"The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will," Schmidt said. "The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence."

The problem with Schmidt's perspective, and to some degree that of the linked article itself, is that they take an "AI" future for granted. Like it's a given that we need to adapt to whatever the tech giants put before us.

But the thing is, the only place where (the success of) "AI" is necessary — that's in those companies' projected earnings. They sunk billions into a technology that could be a big deal in certain number crunching research fields, but to recoup the investment they marketed the product as an everything assistant for everybody.

The corporations pushing "AI" into personal computers, into workspaces, into public governance; they're huge, but they're hardly infallible. They may wish, as in "bet their savings", that this utopian tech dream will work out better than the metaverse ...but that's all it is.

They're just trying to talk their ROI into existence. We need to counter that talk, and that future. It's ours to decide over.

I'm more surprised that people still use Google search at all after the years of enshittification — first the SEO crap, then "personalized search" bubbles, and finally the "AI" idiocy. Even shouting questions down a wishing well seems more productive at this point.

It's time to add a descriptive text to video posts, here's why:

I appreciate how the anti-work movement is diversifying its activities to include anti-job search. Troll those recruitment drones!

My first impression was the lead developer calling a PR for gender neutral pronouns in the documentation "personal politics". Pardon me if I'm still underwhelmed, no matter the state of the project.

I can’t quite believe that… that Disney has let go of the artists who brought the Marvel Universe to life through their genius and […] the people who invented these characters

This is literally the history of Marvel Comics, though. Way before Disney or "AI", they treated their creators like shit. Look up Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

This latest iteration of business as usual does show just what the purpose of "AI" is. Cutting costs, eliminating pesky labour, churning out progressively worse versions of past work at lower production outlay.

At some point "AI" is going to put enough people out of work, not just in the entertainment industry but really across the board, that nobody will be able to afford a trip to the cinema. Let's see where the blame falls then.

I'm not sure what you're asking. There is microG that spoofs Play services to apps. That's been around for several years.

You can also find open source push notification apps on f-droid. Some of those might require a self hosted server, while for example Sunup uses Mozilla's server.

Whether those work on your device probably depends on your ability to root it 🤷

Ugh, that's disappointing. The screendumped list of arguments that "leftists are per definition pro-AI" is reductive and cherrypicked. I guess they can get into the sea with the rest of the "AI" bros.

To be perfectly clear, I don't think the copyright system is anywhere near perfect, especially not the way it has been expanded to benefit corporations rather than actual creators. But it is really the only available legal protection against the gross ethical infringement on human artistry that the "AI" corpos have committed to tran their models.

I'm as black and red as they come — as well as an artist and arts teacher — and that litany of BS arguments does not represent me in the least. I would and have made art without certainty of compensation. That doesn't make my art or anyone else's up for grabs to create piss poor replacements for our skill and craft.

"GenAI" is not a threat to human creativity in itself— it only reproduces lowest common denominator results from the material it's trained upon. But the fact that indiscriminate morons actually think those statistically miscalculated songs, texts or images are as good as what people make? That's the real existential crisis.

I submitted "slop feeding". It's nothing to do with vibes, it's not even coding. You're just feeding prompts to the slop machine.

If that catches on, you heard it here first 🤣

Agreed, Nextcloud has gone from a lean little personal cloud to a hulking enterprise hub.

If you're after something that'll just sync your files between devices, try Syncthing. If you need files available online, maybe something like filestash or, like somebody else suggested, SFTPgo.

There are also tiny, lean calendar and contact server apps out there if you decide you need those. After self hosting NC for years I'm really happy spreading out the tasks over dedicated services rather than having all my eggs in one basket.

I do not hate AI, because it doesn't exist. I'm not delusional.

I do resent the bullshit generators that the tech giants are promoting as AI to individual and institutional users, and the ways they have been trained without consent on regular folks' status updates, as well as the works of authors, academics, programmers, poets, and artists.

I resent the amount of work, energy, environmental damage, and yes, promotional effort that has gone into creating an artificial desire for a product that a) nobody asked for, and b) still doesn't do what it is claimed to do.

And I resent that both institutions and individuals are blindly embracing a technology that at every step from its creation to its implementations denigrate the human work — creative, scholarly, administrative and social — that it intends to supplant.

But Artificial Intelligence? No such thing. I'll form an opinion if I ever see it.

I started degoogling because of Google's more and more transparent business plan of data surveillance. I'm not comfortable with "paying with my information" because of the uncountable (and frankly unimaginable) ways that information can be applied by third parties without my knowledge.

"AI" is one example which wasn't even on the chart when I started degoogling, but we can all be certain that Google and partners use any language sample available on Gmail and G drive to train theirs. This is the company that casually registered private WiFi networks in the course of mapping their Maps street view. They'll harvest everything they can.

At heart, I don't trust corporate mega-monopolies to take care of our best interests as online citizens, and as a European I'm super sceptical of becoming subject to less safe legislation (US, Chinese or whatever) that doesn't offer me protections that I have or expect at home.

By not using Google (or Meta, or Amazon, or X) I can deliberately pick and choose individual services — or host them for myself — rather than hedge everything on the benevolence of one corporation that doesn't give a shit about their users.

The European public sector could choose any stable Linux distro, with any DE. Now, somebody proposed a branded "EU OS" so you know what the non-techies in charge are going to go for.

Pardon my cynicism, but to me that branding seems opportunist and suspicious in itself. Let the suits at least ask their sysadmins what would be the better setup.

If I understand it correctly, it's kind of both. Sounds like Pixelfed didn't follow best practice setting privacy guardrails in follow request approval, and it exacerbates the inherent lack of privacy on the fediverse.

You're right of course, anyone (with the coding chops) could've intentionally set up an instance that does the same for malicious purposes. That should be a wake-up call for anyone who thinks ActivityPub is a great sexting medium.

Scratching my head over this as well. Yes, it might diminish casual discovery uptake that the app isn't in the Play Store, but for this target group I think most users would be comfortable downloading the app from Fdroid.

The larger issue with closing down the entire project including notification servers(!?) is probably a tell that there have been other factors weighing on the developer?

Either way, if the source code is openly available maybe others will pick up development in a way that isn't as vulnerable to corporate policy changes.

There are plenty of good responses here already, but to me the main thing in marketing Trek to new audiences would be stop the frigging nostalgia fest.

• don't circle back to the TOS characters at the tip of a hat. Yes, JJ Abrams, I'm looking at you, but also every other recent attempt at new Star trek movies.
• All the stories around those characters have been told already. Make something new and current within the same universe.
• Don't shoehorn canon and continuity onto every new show. Having Bones make a cameo in the TNG pilot was cute. Making Burnham a previously unmentioned lynchpin in Spock's character was... unnecessary. Don't get me started on SNW.
• The wealth of continuity from previous shows shouldn't be a namecheck scorecard, but a backdrop that curious current viewers can track down and explore on their own.

Twenty years ago when the BBC relaunched Doctor Who, they played down all the background stuff for most of the first season, only drip feeding lore to the audience.

• The stories, the characters had to be appealing on their own
• The 26 seasons worth of classic Who wasn't required watching to keep up, but it gave resonance to the new show.

Star trek needs to learn from that approach to focus on good stories and engaging characters — and to aim outside of the established but dwindling fan group by allowing the almost 60 years of canon to play second violin.

Theoretically speaking, what level of nonsense are we talking about in order to really mess up the training model?

a) Something that doesn't represent the actual contents of the website (like posting "The Odyssey" to the llms.txt of a software documentation site),

b) a randomly generated wall of real words out of context, or

c) just straight lorem ipsum filler?

That OP in the picture not only released an "AI" generated game, the actual gameplay was about training models for profit. It's one big Freudian slip.

I'm not a developer either, so take this as an observer's speculation.

My impression is that venture capitalists took a long look at the fediverse and chucked their money at Bluesky instead, because it actually works more similar to "ye olde" social networks — specifically with a business plan, road map and traditional organisational structure.

The parts of the fediverse that I am most inclined toward is too unruly, recalcitrant and noncommercial to attract deeper interest from VC investors. They are deliberately built and organised to resist expectancy of capital return on investments.

So my conclusion is the reverse of what you'd rather not discuss — in my eyes, the fediverse isn't very good for investors, because until now it's largely been grassrootsy. It will be interesting to see what VC-friendly platforms emerges in the vein of Bluesky or even Threads, and to what degree they will overlap with the current fediverse.

My first thought was, how the hell are people still on Facebook?! 🤣

I see your point, but the most repeated reason/excuse for not leaving Meta (or other big tech platforms) is "I can't, all my contacts are on there". So the longer anybody stays on that dumpster fire, the more they add to the network effect.

My suggestion would be, announce that you're leaving, posting links to where people can find you going forward, and log off for a couple of weeks' grace period. Then login only to download your data and delete the account.

That way, you've given your contacts time to find your new profiles (and maybe their first glimpse of the fediverse), and you're off the treadmill — the contacts who will miss you enough to follow you off FB are probably the ones worth keeping 😉

Edit: added a comma and closed a quotation for clarity.