    I read a really good book that outlines in more detail how this would work and even gives the algorithm for efficiently manipulating the economy-wide resource allocation matrix, it’s called Towards a New Socialism. Apparently the guys who wrote it are weird transphobes now, so I don’t endorse them personally, but it’s the most well thought out, concrete plan for a workable socialist economy I’ve seen so it’s worth a read. Also look into project CyberSyn in Chile under Allende, it’s the closest attempt irl to do something like this.