5000 years of history and apparently no wars, slaves or colonies. Amazing, if true.

This is awesome context. Do you know of places consumers could go to find those slightly less mainstream SKUs? I’m assuming you mean it could be like a dual display port version of monitor vs a hdmi/displayport version or something meant for the PAL region vs NTSC (as examples)?

I mean, yes, there are AI companies, but if you want to be creative with AI these days, it’s actually not owned by the same few people. There are thousands of open source models that can be run on a midrange consumer GPU at home.

But most people who weren’t making art/music/code before weren’t making art/music/code because they weren’t interested in it. Having a tool that magically makes a bunch of shit you already didn’t have any interest in that barely rises above a vague novelty isn’t going to ever suddenly make someone interested in it.

The problem with AI is that every large company is using it to make search, information, and every product and tool worse because they are out of ideas, they actually believe(d?) that the AI was or could be sentient at some point, and, of course, promising AI would do X was a really good way to get through Q1 in 2024. And Q2, and Q3.

Advertising is truly evil because if it did not exist the natural tendency wouldn’t be blind consumption.

This is very well-stated, and what I was driving at.

This is solid analysis. Aside from your proposal about banning opaque algorithms, we also don’t really appreciate how powerful it is for any one human to be able to talk to millions of other humans at the same time is (as social creatures). It pathetically shrinks our world view so that it feels like we’re constantly talking about the same 10 people, when there’s so much more of your life that involves the people you work with, the people in your community, your local politics (like who’s deciding the new garbage truck schedule type stuff) that is completely absent from our online discourse.

I’d also say that the marketing and advertising industry has accelerated misinformation, distrust and overconsumption. I see about as few ads as I can figure out how (I know this because whenever I look at someone else’s experience of the same apps and services I use I can’t believe what I’m seeing), and yet I still manage to buy things, hear about things I’m interested in, and research and find out about new products. I spend money in the economy. We literally do not need this industry.

that’s not how you run services in Linux, and hasn’t been for decades

Thanks for your response. I’m open to the idea that Linux is a different computing paradigm, my frustration is on needing to learn that on the fly and how much of a distraction it was, even on a tertiary machine… that said, how should I be thinking about this?

There’s actually a good UI for managing permissions I eventually found in Mint, I think the main issues I’m having with it now are the lack of it running headless and unreliability with running my native scripts. I’ll try the Debian version though, that sounds intriguing. When y’all talk about distro hopping, how much re-setup are we talking?

So my experience has been mixed. I should note that I have always run some Linux systems (my pihole as an example), but I did, about 2 months ago, try to switch over my windows media sever to Linux mint.

(Long story short, I am still running the windows server)

I really, really, really liked Linux Mint, I should say at the outset. I wanted to install the same -arr stack I use, and self-host a few web apps that I use to provide convenience in my home. To be very fair to Linux Mint, I’ve been a windows user for 30+ years and I never knew how to auto-start python scripts in windows.

But, to be critical, I spent hours and hours fighting permission settings in every -arr app, Plex, Docker, any kind of virtual desktop software (none of which would run prior to logging in which made running headless impossible), getting scripts to auto-run at startup, compatibility with my mouse/keyboard and lack of a real VPN client from my provider without basically coding the damn thing myself.

After about a month and a half of trying to get it working, I popped over to my windows install to get the docker command that had somehow worked on that OS but not Linux and everything was just working. I am sorry I love Linux but I wanted to get back to actually coding things I wanted to code, not my fucking operating system.

I’ll go back to Linux because Windows is untenable but I’m going to actually have to actually set aside real project time to buckling down and figuring out the remaining “quirks”.