Do it as an end user? Be part of the solution?

Documentation is one of the many ways to contribute that don’t involve coding.

Hot take: what most people call AI (large language and diffusion models) is, in fact, part of peak capitalism:

• relies on ill gotten gains (training data obtained without permission, payment or licensing)
• aims to remove human workers from the workforce within a system that (for many) requires them to work because capitalism has removed the bulk of social safety netting
• currently has no real route to profit at any reasonable price point
• speculative at best
• reinforces the concentration of power amongst a few tech firms
• will likely also result in regulatory capture with the large firms getting legislation passed that only they can provide “AI” safely

I could go on but hopefully that’s adequate as a PoV.

“AI” is just one of cherries on top of late stage capitalism that embodies the worst of all it.

So I don’t disagree - but felt compelled to share.

I have a desktop which has / had a similar problem.

Originally I built it with a g-series Ryzen which has integrated Radeon Vega graphics. Upgraded to a 3060 and wanted to run Linux for gaming instead of windows.

I couldn’t get a distro to reliably use my graphics card without the issues you describe. Stuttering, crashing, generally unusable.

Garuda was the answer (to be fair I’d try Bazzite too but I just didn’t get there as Garuda worked). In fact, it worked out of the box for me and I enjoyed it so much I made it my work OS.

I like the GUI utilities they’ve made for front-ending a bunch of Arch CLI utilities and I’ve been saved by BTRFS snapshots more than once.

What is success here? The few founders and VC get filthy rich as the larger population dumps their money into Discord stock while the users and teams with limited foresight, who’ve moved their communities to discord, suffer?

I mean yeah I guess that’s the success Cory Doctorow warns us about again and again.

But that’s not my definition of success.

For context I’ve been on the receiving end of an IPO and the founders and investors made out like bandits while a fair number of employees were stuck holding the bags thanks to lock-ins, dilution and over priced shares.

His recent interview on Pod Save America was so off putting, so filled with his own narcissism, that I simply couldn’t finish listening to the interview. There was little of substance there; just a very out of touch very rich guy loving the smell of his own shit.

Afinity Publisher is a good, affordable and a solid replacement for InDesign, at the price of MS Publisher.

We switched away from Creative Suite during one of the many “Adobe overstepping” debacles and haven’t looked back. Publisher 2 has felt like a drop in replacement for most documents/posters/newsletters/flyers etc.

I’m suggesting Afinity publisher because if you’re using ms publisher you don’t have qualms with closed source software and probably value some of the workflow niceties that come with commercially supported software.

I think that depends on what you’re doing. I find Claude miles ahead of the pack in practical, but fairly nuanced coding issues - particularly in use as a paired programmer with Strongly Typed FP patterns.

It’s almost as if it’s better in real-world situations than artificial benchmarks.

And their new CLI client is pretty decent - it seems to really take advantage of the hybrid CoT/standard auto-switching model advantage Claude now has with this week’s update.

I don’t use it often anymore but when I reach for a model first for coding - it’s Claude. It’s the most likely to be able to grasp the core architectural patterns in a codebase (like a consistent monadic structure for error handling or consistently well-defined architectural layers).

I just recently cancelled my one month trial of Gemini - it was pretty useless; easy to get stuck in a dumb loop even with project files as context.

And GPT-4/o1/o3 seems to really suck at being prescriptive - often providing walls of multiple solutions that all somehow narrowly miss the plot - even with tons of context.

That said Claude sucks - SUCKS - at statistics - being completely unreliable where GPT-4 is often pretty good and provides code (Python) for verification.

I agree. Trump is stupid and easily manipulated. He doesn’t need to be compromised in the way people think. He’s a rich kid with a chip on his shoulder trying to impress Daddy types while stuck in the mindset he’s the most (insert some positive trumpism here) - aka Narcissist.

Very easily manipulated when you know what makes him tick.

There’s a line from the Lioness tv series (S01E06) that rings so true about Trump (but also many modern presidents):

Do you know who’s in this meeting?

Don’t you?

I knew who was in the debrief was at Langley.

Well, it won’t be the President.

Wouldn’t be the President anyway. You don’t plan bus routes with the bus driver. You just tell him where to drive.

Edit; wrong comment to reply to sorry.

Recently switched from VsCodium to neovim - but still use Codium for some specific tasks.

My setup customization focuses around Telescope, Treesitter, Trouble & Blink.

But the advice I got was to start with vim keybindings in VSCode. I used those for six weeks until I got the hang of the basics and it had gone from frustrating to somewhat second nature.

Then I made the move.

I still use Codium for Terraform work (I have struggled to get the Terraform LS working well in neovim and I don’t use it often enough to warrant the effort) and as a GUI git client - I like the ability to add a single line from multiple files and I haven’t looked up how to do it any other way - I’ve got other stuff to do and it’s not slowing me down.

But I grew to hate Codium / VS code tabs in larger codebases. I was spending so much time looking for open tabs ( I realise this is a me problem). While neovim has tabs, it’s much more controlled and I typically use them very differently and very sparingly.

If I need to look up a data structure I just call it up temporarily with Telescope via a find files call or a live grep call (both setup to only use my project directory by default), take a peak, and move on.

The thing is - security risks are going to exist anywhere you install plugins you haven’t audited the code for. Unless you work in an IDE where there’s a company guaranteeing all plugins - there are always going to be risks.

I’d argue that VSCode, while a bigger target, has both a large user base and Microsoft’s security team going for it. I don’t see the theme being compromised as much as problem because it got solved and also prompted some serious security review of many marketplace plugins. Not ideal, but not terrible.

As per my other comment - the algorithm is only part of it.

A big aspect however is the slickness and ease-of-onboarding for mega-Corp apps. It’s a thing that would relatively easy to begin work on.

I’ve seen first hand the amount of time and money even growth-stage startups spend on onboarding and have lots of first-hand reports from peers at the big girls - it’s a critical part of success. Make it easy to get started and easy to stay using.

It’s missing from most fediverse experiences. Pixelfed being a serious contender for an on-boarding rethink.

“time-to-value” - we want that as low as possible.

That’s a shame irrespective of the drama. Asahi is surprisingly good. Installation is (relatively) straightforward.

I’ve got it on my primary laptop. I don’t use it frequently because battery life is poor compared to MacOS and I can’t use an external display but it’s an impressive achievement and I’m sure it will only get better. I haven’t used fedora in 20 years but it’s slick and easy and most of it just works. It looks just like my Linux workstation desktop.

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There sadly isn’t a viable one at the same level of functionality.

Edit: some random other comment appeared here. Fixed.

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Agreed. Companies should be required by law to release source code, build guides, documentation and service architecture for services or apps that are required by hardware they sold.

While there are bigger fish to fry at the moment, socially speaking, the problem is only going to get worse if legislators don’t step in.

Building off the other reply - it’s the standard UX/UI design tool these days. Name a popular SaaS tool - their design / product team likely uses Figma.

They were recently in the news after their acquisition by Adobe fell through.

They also recently release a competitor to Google slides/powerpoint.

Pros:

• you run a home lab

Cons:

• you run a home lab

Thanks for the reply. Makes sense. I haven’t had any jobs recently that would push us there.

CC is also priced low enough we can sign back up for a month if we need it.

One feature set of CC I’ll miss is the libraries functionality working across all the apps. Someone on the team needs a client asset in any app ? (AE/ID/PS/AI) There it is.

How so? Genuinely curious what’s missing as someone who tried it on a job, and loved it.

I just sent a job to print yesterday and the printer didn’t bat an eye.

Are we talking specific types of printing? Like booklets or runs with specific imposition needs or something else?

I think ultimately it will depend on what one needs printed. It would easily meet most common printing requirements as far as I can tell.