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Comment Re:same same. (Score 1) 160

Ubuntu LTS has "Pro" offerings that take it out that far, and Windows isn't free, so it seems fair to include their paid expanded support.

The reason I wouldn't use the RHEL/Alma/Rocky is that I am impatient for new features, but if I was a "I don't care I want to run this for 10 years", then I'd run it on my desktop. I think this is mostly the reason enthusiasts dislike them, which is an opposed concern to "not supported long enough". RHEL10 recently released based on Fedora 40, where desktop enthusiasts are running a Fedora edition a whole year newer.

For Fedora, the "click here to upgrade" is pretty similar to the Windows "click here to upgrade" experience. Unless you get adventurous in ways you couldn't have gotten adventurous in Windows.

Comment Re:Yeah but... (Score 1) 160

As a Fedora user, sometimes you have a period of software instability when they push something not yet baked. It may be for a reason, but that reason may be nearly impossible to discern.

It's not news because the community is broadly used to it and they generally accept it as the cost of getting stuff faster.

Fedora is not as bad as it used to be, but they are really aggressive and inflict oddities from time to time.

If I were really bothered, I could go run something extra conservative, like Debian Stable or Alma Linux, but I prefer the fast-ish delivery of Fedora even accepting that sometimes things can go a bit south.

Comment Re:same same. (Score 1) 160

What LTS editions only do 5 years? I just checked SUSE, Ubuntu, and RHEL.

RedHat is up to 13 years, with the the first 5 years being "full" including releasing for brand new hardware and backporting as needed with another 5 years of "you can keep running it on the hardware you have, but we aren't promising support for new hardware" and another available 3 years of paid extension. Note that Windows 10 pretty much went "maintenance" with the release of Windows 11, so the RHEL lifecycle largely imitates the Windows lifecycle.

SUSE is a bit more generous on paper, but roughly this is about all the LTSes.

However day to day users are not interested and go for the options that favor rapid delivery of new capability, so people don't talk about them as much.

Comment Re: Um (Score 2) 134

Exactly. Even if a technology might have a shot at being desirable, I often see seller interests trample the value and then the seller surprised that the customers didn't go for it after they did absolutely nothing to cater to the user base.

One company I worked at had this persistent issue and a strong warning sign was that they just absolutely worshipped the fictional Henry Ford quote about customers just wanting faster horses and the inventor knowing better than the customer about what the customer should want.

Comment The times we're living in: all is political (Score 1) 181

It really says something about the times we live in that a social network's success becomes defined by polarized political discussion. Political discussion is vital of course, and is one of the existential crises of our lives, but there are other things to talk about: music, art, history, tech, science... the whole human sphere. People need a third space to thrive as the social beings we are, and when all of our connections are reduced to us vs. them, I fear for our humanity.

Comment Re:Neither are we (Score 1) 205

Even adjusting for "all movement is somewhat useful for the skill of driving", an AI model driving consumes training material way more than a human will ever see in their lifetime if they popped right out of a womb and drove for every waking and sleeping moment of their life, several times over. The amount of input and feedback about spacial navigation from just moving about is still a tiny amount by both amount of movement and hours of movement of the training data.

Same for text processing, not only does it consume more than a human will ever see, it will consume more text than a human will ever see, hear, conceptualize across many lifetimes.

Yes, the AI scenarios have a more narrow scope of material but the volume of it is still inordinately more than a human will consume no matter how much you credit somewhat different experiences as "equivalent".

Comment Re:Who cares? (Score 1) 205

And for normal users it is just a blackbox that does what they expect it to do.

The general point being made is that it does *not* do what they expect it to do, but it looks awfully close to doing that and sometimes does it right until it obnoxiously annoys people.

Most laypeople I've interacted with whose experience has been forced AI search overviews are annoyed by them because they got bit by incorrect results.

The problem is not that the technology is worthless, it's that the "potential" has been set upon by opportunistic grifters that have greatly distorted the capabilities and have started forcing it in various ways. It's hard to tell the signal from the noise when you have so many flim flam artists dominating the narrative.

Comment Re:Not artificial intelligence (Score 2) 205

Now the thing is, as a culture we greatly reward the humans that speak with baseless confidence and authority. They are politicians and executives. Put a competent candidate against a con-man and 9 times out of 10 the con-man wins. Most of the time only con-men are even realistically in the running.

Comment Re:Neither are we (Score 1) 205

it's somehow beyond any conceivable algorithm or scale we can possibly fathom.

It's at least beyond the current breed of "AI" technologies, even as those techniques get scaled to absurd levels they still struggle in various ways.

A nice concrete example, attempts at self driving require more time and distance of training data than a human could possibly experience across an entire lifetime. Then it can kind of compete with a human with about 12 hours of experience behind the wheel that's driven a few hundred miles. Similar story for text generation, after ingesting more material than a human could ever possibly ingest they can provide some interesting, yet limited results.

Comment Take a test and find out yourself (Score 1) 189

Honestly, take a test. I recommend this one here:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftyping-speed-test.aoeu...

Anything above 250cpm is probably "good enough", but just about any touch typists can easily do 300+ without breaking a sweat, and my faster students in my CS classes can usually do 400+ (myself, I rarely reach that score anymore, but then, I'm old...).

Also, error rate should be really low (1-2 mistakes is probably fine, but any more, and you have room to improve).

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