In order to take advantage of that, someone needs to be positioned to process all that material economically, and to make the logistics achievable by the big players. If it costs Facebook $10million to store and transport phased out gpus vs just sending them to a landfil, they're not going to do it. If they get $100k for recycling - probably not going to do it. If they pocket $5 million, they will definitely contract that out, especially if it costs $50 million to build out the infrastructure to handle it.

Probably a good company idea - transport, disposal, refurbishment of out of cycle GPUs and datacenter assets, creating a massive recycling pipeline for recapturing all the valuable elements is a pretty good niche.

The idea that AI enforcement won't be just as corrupt and capricious as any other form of government run extortion is bonkers. You're talking systems with less oversight than openclaw being run by people whose entire goal is to make as much money as possible, no matter the source. Private, unaccountable companies with effectively no oversight with the legal right to send you invoices for things you might or might not have done, and the cost for disputing it might well exceed the cost of just paying it and getting it over with.

Why are Californians so hellbent on giving their money to the government, given the absolute shitshow that is their budget and track record? The only good things that have happened in California for decades comes out of private enterprise, but all the crazy nonsense is fostered and maintained, apparently quite vigorously, by elected governments.

I'm furious that 10% of my federal income taxes end up going to California's bullshit, I can't imagine what it would be like having to live there.

Seriously, it's bordering on levels of insanity right up there with thinking that Jefferey Epstein would make a great babysitter. Do people just not pay attention? Does the weather just make everyone complacent and docile?

Speed cams and automated gotchas allowing the government to raid your pocketbook are a bad thing. There's no framing or circumstances where that's good.

In the specific case this thread is about - that of red light cameras - presumably the camera produces a photograph showing a red light, a vehicle going through it, and the vehicle's license plate. Plus a video, showing the light was orange for the legally required amount of time, and showing the absence of any exceptional circumstances (e.g. ambulances).

As law enforcement goes, that really seems like the least capricious, highest oversight law enforcement I can imagine.

Some cameras only produce a photograph. Some produce a video with the light status showing on it--but there have been cases that's wrong, the camera recording what it was programmed to do which didn't match the real lights.

You need actual video of the scene that can be examined and which is of sufficiently good quality that the identity of the car can be confirmed. Very often it does not exist.

Likewise, speed cameras should record enough that one can do a time/distance calculation to confirm the speed--because the system can be miscalibrated or can be fooled by large, flat surfaces.

Or look what has happened with breathalyzers. Last I heard if a judge grants the discovery request for the source code the case gets dropped. And the whole thing is based on a flawed principle in the first place: the ratio of breath alcohol to blood alcohol varies substantially between people--setting it for average isn't accurate. As a screening test for doing a blood draw, fine, but it should not be allowed anywhere near the courtroom. (Some states get this right, some do not.)

And, yes, ambulances. I forgot about another time I know I ran a red light. Something with lights/sirens was coming up behind, no lane was empty, I was in the only lane with one car. Lots of space at the intersection, I pulled forward and turned hard right, clearing my lane without actually entering the cross path.

Your taxes getting evenly distributed is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that removing California from the US would either increase your taxes or require reductions in federal spending.

Something like this would be anxiety inducing for most people, I bet. That'd be an excellent experiment, track heart rate, EEG, and performance on a range of cognitive tasks with 2 minute long breaks between each tasks, one group exposed to the irregular ticking, another exposed to regular ticking, another with silence, and one last one with pleasant white noise.

We're going to need local AI to sift through the trash. Platforms have been more or less useless at curating content, and it's only smaller sites like HN that have retained a high SNR at this point. It doesn't even matter what media, at this point, video has passed the 2-3 second sniff test. We're seeing boomers get completely sniped by AI videos, even with watermark, showing absurd spin on current events. Text, music, podcasts, video, cartoons, whatever, it's all been infested, and the quality keeps increasing. I've seen a couple 2+ minute seedance productions that have been actually enjoyable, but by June that sort of thing will be one-shot prompting instead of someone gluing together the outputs from 4 difference SoTA AI tools.

It's getting weird, and we're not ready for it, at all.

AI will destroy the current paradigm, completely and utterly, and there's nothing they can do to stop it. It's unclear if they can even slow it, and that's a good thing.

We will be forced to legislate a modern, digital oriented copyright system that's fair and compatible with AI. If producing any software becomes a matter of asking a machine to produce it - if things like AI native operating systems come about, where apps and media are generated on demand, with protocols as backbone, and each device is just generating its own scaffolding around the protocols - then nearly none of modern licensing, copyright, software patents, or IP conventions make any sense whatsoever.

You can't have horse and buggy traffic conventions for airplanes. We're moving in to a whole new paradigm, and maybe we can get legislation that actually benefits society and individuals, instead of propping up massive corporations and making lawyers rich.

If corporations are allowed to launder someone else work as their own people will simply stop working and just start endlessly remixing a la popular music.

Why is it people can clearly see the recycling scam for what it was, but the idea of coal or carbon fuels makes them entirely unable to handle any sort of thinking that isn't entirely superficial and one-sided?

Maybe, like everything else in life, it's a complex series of tradeoffs, costs, and benefits, and you decide whether the cost is worth the benefit.

And if a policy being pushed doesn't make sense when all the costs and benefits are accounted for, then someone is doing something shady and making a shit ton of money, especially if there's a huge amount of smoke and mirrors and politicized talk.

Ireland's being used for things and it's obvious those in power don't care about and don't think the Irish people being affected by these sorts of policies can or will do anything about it. As that largely seems to be the case, I have to wonder if we're going to see a repeat of what seems to happen every time a government thinks that about the Irish and takes advantage of them.

Let liquid glass be your red pill - come join us in the real.

The cross platform scene is much different these days. Electron apps suck, but at least they suck equally across all platforms. And there are many Electron apps.

But a lot of people rely on Adobe, Microsoft or Windows-only, Mac-only apps. I don’t see that changing anytime soon, unfortunately.

AI is making handling the edge cases that kept people locked in almost trivial. Any workflow, custom spreadsheet, specific OS-only app can be worked around, easily. Staying stuck on Apple or Microsoft is a choice - they're no longer returning value concurrent with the money they charge.

You're free to continue giving them money, but the reasons to do so make less and less sense each day that goes by.

Inkscape is not an option, nor is anything involving importing PDF/SVG, those have to expand a huge ton of stuff that's represented much more compactly in an .AI file. It's about as large a difference as that between an executable file and its source code.

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/desktop-hyper...

It seems like they removed it from VMware 17.6, but maybe another VMM still has this functionality?

Inkscape, Affinity, other open source alternatives exist, but have a remarkably different UI and don't capitalize on your muscle memory.

The feature overlap is bordering on complete, but there are some Adobe Illustrator only perks, for sure. Most of it you can make up for with any of the frontier image AI models.

There are plugins - if you're well versed in how they work, converting between AI and vectorpea should also be a piece of cake with AI.

There are plugins - if you're well versed in how they work, converting between AI and vectorpea should also be a piece of cake with AI.

I'm an artist, not a prompt jockey. My interest in spending even a minute of my life trying to convince a plagarism engine to spit out something half as refined as Astute's plugins for Illustrator is absolutely zero.

There’s nothing that comes even close to Photoshop. Same for a lot of similar professional tools.

> AI is making handling the edge cases that kept people locked in almost trivial

Not for anything remotely complex. Let’s see how that looks in 5 years, but I’m skeptical.

I've converted over a dozen weird edge cases of spreadsheets and access apps and ancient scripts used by departments into standalone little apps or browser apps, ranging from budget and finance related bookkeeping to tracking sales to licensing management. The only advantage Excel has over this is ease of maintenance - it's a lot easier for someone to guide themselves through updating things on a spreadsheet, or to break an idea down into multiple pages, etc, if spreadsheets are what they're familiar with.

If you're an engineering or finance firm dependent on an obscure, unique Excel feature, I could at least see the argument that your use case is too hard to migrate off of Windows.

> exceeds CS6

I wish. It's not even on par with Photoshop 4. No LAB mode, handles only 4 profiles. I could be here all day listing missing features. Also, have you tried to open a 6GB PSB file with it?

I've used Photoshop almost daily since 1994. I really wish there was an open source competitor. There isn't.

What's the AI workaround for Illustrator/After Effects/etc.? You're not suggesting generating vector art or video assets via LLM replaces these, surely?

I'd rather Linux developed an identity of its own. I feel like keyboard driven tiled windows are the closest it has to that.

They just need to get back into the mindset that design is how it works. Not forcing some aesthetic into everything with the superficial idea of "focusing on content" as a backwards justification for making everything transparent cause someone thought it was prettier.

Linux is for people who want to get rid of "they". If "they" start screwing things up, you switch to a different "they". Alternatively, you become "they" by forking the project.

This doesn't make sense for the vast majority of people.

Linux desktop doesn't have the vast majority of the niceties that living in the Apple ecosystem gives you. If I was going to rebuild any one of them for Linux, it would easily become a major project that would suck up all my free time.

That's fine.

> Linux desktop doesn't have the vast majority of the niceties that living in the Apple ecosystem gives you.

And it never will should nobody actually step up and put in the work to make it a reality. Linux needs users willing to do such things.

The original free software business model is that people would pay programmers to work on the features they needed and the results would go back into the commons in the form of upstream patches. I've actually made some money this way. It was nice.

Do most people want to get through that research? Absolutely no, I don't expect many people to follow me into that rabbit hole. They can get the default or Windows or a Mac, no problem with that.

Nothing inherently prevents Linux from replicating those features. It's just that somebody's gotta put the work in to make it happen. That somebody could very well be you if nobody else cared to do it.

My laptop has fancy RGB keyboard LEDs. Manufacturer shipped a shitty Windows app to control them, as well as the internal fans. My choices were: either give up on those features or implement them myself. So I reverse engineered what I could and made a Linux program to control the LEDs. Threw it out there on GitHub just because and woke up one day to discover that not only did I have users but somebody else had independently built a GUI on top of it.

The idea is not to change Linux distributions into Apple tier experiences. The idea is to convert you into a contributing user who is capable of solving his own problems and making his own features. The idea is to elevate users from consumers to contributors who take ownership of their systems.

That's the only way you can ever be free of "they" and whatever "they" decide to impose on you. Being at their mercy is a dangerous position to be in. Forcing low contrast glass UI on users is a nonissue compared to that one time where they threatened to start automatically scanning everyone's devices for CSAM. There's really no limit to what they can do to you should you relinquish ownership of your machine to "they". That's what I want people to understand.

Until you want to contribute but is stonewalled and gatekept by overzealous devs to the point that you lose all interest in contributing and just give up. Which means you are back to using a “they” computer—not a big corp “they”, but a “devs somewhere” “they”. Pretty much exchanging six for half a dozen.

Still preferable to being completely at someone else's mercy though. It is always better to have the option to maintain a fork if needed. I actually maintained my own custom fork of bash for quite some time. About a year later upstream added the feature I wanted so the fork was no longer necessary. It was a pretty good exercise though. Maintaining the fork turned out to not be that hard. All I had to do was pull upstream, rebase my branch on top of upstream, recompile and repackage. It is always better to have the power to do this than to not have it.

The absolute VAST majority of Linux users are not out there forking their own distros or creating their own WMs. They, more often than not, are just fine with using whatever is being cooked up by the big names in the Linux space, people aren’t giving up the “they” just because the “they” is now KDE or GNOME.

Hell, even Torvalds himself has gone on record to say that he just wants his computer to work and is happy using Fedora and GNOME (the very definition of a “they” Linux).

I built a freestanding lisp interpreter that runs directly on top of the Linux kernel just to prove this. Zero dependencies, native system call support. I know that everyone is going to want stuff like glibc instead. But it was possible, so I did it.

For those that such options do matter, it is absolutely essential (I’m in this category). But for the common user, it’s just another thing that their system does that they don’t understand and have no desire to spend time learning. Most think like Torvalds himself: they just want a computer that works and gets out of their way.

I'm arguing against the "common user" migrating to Linux though. "Linux is for people who..." I just didn't want to say it out loud. If this stuff doesn't matter to you, then obviously you shouldn't use it. I'm just trying to convince others that it does matter.

I want Linux to be the programmer's system, and I want a world with more programmers in it. I have no interest in "common users" other than the fact they might one day become programmers themselves.

What's a good calendar app on Linux?

What's a good e-mail client?

What's a good photo and image editor?

I think Liquid Glass looks good.

That sort of pressure can work. But then you risk brigading and activist fueled social media mobs and that's definitely no way to run the internet.

I don't necessarily think that's 'no way to run the internet' or even 'no way to run anything', in that people can choose to whom they listen in regards to blocking, protesting, boycotting.

As long as none of the different groups of opinions are forced on anyone else, then pick and choose those you apply and those you ignore.

With my lists of blocking, I classify them, personally, into different tiers such as Basic, Recommended, Aggressive, and Paranoid when I apply the rules to other people's (family) setups - I'm the only one that uses Paranoid.

The user is responsible for the output of the software. An image created in photoshop isn't the IP of Adobe, nor is text in Word somehow belonging to Microsoft. The idea that because the software tool is AI its output is magically immune from copyright is silly, and any regulation or legislation or agency that comes to that conclusion is silly and shouldn't be taken seriously.

Until they get over the silliness, just lie. You carefully manually crafted each and every character, each pixel, each raw byte by hand, slaving away with a tiny electrode, flipping each bit in memory, to elicit the result you see. Any resemblance to AI creations is purely coincidental, or deliberate as an ironic statement about current affairs.

Using AI as a tool to produce output, no matter how complex the underlying tool, should result in the authorship of the output being assigned to the user of the tool.

If autocorrect in Word doesn't nullify copyright, neither should the use of LLMs; manifesting an idea into code and text and images using prompts might have little human input, but the input is still there. And if it's a serious project, into which many hours of revision, back and forth, testing, changing, etc, there should be absolutely no bar to copyright.

I can entertain a dismissal based on specific low effort uses of a tool - something like "generate a 13 chapter novel 240 pages long" and seeing what you get, then attempting to publish the book. But almost anything that involves any additional effort, even specifying the type of novel, or doing multiple drafts, or generating one chapter at a time, would be sufficient human involvement to justify copyright, in my eyes.

There's no good reason to gatekeep copyright like that. It doesn't benefit society, or individuals, it can only benefit those with vast IP hoards and giant corporations, and it's probably fair to say we've all had about enough of that.

How long they will agree this in the face of large media companies' lobbying efforts remains to be seen.