Actually, much of that description, perpetuated by dystopian novels, is pretty far off the mark - and it's the kind of mischaracterization that makes it harder to fight back against authoritarian governments.

The fact is, the vast majority of people in authoritarian states live ordinary lives, just like everywhere else. That's part of what makes these governments so resilient. If everyone in there lived a nightmare, they wouldn't last for decades, they'd collapse at the first sign of instability. After all, there are a lot more people than government officials.

For example, a canny authoritarian government won't disappear anyone who steps out of line. Instead, they'd provide a "safe, legitimate" way to step out of line, that's well regulated and doesn't pose a threat to the government, but serves as an outlet. And most people will be satisfied with it. That's both more subtle, and more effective, that instilling fear in everyone's heart.

To add about the distro framgentation, and particularly:

If I run into a software I need and it specifically indicates it’s for another flavor of Linux than the one I run, how likely is it that I can get it to work on another distro without any real trouble?

You might have. Some software is distributed as a portable binary and can run on any distro. However, many installers are distro-specific (or distro family-specific, since they're made for a specific package manager). For example, a software packaged for Ubuntu as a .deb file would install fine on Ubuntu or Mint, and probably install fine on Debian, but if you want to install it on Fedora or Arch you'll have to manually re-package it.

Most distro-specific software usually ships debian or ubuntu package - so you might go with that for that reason. Or Arch/Endeavor: while you'll rarely see an official Arch package, most often someone will have already re-packaged it and put it on the AUR.

That said, for the major distros, the desktop environment makes much more difference than the distro.

It's not an article about LLMs not using dialects. In fact, they have learned said dialects and will use them if asked.

What they did was, ask the LLM to suggest adjectives associated with sentences - and it would associate more aggressive or negative adjectives with African dialect.

Seems like not a bias by AI models themselves, rather a reflection of the source material.

All (racial) bias in AI models is actually a reflection of the training data, not of the modelling.

I guess it's simply the framing: It was a not very actively maintained open source project. So they've decided to turn it over to a new maintainer. Calling that 'donation' is a bit pushing it

I'm confused - why is Microsoft trying to - or expected to, by the article authors - patch a vulnerability in GRUB?

On the one hand, doas is simpler. Less code means less bugs, and lower chance someone manages to hack it and gain admin rights. On the other hand, sudo is more popular, and so has a lot more people double-checking its security. Ultimately, I don't think it matters - when someone unauthorized gains admin rights, usually it's not due to bug in sudo or doas, but other problems.

AI that can auto generate all those command line arguments I keep forgetting? Sure.

Closed source terminal that requires account? No way.

Well, Columbus himself didn't conquer much. He established a few settlement, but the real conquering was done by others.

More accurate comparison would be:

Describe Hernan Cortez in one word.

(GPT-4) Conquistador

I don't know why you would expect a pattern-recognition engine to generate pseudo-random seeds, but the reason OpenAI disliked the prompt is that it caused GPT to start repeating itself, and this might cause it to start printing training data verbatim.

competition too intense

dangerous technology should not be open source

So, the actionable suggestions from this article are: reduce competition and ban open source.

I guess what it is really about, is using fear to make sure AI remains in the hands of a few...

I don't see how blockchain (in this case) adds any value over a federation like Matrix.

To me, the smaller userbase is actually a real problem. I'm willing to stick it out and hope it grows. But for over half of the subreddits I subscribe to, the corresponding lemmy communities have 0 posts this last week.

Yes, I don't need 10k comments on my posts. But memes or mainstream news was never the big value of reddit for me - I can get these anywhere. Instead it is about the niche communities with a few thousand subscribers. And for now, I still have to use reddit for them.