Yeah. We desperately need anti-trust laws to actually be enforced. I think we’ve proven that nuanced and thoughtful rules don’t cut it, so I’m in favor of some deeply restrictive new rules that are impossible to mis-interpret.

I also think we should create laws with immediate financial incentives for breaking up monopolies.

I’m essence, we need a law that I, as a random citizen, can just climb into any parked Amazon truck and take it home.

I think Amazon would be a lot more interested in splitting the company along appropriately legal lines if the alternative was the owned capital just getting declared public property on a random Tuesday next year.

I’ve found enshittification to go in cycles, with mixed results for recovery.

• Google successfully embraced extended and extinguished XMPP, but now it seems like most folks use Discord, Skype, Zoom, Signal, and whatver Meta calls their spyware today. Our chat experiences certainly aren’t living the FOSS dream, but at least Google Talk doesn’t feel mandatory anymore like it briefly did after it “extinguished” XMPP. (Did Google kill Talk? I can’t keep track of what Google hasn’t killed yet.)
• Mobile operating systems have been a bumpy ride with highs and lows, but Android, the current most common mobile OS, is a lot more open than anything we had before. The vendor builds of Android that most people accept are, indeed, enshitifying now, so I guess the verdict is still out.
• The web itself tried hard to go fully proprietary several times: with Microsoft COM, Microsoft ActiveX, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Silverlight, among others. These are all completely gone now. Today, almost every scrap of technology serving and browsing the web is open source. Of course, most of search is still closed and enshitifying, and the open options for social media are very new, so there’s still plenty of room to improve or lose ground.
• The Commodore 64, a (delightful, but closed) proprietary platform, was once the single best selling single computer model of all time. Today that title goes to the Raspberry Pi, a mostly open hardware specification that is rapidly improving.

Anyway. There’s cause for hope, along with plenty of reasons to be concerned.

// portability

Gave me the giggles. I’ve helped maintain systems where this portable solution would have left everyone better off.

I’ve run almost every OS.

My daily driver is Debian. It’s practical, efficient, stable, and with just a few commands clipped out of blog articles, it morphs into whatever weird silly thing I happen to need it to be, this year.

I don’t believe that you can use traditional algorithms to teach the car street driving, because there are to many different variations… Even if your autopilot is 99% correct and you drive 20000km a year, you still drive wrong 200km of it.

Exactly!

And this is why, if the problem is solveable, it must be solved by learning models shepherded by expert engineers. The LLMs can take care of the long boring stretches, freeing skilled engineer time to fine-tune an LLM algorithm hybrid for the tricky bits.

I’m inclined to believe the problem is solveable, but since I’m not selling anything, I’m allowed to say “if”. Heh.

Yeah. Current generation learning models can do impressive things in the hands of a skilled engineer, but Elon is leading a round of class warfare against skilled engineers right now.

Shareholders need to decide which they really want to bet on to win.

Makes sense. I’m not picky about which exact risks our entitled overconfident billionaires opt to take.

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I mean, if anyone ever introduces the average shareholder to those executive decision desk toy spinners, the average CEO is fucked.

Sometimes I’m reminded that there’s always a chance that they go submarine diving or some such with another overconfident crony who thinks their skills got them where they are today.

That out of the way, FSD sucks, and it’s getting worse, not better.

It’s almost like they bet on the AI to teach the AI, rather than continuing to pay for skilled engineers.

Buckle up folks, we’re going to see a lot more of this, across every industry, before the lawsuits go into high gear and anything gets better.

I love it! Thanks for letting me know.

Historically, “nothing” is the label we apply when none of the things we are currently able to detect are present.

After we can detect what actually is there, we update our description to the much more accurate term “practically nothing”.

Large corporate donors decide, in a non-representative winner-take-all vote system.

Also, I think they meant to say “both parties”.

I’ve found that mapping a big dumb button to “Enter” works nicely for adding drama when invoking a big old batch script process.

This sounds like an important step toward fully working the right think algorithm.

Makes sense. I suspect it may still not work due to Proton likely being compiled for Intel, rather than ARM chips.

If you run into that, you may be able to work around it by logging into the Raspberry Pi, cloning the source code and installing: (if you’re able to get that to work, it’ll likely work equally well on Ubuntu or Raspbian). But it’s not for the faint of heart, they (Proton) don’t include many details, so it looks like there will be a lot of learning about their tool chain. https://github.com/ProtonVPN/proton-vpn-gtk-app#installation

(Edit: Since ProtonVPN is Python based, it may be fine, as long as there’s not too much C in the project. If it works immediately, my gut feeling is it will also work fine on Raspbian, if you need to switch for any other reasons.)

I know a lot of people have Pis set up like this and surely they can’t be administering the whole thing through CLI, right?

We are, indeed. I use a combination of SSH (for quick stuff), and Ansible for stuff I need to do repeatedly.

How do I get a similar setup to my Synology such that I can just get a desktop interface in a browser?

The tool you’re looking for is a ’VNC’ solution. There’s lots of them, and the best ones are free.

You can enable VNC on your Raspberry Pi through Raspi-Config. You’ll also need a VNC client on each device you want to connect from. Fin linked one above, I think.

And now some un- requested advice from me:

You mention running Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi.

If you choose Ubuntu, I believe you will encounter many recipes online that will not work, because Ubuntu does not come with various Raspberry Pi specific tools pre-installed, such as raspi-config.

Raspbian and Ubuntu are extremely similar (this is intentional).

But I have found:

• Many Raspberry Pi recipes will not work on Ubuntu, because Ubuntu does not include Pi specific software that is included in Raspbian.
• Most Ubuntu recipes work perfectly on Raspbian.

I think the Raspbian software can be added on top of Ubuntu, but I’ve never cared enough about the minor differences to even try.

The Ubuntu recipes I have found that don’t work on Raspbian also don’t work on Pi hardware at all, until I compile additional tools from source code. (A Raspberry Pi uses an ARM chip, which is cool, but makes it harder install some software that doesn’t support it.)

Clever, since checking Steam reviews for SteamDeck compatibility has definitely slowed down my impulse game purchases.

Was the byline written by AI?

This comment was also brought to you by the artificial intelligence boom, and has as much to do with it.

You can still purchase this comment as an NFT.

I’m working with a supplier to create a limited edition Pog, with this comment printed on it.

This is the official comment of the new millennium.

This comment is drifting slowly backwards in time, in hopes of escaping the AI hype machine into an earlier, equally stupid hype train, but one made more tolerable by nostalgia.

This comment still only costs 5 cents.