If memory and processor prices ever become sane and reasonable again, could this be the end of the AI bubble? If free-as-in-beer-AND-speech models are readily available, and if the computing power required to run them is affordable, what do the major AI merchants who've been inflating the bubble have to offer?

Sure, there's the training time and effort. But just as the internet spelled the end of having no choice but to pay for music and other media, won't it also be the way in which the training data that AI companies already stole can be re-stolen by folks who are running their own LLMs on their own hardware?

"Gazing into Sam Altman's Orb" could be the modern-day equivalent of a tattoo inked in a Nazi concentration camp.

What's that Sam? Your iris-print isn't in your database? I'm shocked! /sarc

It's astonishing to me how the plebs of the world are being treated more and more like cattle, and how they're increasingly eager to comply.

On a side note, what are the chances of hackers messing with the database? Having a major criminal swap identities with you would be... inconvenient? Deadly? But they're taking all prudent precautions, so that could never happen, right?

Fair point. But geo-politics makes strange bedfellows, and this may be one of those unicorn moments where Putin's desires and what's best for the free world in the long term actually align. (Note that I consider America - and Israel, of course - to be no longer a part of the free world).

Dog help us if random YouTubers are taking over for traditional news media.

On the other hand, what used to be a fairly solid traditional journalistic foundation - those of you old enough to remember Cronkite know what I'm talking about - long ago started giving way to sensationalism. With the advent of Faux News, what used to be serious journalism devolved into the pre-internet equivalent of clickbait. The sad end of 60 Minutes' credibility at the hands of genocide-supporting Bari Weiss sealed the deal: reliable and responsible TV journalism is dead and cremated, and its ashes have been pissed on.

On the other hand, I've found a few YouTube journalism / editorial channels that I trust. For news and opinion about the shit going on in the world just now, for Americans I recommend the channels Large Man Abroad and Secular Talk. For Canadians, I suggest Wrong Enough to Know Better and Rational National. I'm well aware of the Left-leaning bias in all of these; AFAIC, these days the Leftists are far more reliable and objective than any Right-favouring sources I've found.

As a Linux user I primarily use EXT4, so I've gotten used to assigning 'natural language' filenames to my files. Being able to use spaces, and many punctuation characters, makes filenames more descriptive and easier to read. That's important to me for large libraries of certain file types.

With few exceptions NTFS does allow that; but FAT32 doesn't. I like some of my external drives to be accessible by Windows machines 'just in case'.

Granted, Linux's handling of NTFS drives is a bit limited. An accidental disconnect will corrupt an NTFS drive. Then I have to use my wife's laptop to repair it. But I find the more flexible file naming capability worth the tradeoff.

As an aside, it seems to me that EXT4 is a far more robust filesystem than NTFS. I don't have enough experience with FAT32 to comment on how fragile it is or isn't.

Look for the Philippines to (again) become a US protectorate; or maybe even the 51st state, assuming that Agent Orange doesn't try to take Canada first.

My condolences to your wife, and may she never experience a serious blow to the head or an eye.

I know a bit about this because I have cataracts and a vitreous detachment in one eye. Lots of floaters, but probably not bad enough - yet - to need a vitrectomy. But cataract surgery is only a matter of time, and I also have IFIS...

Why are we allowing a shit stain government like that controlling the US right now to put Iran in the position where threatening international shipping was a matter of self-preservation?

As for that "allowing" part, America hasn't allowed it. They've simply failed - miserably, predictably, and even predictedly - to prevent it.

You SHOULD have listened to the experienced and knowledgeable American military leaders who told you that attacking Iran was a BAD idea.

Actually, that's kinda brilliant, even in its twistedness. It would have the additional benefit of throwing a kink into the genocide which Israel is conducting. After all, the genocide is VERY unpopular in much of Europe, especially in Spain.

That said, from what I've heard the US has put a serious dent in its missile stockpile. Part of me wonders if that was a major factor in Trump's threats to nuke Iran.

Maybe more sorrow for civilization, and less sorrow for vacationers, would be appropriate - if only from the standpoint of pure self-interest.

More importantly, civilization runs on its stomach.

I may have missed a "whoosh" sound over my head, but here goes: I'm not sure why your comment was modded "insightful", unless the jets you're talking about are fighter jets.

I'll second the click-bait concerns mentioned already in other comments. "In trouble" is too charged a term. That said, the last time I tried LMDE, I scurried back to the Mint based on Ubuntu - LMDE was just less refined and needed more intervention to get what I wanted.

I started out my Linux journey on Debian, but found that it became harder to maintain, and that even the "stable" version needed more effort than I wanted to put in to get what I wanted. So I went to Ubuntu, but jumped ship when they started pushing UIs and desktop interfaces that pissed me off. I tried Mint, and it turned out to be the nearly-perfect version for me.

What that means for me is that if Mint starts switching to LMDE exclusively, I may end up looking for another distro. So if there are a lot of other users like me - and I really don't know if that's the case - then it's just possible that Mint WILL be "in trouble" in the future if it drops its Ubuntu-based releases.

My "other mind" doesn't trust Ubuntu as a company, and welcomes the prospect of a distro that's not constantly fighting off the Snapification that Ubuntu is pushing. I have nothing against self-contained executables, but my experience of Snaps has not been good, and I much prefer AppImages - they "just work". I understand the objections around both memory bloat and storage bloat; but AppImages allow me easy access to applications - and versions of applications - that I can't get through repos without a lot of fiddling and risk of breakage.

I'm not too worried about this development just yet, but I think it's about time I gave LMDE another try. If I don't mind it too much, I may start migrating before it becomes necessary.

My, that's quite the moral and philosophical turnaround. Switching from shoes made with a focus on sustainability, to server farms which rape and pillage the environment in multiple ways and on a truly dramatic scale?

The shift is impressive - but not in a good way...

That "good people" part is the kicker. Also, regarding US specificity: the murder rate in US vs EU is roughly three times higher. Sure, some of that can be attributed to cultural factors. But surely a very large portion of the difference is a result of ready access to guns.

I've had a cursory look at data that aren't inflated in the manner you describe, and the figures still seem stupidly high. But for the sake of this discussion I'll concede your point. I'll simply point out that use of the phrase "school shooting" is very rare in countries other than the US. Even here in Canada, where we've had our own notable school shootings, use of the phrase in the context of American news stories is far, far higher than the one-in-ten population ratio would suggest.

Umberto Eco begs to differ. From my point of view, anyone who doesn't acknowledge that the US is now Fascist is ingesting vast amounts of copium and/or hopium.