Linux May Be the Best Way to Avoid the AI Nightmare

To me this is even worse though. They're using your electricity and CPU cycles to grab the data they want which lowers their bandwidth bills.

It happening "locally" while still sending all the metadata home is just a slap in the face.

That's a pretty big joke, but I think the bigger joke is calling LLMs AI. We taught linear algebra to talk real pretty and now corps want to use it to completely subsume our lives.

Runs locally, mirrors remotely.

To ensure a seamless customer experience when their hardware isn't capable of running the model locally or if there is a problem with the local instance.

microsoft, probably.

Right, but AI is not the only way they're doing the data collection.

It's not just Linux, but free & open source software in general. And it's not just desktop PCs that are plagued by this corporate spyware, it's much worse when looking at the mobile device landscape. The only real solution for mobile devices is GrapheneOS with FOSS software installed from the F-Droid marketplace. Browsers are also under attack by proprietary software corporations, Google just intentionally broke adblockers on all Chromium-based browsers, so they can generate more ad revenue. Last year, they tried to push a proposal that would have massively extended their monopoly on web browsers (WEI). All the streaming services are screwing their users over and increasing the subscription prices while making the content library smaller. It's such a fucking scam, and it's almost sad to see how many people are dumb enough to fall for it.

Praise Stallman

I mean, the problem isn't the existence/obviation of jobs, but what we do next when it happens. If the people whose jobs are automated away are left out with no money or employment, that's a serious problem. If we as a society support them in learning something new that puts their skills to good use, and maybe even reduce the expected working hours of a full-time job to 35 or 32 hours a week, that's an absolute win in my book.

But as someone pointed out elsewhere....AI can already take over the job of company CEOs.... decision making tools could make a group of technical people be more effective than a CEO as we know today.

AI is a cool feature, which makes a great excuse for proprietary corporations to spy on their users. I'd say it's one of the best opportunities for an excuse of the last few decades. Only 9/11 was a better excuse to put everyone under corporate/government surveillance.

And it won’t ever be true until you can pick up a PC running Linux in a big box store. I could see the Steam Deck (and Valve’s rumoured upcoming console) to make a dent in the PC gaming space, but it won’t make a difference to the purchasing decisions of your your aunt who uses her pc to check her emails.

Should corporate buyers ever get tired of MS’ shenanigans they might switch over to Ubuntu, but I’m not holding my breath for that.

Decades ago it was a funny joke. Now it's the most popular handheld OS on the planet by a huge margin. Linux is damn EVERYWHERE except the desktop now, and it's only a matter of time.

Been hearing this for decades.

I've been hearing this about people hearing about people hearing that about Linux for decades.

We can dream 😔

Seems like we’ll get financially viable fusion power plants before that happens.

Guess which OS won't be recognized as a "trusted environment" to visit websites with down the line in Google's upcoming Web DRM. For your own protection of course...

I think it might. Demographics are changing to make PC users more technical overall. The casual user isn’t looking to purchase a desktop PC. Casual is now synonymous with mobile.

It used to be that you needed a desktop to do your taxes or make an insurance claim over the Internet. That’s just not true anymore.

Technically you could have such data gathered and stored locally, without sending them to big corpo. Privacy friendly "AI" is very much possible, it's just not favorable to those companies because they see those models as a tool and the data as what ends up making them money.

Most things MOST people work on these days aren't heavily tied to Windows as an OS in a way that would prevent it running via emulation. Worst-case, in a VM. Lots of the everyday things people use is in the browser now.

You have an example?

It's not about the total share, it's about the premise.

Linux is a solution against corporate greed, it directly takes market share away from Microsoft, and is a viable competitive alternative with few drawbacks.

Tell that to the code I have it write and debug daily. I was skeptical at first, but it's been a huge help for that, as well s learning new (development) languages.

I mean, if LLMs really make software engineering easier, we should also expect Linux apps to improve dramatically. But I’m not betting on it.

We don't have capitalism in the US, we have late-stage crony capitalism. Regulated capitalism is fine, but we are in a crony capitalist system which feeds corporate greed. Our government is controlled by a handful of mega corps which have their hands pulling the strings due to the lobbying system. It wasn't always this way, which is why I don't blame capitalism, I blame human greed.

You really need to specify what you mean by "AI". AI has been used in tons of applications for decades. Do you mean LLMs? Because not all AI is LLMs.

Just take some time to look up the benefits of AI and what it is being used to solve. It's easy to focus on how corporations are abusing the technology for profit, but it's a bland weak perspective to think that AI can't solve problems.

Ah yes. Let’s ban AI so the cartels take over the market for AI. What a great plan.

I hate to break it to you, but if you're running an LLM based on (for example) Llama the training data (corpus) that went into it was still large parts of the Internet.

The fact that you're running the prompts locally doesn't change the fact that it was still trained on data that could be considered protected under copyright law.

It's going to be interesting to see how the law shakes out on this one, because an artist going to an art museum and doing studies of those works (and let's say it's a contemporary art museum where the works wouldn't be in the public domain) for educational purposes is likely fair use - and possibly encouraged to help artists develop their talents. Musicians practicing (or even performing) other artists' songs is expected during their development. Consider some high school band practicing in a garage, playing some song to improve their skills.

I know the big difference is that it's people training vs a machine/LLM training, but that seems to come down to not so much a copyright issue (which it is in an immediate sense) as a "should an algorithm be entitled to the same protections as a person? If not, what if real AI (not just an LLM) is developed? Should those entities be entitled to personhood?"

I'm on his side, I don't get the dislike. Maybe he likes massive corporations stealing people's data putting artist and journalist out of work.

Check out Jan AI. It's open source and extremely easy to install and run. I run it locally on a 2017 laptop without a dedicated GPU and it works, just takes longer to generate responses compared to something like ChatGPT.

It really depends on what model you want to run and how much training is bundled with it. You can pretty much run any model if you have enough disk space but of course GPU + VRAM is preferred for a ChatGPT like fast response. Otherwise, running on an older CPU and RAM is going to be noticeably slower, especially with complex models with a lot of training data to trawl through.

There are some pretty lite models out there but the responses will be more barebones and probably seem 'less informed'.

Give GPT4All a try for your first time. It makes install, configuration and usage point-and-click while being fairly straight forward. For the presented/featured models, it presents a small summary and VRAM recommended, though there are many, many other models available from inside the UI.

Will my dell latitude from 2006 work?

I agree with this. We already have a situation where we don't have feasible alternatives to the primary method, Google search comes to mind. With Linux, even if every company in the world goes down, nerds will still want to play with the technology.

Gnome when you first use it feels like a stupid system, then once it "clicks", you feel like the devs were goddamn geniuses for creating a workflow like it.

And yeah, the polish is nuts considering for a long time and assumption about FOSS was that all the apps are ugly and unpolished.

I'm sure I can install a local AI on a Windows PC as well. Linux is not the solution to every possible problem in the universe. Oh indeed many of them

That's true but if you don't mind the fact that the AI can't learn anything new you can actually go hardware optimization routes and get pretty good performance. We're starting to see AI chips being made. They will do for AI what GPUs did for graphics.

However these hardware optimized chips are only for running the AI you still need GPUs for training it. I could see a situation where new models are trained by big companies and then the results are sold to individuals who then buy the packages and install them on local chips.

Or you can import the "I don't care about cookies" list: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/

Combine with above and rarely see those prompts

Didn't HP sell some fancy shmancy laptops that came with Ubuntu or some flavor of it? Think it was for developers but I thought that was the closest we gotten to commercially selling Linux based machines.

P.S. I could be wrong about this but I am sure this happened.

I agree. Most people won't switch to Linux because they have never used it and think they'll have to relearn computers from scratch.

I propose September 17, the day of the first Linux release.

I think there is some sort of conference. The key would be to convince all the Linux users to stop telling us about it the rest of the time.

Linux uses and vegans have the same "I'm better than you" energy.

Didn't he kind of pull a 180 on those VERY questionable views? Not even trying to refute that he is not right about everything, as that's just silly, but I'm pretty sure he pulled back on that particular extremely dumb opinion.

IDK, I agree with Stallman in a philosophical, pedantic sense on some of his gross views, but I reject it from a policy perspective.

On pedophilia, Stallman went on the assumption that a child can consent to an adult, and I agree with the conclusion that, if they consent, it's totally okay, regardless of age. But he missed the most important bit: children can't consent. So I agree with the conclusion philosophically, I just disagree with the assumed premise. He didn't seem to understand the age of consent and why it exists. When he made that statement, I understood where he was coming from, and I also understood that it would be a bad look and that he shouldn't have opened his mouth.

I disagree with him a lot too, especially politically. But I feel like I understand his reasoning, and in many cases we just disagree on some fundamental assumptions. I like that he's a very logical person, but being highly logical can end very poorly when you're dealing with shaky assumptions.

Imagine the horror of living in a world where all vehicles slowly expand and have to be cut down to manageable size annually until eventually the car is just too big a la American full size SUVs at EOL.

As long as even basic features like push notifications are locked behind Google services, I'd hardly count that as a win. The Google monopoly on android is even worse than the Microsoft monopoly on PCs. Microsoft has at least some good alternative with the current Linux environment, but Googles only competitor is apple with an even worse system.

Sure there are projects like LinageOS and GraphenOS, but both are still reliant on micro G or containerised Goggle apps.

IBM's Watson Enhanced Red Hat

imagine if pop os does it first.

It's built by Google, but it's open source, and is probably the best optical character recognition by far. It's one pip/pipx installation away and I find it pretty useful on occasion. Same as WhisperAI by by OpenAI. Fully open source and one pip/pipx command away, probably close to the best audio transcription there is as well.

Not sure either count as AI, at least not AI chatbot kind of AI more like more simple algorithms, but they're great in the sense it's just another program but a very useful tool. Not some baked in copilot kind of deal

For most users it probably just comes down to what is installed on their machine when they buy it. People generally don't think about operating systems a whole lot.

They do. They are called servers.

But no one is using Linux desktop computers in a business environment because corporate IT departments don't want to have to deal with the nightmare that is installing packages every 5 minutes.

Linux is fine if you're into computers and like fiddling around, but if you just need the damn thing to work you don't want to mess with Linux. It doesn't "just work".

I think, there's just too few potential customers.

Linux works excellently for techies, but those don't need help.

It works great for the many people that just browse the internet, but Windows or their phone/tablet is also fine for that.

Well, and then there's a chunk of people that aren't techie enough to install an OS, which would still have an interest in an improved OS, but those will then also often use some specialty software which only runs on Windows.

Well, my NAS before was in the same style as yours and I moved it to that Linux Mini-PC (that by then had already replaced both TV boxes) because it has much better performance as a NAS (my router could only share using SMBv1 which has less than half the speed of SMBv2 and above, and there are even benefits for Kodi that is in that same machine to access the media directly via the filesystem rather than mounted shared, both because it's much faster doing full scans and because it will actually do proper incremental scans - i.e. only and quickly check files with creation dates newer than last scan data - when scanning my NAS for new media files.

As for shared MySQL synch, if I remember it correctly from when I read about it on the Kodi website, that's just having that MySQL set up as a standalone database server in a place accessible by all potential Kodi client instances and then configure your Kodi clients to use that standalone database instead of the internal database of each Kodi client.

This is just a traditional client-server structure were the "server" is the standalone MySQL database and the clients are the Kodi instances: pretty run of the mill way to have a server doing something for multiple client applications if they're all on the same network so lots of corporate software works like that.

The most obvious way of doing this is having that MySQL database on the Linux Mini-PC (even in professional settings, putting your database on a Linux machine is almost always the best choice) by installing it as a package (for example, with apt-get) and then you do have to initialize it and load it with data from an existing Kodi instance (again, if I remember it correctly, you export the data from the internal database of your Kodi instance and import it into that standalone database) and then point the Kodi instance (and any other present or future Kodi instances you want to use that shared watch history) to that standalone database. From looking at it (and given my experience with making server side software), I believe the instructions on the Kodi website for this are correct and complete even if they seem a little daunting at first.

Personally I didn't do it because I have no need for it and hence couldn't be arsed.

I used KODI for a while but switched to "just" minidlna/ReadyMedia for a lighter setup. I know that VLC can resume videos even over DLNA so I'm wondering if it can abstracted away, e.g having a VLC script that checked, maybe based on filename, if the opening file has already been played from another location and if so, resume from there.

I see that in ~/.config/vlc/vlc-qt-interface.conf there is a [RecentsMRL] section with list (unfortunately local only I believe) and times (in seconds I imagine). One could imagine to scp that file to the NAS using e.g inotify (after writes) then merge it (not replace) on that section only, then a shortcut that before starting VLC get the merged file and does the same. That should allow for resuming across devices.

To add to this Ardour may be worth a look for DAW. I haven't touched it in a while but recall it being rather nice.