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Comment This is not a problem (Score 1) 68

1. The morons who aren't doing anything illegal but are Nintendo for compromised privacy deserve to be recorded and screwed.
2. The criminals who are doing illegal and evil things on a platform with kids on it also deserve to be recorded and screwed.

Sane people who have no interest in illegality and want to protect their privacy should simply vote with their wallet.

Comment We have seen this before (Score 0) 167

This is no different from industrialization. A bunch of very skilled professions simply became non-viable as a source of income because a machine could do it faster/better/at scale.

A lot of comments in TFA talk about how AI cannot do complex things, while only humans can. This is just poor understanding. At this point, no one is entirely clear about what the limits of AI are. Even if we know some they are not general limits of the approach, but rather specific limitations of the architecture used (diffusion models, transformers, cnns etc.)

What remains true is that someone must generate training data. The current AI wave is essentially riding on centuries of accumulated training data. This is effectively the fossil fuel boom data for AI. It will run out. And then model capabilities will plateau. What will probably happen at that point is that original novel works to used as new training data will become much much more valuable, and only the upper percentile of creative folks will have viable careers. The mediocre stuff will be replaced by AI

Comment Marketing gimmick (Score 1) 70

This is a dumb marketing gimmick. An app is a set of functions that accomplish a particular task. An OS is a set of functions whose specific task is to manage the hardware of the device.

If your OS is doing more than that purpose, and allowing for example posting directly to your social network, you have merely bundled your app with your OS.

You may bundle a functions that use an AI model with API integrations to do plenty of things. But that is unlikely, I do not want to talk to an AI chatbot to scroll through a social network...can you imagine how that will go ?

"Open Facebook. Scroll down. Scroll down. Scroll down. Open this link. Close this link. Give a stupid emoji."

Comment I wish it mattered (Score 2) 33

Over many years, I've tried to use OpenDocument Format and failed because of Libreoffice.

Yes, I can see the irony. But ODF has remained far to closely tied with Libreoffice. It is a first-class citizen only on Libreoffice, which works well only on Linux. On MacOS, Libreoffice is terrible...with literally broken UI as evidenced all over the internet. On Windows, MS Office, even with its 365 shenanigans is so much more performant and feature rich, that the main reason anyone uses Libreoffice is because it is free (as in beer). Heck, MS Office is more performant even on MacOS compared to Libreoffice who cannot seem to get basic things like hardware acceleration right. This is the place, where they have a potential market, as Apple's own office suite is much more inferior.

Libreoffice still does not have a proper cloud based collaboration solution in 2025 that is in-built. So when it comes to business use, it is very often a deal-breaker.

The shortcomings of Libreoffice directly hurt ODF. There is a lesson to be learnt if countless users doing the most basic stuff will use a browser-based solution (Google Docs) over your suppoedly more feature rich office suite. Maybe Libreoffice is too complex for someone who can do with Google Docs and just not upto the mark for someone who needs MS Office, and stuck in that uncanny valley.

Comment Not much of a loss (Score 1) 56

Whiskey was a native Mac GUI for managing Wine. But Wine is molasses on Apple Silicon anyway. There are very few Win32 applications that do not have a native MacOS build or an alternative on MacOS. At worst, there is Parallels which will give you a Windows VM and will at least run everything. In fact, the advantage of Wine was that it is supposed to be more performant than a VM. This is simply not true on Apple Silicon in 2025.

And if you are so tied down to a Win32 app that you absolutely must use it and cannot replace it, and even a VM will not do, it is trivial to just have a Windows machine. You can buy a cheap Windows box for approximately the same cost as the Crossover subscription/license.

All in all, there was no point to Whiskey anyway.

Comment The problem is funding (Score 1) 42

Yes. Signal as a non-profit public good is better than WhatsApp as a corporate data sponge.

But if users flocks to Signal, they are no longer going to be able to handle the traffic. They will need more backend infrastructure, which costs. And history has shown that donations typically do not sustain these services. They are going to need a source of revenue. So they start charging, which makes people look for the next free clone or they turn into a data sponge themselves.

People need to accept that services need to be paid for on the internet as well.

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