Whenever AI is mentioned lots of people in the Linux space immediately react negatively. Creators like TheLinuxExperiment on YouTube always feel the need to add a disclaimer that “some people think AI is problematic” or something along those lines if an AI topic is discussed. I get that AI has many problems but at the same...
I won’t rehash the arguments around “AI” that others are best placed to make.
My main issue is AI as a term is basically a marketing one to convince people that these tools do something they don’t and its causing real harm. Its redirecting resources and attention onto a very narrow subset of tools replacing other less intensive tools. There are significant impacts to these tools (during an existential crisis around our use and consumption of energy). There are some really good targeted uses of machine learning techniques but they are being drowned out by a hype train that is determined to make the general public think that we have or are near Data from Star Trek.
Addtionally, as others have said the current state of “AI” has a very anti FOSS ethos. With big firms using and misusing their monopolies to steal, borrow and coopt data that isn’t theirs to build something that contains that’s data but is their copyright. Some of this data is intensely personal and sensitive and the original intent behind the sharing is not for training a model which may in certain circumstances spit out that data verbatim.
Lastly, since you use the term Luddite. Its worth actually engaging with what that movement was about. Whilst its pitched now as generic anti-technology backlash in fact it was a movement of people who saw what the priorities and choices in the new technology meant for them: the people that didn’t own the technology and would get worse living and work conditions as a result. As it turned out they were almost exactly correct in thier predictions. They are indeed worth thinking about as allegory for the moment we find ourselves in. How do ordinary people want this technology to change our lives? Who do we want to control it? Given its implications for our climate needs can we afford to use it now, if so for what purposes?
Personally, I can’t wait for the hype train to pop (or maybe depart?) so we can get back to rational discussions about the best uses of machine learning (and computing in general) for the betterment of all rather than the enrichment of a few.
Not irrational to be concerned for a number of reasons. Even if local and secure AI image processing and LLMs add fairly significant processing costs to a simple task like this. It means higher requirements for the browser, higher energy use and therefore emissions (noting here that AI has blown Microsoft’s climate mitigation plan our of the water even with some accounting tricks).
Additionally, you have to think about the long term changes to behaviours this will generate. A handy tool for when people forget to produce proper accessible documents suddenly becomes the default way of making accessible documents. Consider two situations: a culture that promotes and enforces content providers to consider different types of consumer and how they will experience the content; they know that unless they spend the 1% extra time making it accessibile for all it will exclude certain people. Now compare that to a situation where AI is pitched as an easy way not to think about the peoples experiences: the AI will sort it. Those two situations imply very different outcomes: in one there is care and thought about difference and diversity and in another there isn’t. Disabled people are an after thought. Within those two different scenarios there’s also massively different energy and emissions requirements because its making every user perform AI to get some alt text rather than generate it at source.
Finally, it worth explaining about Alt texts a bit and how people use them because its not just text descriptions of an image (which AI could indeed likely produce). Alt texts should be used to summarise the salient aspects of the image the author wants a reader to take away for it in a conscise way and sometimes that message might be slightly different for Alt Text users. AI can’t do this because it should be about the message the content creator wants to send and ensuring it’s accessible. As ever with these tech fixes for accessibility the lived experience of people with those needs isn’t actually present. Its an assumed need rather than what they are asking for.
The person on the left is carrying bags, the one in orange is a delivery driver and a couple of people are wearing backpacks. Aside from car brained, Damaris is also blind.
I’d be keen to know your (or others) experience of biking and driving in those conditions because in my experience cars aren’t well suited to those temperatures either. I don’t have direct experience of biking in that low but I know people who do and they swear by it.
Of course you could throw fuel at it and keep your car running all the time to stop it from freezing. 😷
Not to be too negative but begging for drivers to consider us human is so tiresome.
We already know how to nearly eliminate road death. Unbundling the modes (segregation) and treating cars as guests where that’s not possible. After that treat infractions by drivers seriously. If you can’t drive safely your license should be removed. No more arguing in court that you need to drive to get to work.
It also, I think, centres the ability of drivers to act independently of the visual design of the infrastructure and whilst, that is possible of course, research suggests driving behaviour is more strongly determined by design than conscious choice.
This is a basic represention and inclusion issue. Unless you are actively seeking out voices of those minorities and addressing their concerns you will have a reinforcing loop where behaviour that puts people off engaging will continue and it will continue to limit people from those minorities being involved (and in the worst case causing active harm to some people who end getting involved). From what I understand the behaviour that has been demonstrated and from who those people leaving it is clear this is active issue within Nix. Having a diverse range of people and perspectives will actually make the outputs (software) and community generally better. It’s about recognising the problems in the formal and informal structures you are creating and working to address them.
Additionally, but just to clarify nepotism would be giving positions based on relationships with people in power and not ensuring that your board contains a more representative set of backgrounds and perspectives.
Others have replied pointing out this is a strawman and that merit doesn’t make any sense as a metric if you have discrimination. In practice performance (‘merit’) is complex interaction between an individual’s skills and talent and the environment and support they get to thrive. If you have an environment that structurally and openly discriminates against a certain subclass of people and then chose on “merit” you are just further entrenching that discrimination.
This is a project that seemed to be having specific problems on gender that was causing harm and leading to losing talent. In a voluntary role particularly this is a death spiral for the project as a whole. Without goodwill and passion open source projects of any meaningful size just wouldn’t survive.
I’m glad you care enough about diversity and evidence to have worked out how to solve these problems without empowering and listening to those minorities. Please do share it.
You say remove discrimination and then use a discriminatory strawman. No one is suggesting a code contribution must be accepted based on a minority status. They are saying that to get a decent functioning community for everyone you need a diverse range of people in positions that set the behaviour of the community. You can’t get the CoC and enforcement of it right unless those affected are in positions that influence it. Your enforced anonymity doesn’t work because there are other ways of gendering and racialising people (e.g. based on who people talk). Additionally, what you are saying is that minoritised people have to hide who they are so they don’t get discriminated against rather than just deal with those doing the discrimination. They are called communities because that’s what’s they are: people want to be part of something and that involves sharing a part of themselves too. Open source projects live or die on their communities because they mostly don’t have the finances to just pay people to do the work. You need people to beleive in the project and not burn out etc.
You lose nothing by making sure people from all backgrounds have the same opportunity and enjoyment being part of it. If you aren’t in a minority and don’t care about those that are then just say so!
It’s not about “satisfying the minorities”. It’s about ensuring a basic base level of respect and behaviour for people from all backgrounds. The roles you are talking about were specifically to deal with the fact there was an active problem around that minority in that community that needed dealing with. So bringing in that lived experience is absolutely important. Someone can be adequate, sane, have “proper” mindset and judgement and be from a minority that is currently being targeted with lived experience of the problem. Dealing with issues around diversity and inclusion make life easier and better for everyone: it’s well evidenced. I benefit daily from work that’s been done to make my area easier for people with disabilities despite not having one. Those only came about by people with disabilities challenging and getting in the room where decisions are made.
It’s really not that hard! If you don’t feel minoritised in your daily life and therefore don’t see the importance, fine, but all of us are only one incident or cultural shift to end up being the target so if you aren’t motivated by the plight of people you are happy to “other” than do so because one day you might be the other.
I didn’t mean that all bikes sold were UCI compliant as directly as that. The market has focused on pursuing a fairly narrow definition of performance for a bike in part because of the narrow definitions of racing cycling. That’s had knock on effects for the type of components that have been focussed on and developed. The near ubiquity of diamond frames over recumbents which prioritise comfortably for example.
I think we have seen that effect lesson over the last decade or so (e.g. belt drives for example). Ebikes help as they have very different markets, need different properties and have by definition no need to overlap with UCI compliance at all.
Of course its quite hard to unpick the other factors that have led the market to be cater so strongly to leisure market over the utility market but the UCI I think is up there in setting a cultural standard for what a bike is at the cost to alternatives.
Being available in a niche market isn’t the same as being affordable because its a mass product. There’s more use-cases then you outline: they are particularly good for those with certain types of disabilities. You are right that mixing with traffic is another key reason why they arent as popular. There’s a reason you see them most commonly in areas with decent segregated infrastructure. Personally I have a DF for some of the reasons you outline. My point wasn’t all about the frame though that was just an example, its also true of the focus at component level where R&D has not prioritised low-cost low-maintance options because the high-cost high-performance market was more lucrative and that stems from in part from the direction performance cycling took.
Just had the fleeting thought that maybe there is a substantial cost to review and create enormous traffic safety research systems and the subsequent training required of law enforcement personnel and administrative staff....
I haven’t seen any work estimating this. I have as part of my work spent some time trying to estimate the upstream effects of private cars (and other forms of transport) and it quite quickly gets very hard to find very much data. Even something quite basic like road maintainance gets quite difficult to unpick. So we know broad generalisations like heavier vehicles cause more damage but its quite hard to isolate this connection with individual traffic make ups (e.g. how much change in costs does a 10% change in average vehicle weight cause)
Sadly, we don’t have a culture that particularly wants to know or track the costs. I’m not sure I’d be so confident though that the administration costs would be completely neglible. Some of the costs are quite high level: highway engineering, infrastructure and enforcement which can have high labour and materials costs. Probably what you need is a “natural experiment”. Find a town or city that already happens to have a strange policy (I vagually recall somewhere that has a network of golf cart usage?) and try and ask the relevant authority whether they can provide the back history of spending and compare it to a similar size “normal” road network.
Related bugbare of my mine is the term cycling or walking infrastructure when in reality most if it is actually only necessary because of cars so its really car infrastructure (i.e. to facilitate cars going non human speeds without killing people or damaging buildings).
I agree there may be quite a large range but just to say that can still be useful.
I think its crucial to start denormalising all the costs and externalities of car focussed transport policy. Motornormativity means policy makers and general public internalise costs of progressive infrastructure and are blind to the huge costs of the status quo.
So even being able to pin a wide range on it can be helpful. Not for financial costs but for emissions I was able to show even for the lower end of a wide range of additional hard-to-quantify emissions for scenarios that didn’t drastically reduce private car usage as well as electricify would blow past thier carbon budgets.
I suspect this will generate a lot of discussion and opinions on both sides but what I think we lack is a culture of longitudinal data and study. Maybe you are right or maybe dropping new users in the deep end puts them off forever. It would be nice to see some quantative study on the Linux user experience. Does it shift wider tech beliefs or political beleifs?
Who knew recommending Distros could be so controversial 😛?
Seriously though I think this is a great flowchart and you took on board the more reasonable suggestions from the intial post. This flowchart now quickly eliminates some of the distro choice anxiety. Worst case a newbie might end up on a distro like mint and then end up migrating to a different one.
One comment I had is that I actually didn’t know what opinionated DE meant without googling despite being a long time Linux user (maybe thats just my ignorance) and I wonder if a newbie might be confused maybe there’s another way of saying it (flexible versus simple?).
Anyway, I really think early me would have appreciated this when I first started even if that would been ultimately “use Ubuntu” back then.
I’m in a bit of a productivity rut and whilst I suspect the issue is mainly between the keyboard and chair I’m also interested in what (FOSS) tools there are that people find effective....
Ah thanks for the clarification. I never did manage to use Virtual Desktops effectively but it sounds like the problem was me trying to use them within the workflow rather than for different projects. I always found it difficult to switch compared with just having an extra monitor.
I do worry it might be quite resource intensive just sitting loads in the background though.
Particularly excited about Trillium. I’m current trying Joplin but labour and time reflect and organize the noted means I’m rarely using it effectively.
Habitica sounds interesting. I definitely feel I need something like that. My struggle sometimes is in splitting projects into bitesize chunks (some are easier than others) some of my work can be quite open ended thought projects. I get caught in a trap of doing the easier work to plan work (like coding) rather than necessarily the most urgent.
I worry I’m not “hardcore” enough for emacs (I have tried in the past and now mostly use Vim). I will give it a try though as quite a few people recommend here!
It’s on the list to try. I briefly tried i3 but couldn’t get on with it. Though that was a bad time to try change as there was a lot of deadlines and I didn’t really have the time to learn. I have a bit more time so I’m going to try again.
Avoiding going on yt is definitely a plus. I am trying to move more to active choice of music rather than just what the algorithm is pushing. Obviously that requires upfront work but I think it’s worth it.
The anti-AI sentiment in the free software communities is concerning. (lemmy.world)
Whenever AI is mentioned lots of people in the Linux space immediately react negatively. Creators like TheLinuxExperiment on YouTube always feel the need to add a disclaimer that “some people think AI is problematic” or something along those lines if an AI topic is discussed. I get that AI has many problems but at the same...
Here’s what we’re working on in Firefox | The Mozilla Blog (blog.mozilla.org)
KDE Plasma 6.1 Beta Release (kde.org)
Cycling isn't legitimate transportation...apparently (sh.itjust.works)
The person on the left is carrying bags, the one in orange is a delivery driver and a couple of people are wearing backpacks. Aside from car brained, Damaris is also blind.
Scotland launches campaign "give cycle space", reminding that those riding bike are real persons (www.youtube.com)
The campaign aims to promote the highway code rule that requires drivers to give at leadt 1.5 m space to cyclists when overtaking....
Much ado about "nothing" - Xe Iaso (==Goodbye NixOS) (xeiaso.net)
discourse.nixos.org/t/…/44236...
Fedora Linux 40 Officially Released with Kernel 6.8, Gnome 46 & KDE 6 (9to5linux.com)
Sadly, DNF5 and the new Anaconda installer didn’t make it to the party, in case you were wondering.
“The city of the future uses bikes” Seen in Puebla, Mexico (lemmy.ml)
todon.eu/
Has anyone calculated the administrative costs associated with traffic safety research? (crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov)
Just had the fleeting thought that maybe there is a substantial cost to review and create enormous traffic safety research systems and the subsequent training required of law enforcement personnel and administrative staff....
deleted_by_author
Gnome Flashback And Gnome Classic. (www.youtube.com)
Random UK grandma in my recommenced giving a tour of classic gnome.
How to choose your first distro - A guide for beginners (flowchart + text post)
So, you’re new to Linux? Welcome to our community!...
What Linux "Productivity" (ideally FOSS) tools do you use?
I’m in a bit of a productivity rut and whilst I suspect the issue is mainly between the keyboard and chair I’m also interested in what (FOSS) tools there are that people find effective....