https://neocities.org/

Really awesome old school sites. Crazy gifs, web rings, etc.

Ah, so now people will be incentivized to spam more bombastic and extreme content to more and more fanatic groups, brilliant.

Lol, I wouldn’t even use MS Office on Windows, Libre Office all the way.

Thanks for your response. Yeah, I think the issue isn’t the technology, it’s who controls and owns it.

I doubt it would be anywhere near as controversial if it were all fully open source and run by public organizations and communities that were interested in bettering the human experience and reducing mundane work vs maximizing profitability.

I think you’re reading too deep into what I was saying. Perhaps I wasn’t being clear, my bad if so.

I’m not against AI tools to assist people’s work. Using them for grammar/spellcheck, code completion and automated testing, artwork help for filling in repetitive background details/textures, automatically removing background details in pictures like dumpsters or people photo bombing, etc.

What I am against is the grifting, the near religious devotion by tech bros to AI replacing humans in all areas of life, and the fact that the groups and companies controlling almost all of the development of this tech are multi-billion/trillion dollar corpos that don’t make all aspects of their tech open source and are 100% motivated by profit.

It’s all connected, the reasons why it can’t do basic logical reasoning are the same for why it can’t replace human art.

It’s because neither of those activities are mere pattern recognition and statistical inference, which is all LLMs will ever be.

Of course they don’t, logical reasoning isn’t just guessing a word or phrase that comes next.

As much as some of these tech bros want human thinking and creativity to be reducible to mere pattern recognition, it isn’t, and it never will be.

But the corpos and Capitalists don’t care, because their whole worldview is based in the idea that humans are only as valuable as the profitability they generate for a company.

They don’t see any value in poetry, or philosophy, or literature, or historical analysis, or visual arts unless it can be patented, trademarked, copyrighted, and sold to consumers at a good markup.

As if the only difference between Van Goh’s art and an LLM is the size of sample data and efficiency of an algorithm.

Did the same for my parents earlier this year. I downloaded a Windows 10 theme for Mint so it felt and looked more Windowsy for them.

It’s been great for them. One piece of advice, make sure you sit down with your grandma after installing it and have her do everything she normally does on Windows.

Make sure all the shortcuts and bookmarks are in the same spots and called the same things.

I’m so excited for the AI crash

Jellyfin for only music streaming would probably be fine, if it’s just you using it. PiHole would be good, you could probably get a low impact distro on there to run Docker containers, but only pretty light services on it.

DM me, I got a few bridges to sell you.

About to build my first really nice homelab NAS for Jellyfin, archiving, etc. targeting between 30-40TB if all goes well :)

There’s the enshitification we know and love! Freetube for desktop and Tubular for mobile is how I’ve been watching YT for over a year now, and it’s great!

Good.

I still mess this up for lists in Python…

Yes!

Absolutely!

Not sure this has been said yet, but Neocities is a pretty great throwback to GeoCities and the early 2000’s web.

All a bunch of small, handcrafted websites and personal blogs by individuals and small groups.

Exploring feels like I remember back in the early 2000’s as a teen. Crazy and weird sites, hidden links and easter eggs, ARGs, random annon comments you can post to a wall, .gifs all over, pixel art, hacker manifestos, links to other similar sites, etc.

The Fediverse is pretty great too.

I wish there were more site directories curated by communities, that would reduce my reliance on search engines for sure. RSS is great, I’ve been using that to help build my personal content feed.

Snaps are a standard for apps that Ubuntu’s parent company, Canonical, has been trying to push for years.

The issue that most people have with them, is that Canonical controls the servers, which are closed source. Meaning that only they can distribute Snap software, which many Linux users feel violates the spirit & intention of the wider free and open source community.

Appimages and Flatpaks are fully open source standards, anybody can package their software in those ways and distribute them however they want.

.deb files are software packaged for the Debian distribution, and frequently also work with other distros that are based on Debian, like Linux Mint.