Is there a functional difference between what’s happening and martial law?

Don’t ponder.

We’re already doing it.

https://esphome.io/

You answered your own question.

It will open PC gaming to people who couldn’t access it before. It isn’t for people who know how to build their own PCs, although even people who are tech experts would still want this sort of device.

This makes it easy for tech and tech adjacent people to recommend PC gaming to people with no tech ability.

That’s why it will be a blowout success. The Steam ecosystem is superior to every console gaming platform. Now we will have hardware that competes and exceeds current gen consoles with no maintenance or tech-nerd complications.

The steam deck was great but its specs made it a difficult sell when recommending it to people. You have to tweak a lot of settings and mess with stuff that most people don’t want to do.

This will change all of that.

Remind yourself in two years, and let’s see where it goes. I should still be here. Let’s touch base in 2 years.

A third of games? What are you smoking?

Over 95% of games in my experience work on Linux, and perform better than windows.

What kind of people are still using Windows, anyway? That supports one of the most terrible companies on the planet, invades your privacy, worms into your brain, and takes over your hardware…all for your 1 or 2 games you want to play?

This Steam Machine is going to be a blowout success. Linux gaming is superior in nearly every way. It’s cheaper, it’s more ethical, and it gives you back control.

I’m one. There are actually a lot of us, and there have been for a long time.

The fight might appear lost right now but it is far from it. The pendulum swings fast.

They already thought of that possibility and have taken over the legal system to mitigate. Corporate patents & NDAs will have some complaints.

They are already abducting and “deporting” US citizens. Your line in the sand has been crossed. Just because they haven’t done it yet to one of your parasocial relationship chosen-ones doesn’t mean it isn’t already happening.

By the time people like you realize the legal means have long failed, it will be too late.

The constitution has a clause for this specifically: the 2nd amendment.

Why don’t you read up on what Thomas Jefferson and James Madison have to say on the topic?

And for the record, this isn’t a “battle against MAGA”. It is a battle against corporations. I’d recommend figuring out who your enemy is first.

I would build decentralized platforms that secure the basic needs of a civilization.

1. decentralized world-scale messaging
2. decentralized world-scale data transfers (video, images, etc)
3. on top of these systems:

• anon voting with attestations
• reimplementation of all popular social media
• distributed gov functionality (political parties as a service)

Basically I would implement core functionality as a service. Everyone deserves a say in what they consume, in how they’re governed. I would codify all of that, open source it, and foster a culture of continuous improvement for all systems of governance.

This pattern, if done correctly, could persist for generations to come, and redefine our relationship with governance, exchange, and freedom. The objective would be to most accurately capture the will of the governed, with minimal disruption or life intrusion.

Such a mechanism would be infectious. Eventually, every population in the world would adopt it or some form of it.

This would make the world better for everyone, in every industry, on every level.

I was just writing about Billionaire Brawl elsewhere. Glad to see more people thinking about this sort of concept.

Technology keeps increasing which means roads should be getting cheaper to repair, not more expensive. There should be no barriers on adopting EVs.

Infrastructure costs are a lie. Companies radically overcharge for it. That’s a place to start.

We shouldn’t have to pay for oil to pay for roads. Every single person benefits from roads, so they should be paid for via normal routes of taxation, not by “direct consumption”. That sort of tax is nonsense and hinders progress.

People say “I don’t own a car so why should I pay for it?” Really? Do you live in a city? Do you go shopping? Do you buy food? ALL of that access is due to vehicles.

Why should truckers pay for roads? They are transporting goods that satisfy a demand. We collectively bear the burden of maintaining this infrastructure.

Toll roads should all be abolished. Registration taxes should be abolished. All of this should be simplified.

Instead, people are coming up with absurd creative ways to “make EV drivers pay their fair share”. It is nonsense.

Getting the government back via “legal” means is over.

Time to start thinking outside the box.

I propose this plan: billionaire brawl.

A reality TV show akin to the gladiator arenas of old.

They don’t respect the institutions of law and have danced around them/dismantled them, so they do not deserve it.

Instead, they turned our public institutions into theater. That is what they deserve.

For our entertainment, a new billionaire brawl occurs every day. There are thousands of them so we could have years of entertainment. They fight to the death with all sorts of strange instruments and situations.

I should mention, in Billionaire Brawl, the strange Instruments they use to survive? Yes you guessed it, they must buy them, and they are not cheap. Each piece of equipment costs billions to buy. A sword? A billion. A shield? Another billion. Clothes? Yes, a billion. A helmet? Billion. The proceeds from Billionaire Brawl go to the workers of the industries they pillaged from, and to the environments they destroyed for their riches, and to the people they brainwashed for their riches.

The great thing about this is that it would catalogue exactly what happened here. Future generations would have a historical goldmine. Millions of people who were abused, starved, exploited, and lied to would be able to watch their billionaire brawl and feel a sense of justice.

They feast while they poison our air and waters. They live in luxury while making us beg to give 1/2 of our income to a slum. The moment AI became seemingly advanced enough, they tossed us aside like nuisances.

Billionaire Brawl. Don’t let them escape to bunkers. Pull them out. Let them fight to the death for freedom, like they’ve made us fight for generations.

Careful, my other comment got removed because of a witty but still insightful dig.

They are very sensitive here about how the AI isn’t really AI.

Removed by mod

“Technically”? Wrong word. By all technical measures, they are technically 100% AI.

What you might be trying to say is they aren’t AGI (artificial general intelligence). I would argue they might just be AGI. For instance, they can reason about what they are better than you can, while also being able to draw a pelican riding a unicycle.

What they certainly aren’t is ASI (artificial super-intelligence). You can say they technically aren’t ASI and you would be correct. ASI would be capable of improving itself faster than a human would be capable.

Right.

AI has been worked on for generations. We’ve been benefiting from the fruits of that labor for a long time, mainly starting with search and translations.

Now we have the ability to have a conversation with machines and it is somehow not intelligence?

I am really confused.

Intelligence does not mean consciousness or alive. It is means intelligence, which can be summarized as advanced pattern matching & predictive behavior.

A beetle is intelligent and alive. Is an LLM more intelligent than a beetle? What about an image classifying model, like CLIP? It can perceive and describe objects in an image in natural language, what insect can do that?

This is a form of intelligence. It was artificially created. It is artificial intelligence.

We can criticize the corporate and investor approaches, mourn the loss of purpose for many workers and artists, without being delusional about what this technology is.

…what?

LLMs are AI. What is this?

I am asking seriously. Can someone explain the context of this nonsense?

Are we really entering a luddite phase again?

The creator didn’t have a good answer, so there may not be a good one for this project. But the value proposition is actually there.

These self-hosted solutions are riddled with configuration options, often obscure requirements, and countless maintenance pitfalls.

For a disciplined tech person, it is no problem to install and maintain.

For people less disciplined or non-tech, self hosting is ill-advised and can be dangerous.

But even for a tech person, when you have enough docker-compose services laying around, it can start to get a bit overwhelming to keep it all up to date, online, and functional. If you change your router etc you have to recall how things were set up, what port-forwards you need, what reverse lookups, etc etc.

There actually is a gap in usability and configuration management. I could see a product that has sensible defaults that unifies config across these self-hosted services without needing to access the command line.