It’s best to think of the AUR as an arch-specific build instruction wiki, not a package manager repo. It’s just that the build instructions are formally specified, so it’s possible for the former to be used like the latter. But that’s how you get yourself in trouble.

It does have a steep learning curve, and I do think it is more enjoyable the more you get familiar with the systems. Yeah, sending caravans out can be very risky early on for many reasons.

For a first run, maybe choose a slightly easier difficulty (Community Builder), use the Phoebe Chillax storyteller, and pick a location on the planet that has a year-round growing season. And when choosing your starting colonists, I recommend someone with shooting, someone with construction, and maybe someone with cooking or plants. This way you can be relatively self-sufficient without needing to caravan.

Once you can caravan, I recommend trading/gifting to other factions to build goodwill. This will keep them from attacking you, and once you have a comms station, you can call them in to help with defense in a pinch. Note that some factions are always hostile, though.

When you do get raided, make sure your colonists are always firing from behind cover. When possible, try to gang up on isolated enemies and melee them down to increase the chance they are incapacitated (not killed), so you can capture them. Prisoners can either be slowly converted and recruited, or released for goodwill with their faction (or used for other fucked up stuff).

Good luck!

I played Rimworld again last night for the first time in months, and now I just want to get back to it.

The only thing on the AUR is a recipe to build the package on arch. In a perfect world, the AUR contains a build recipes for every package in existence. It’s always up to the user to be discerning about what they install on their system.

Do they know about algorithmic pricing? Most people don’t like the idea of a company charging them more based on how desperate they are.

Do they know about DHS’ new Predictive Policing.

Do they know that scammers can use info they gather about them to run scams on their loved ones pretending to be them?

Do they know that there are legitimate reasons to want privacy? Ex. a journalist investigating a politician or corporation, or a single mom trying to keep themselves and their kids away from a crazy ex.

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

You might just be in a bubble of privacy-minded people. I know many people who would hand over their phone unlocked at the drop of a hat. Their digital lives just don’t mean anything to them. But more likely, they don’t appreciate the damage someone can do with that access.

Keepass has always been great. If you aren’t regularly sharing account logins with other people, you just have a file you can sync using whatever method you want. For clients, I recommend KeepassDX on android, and KeePassXC on PC.

I also had to look it up

Fear isn’t the right tool to avoid it, though.

To be clear, I’m saying the opposite. Fear is the necessary ingredient that causes fascism. Everyone is seeing wealth inequality, and jobs going away, and cost of living rising, and (depending on the country) healthcare costs rising and quality getting worse. There is a lot of fear going around all over the world, and that’s the classic environment for a demagogue to step in, point at a scapegoat, and stoke populism. As we’ve learned in the US in the last decade, it’s a short jump from there to fascism, and Germany and Italy weren’t the only countries to learn the same lesson back during the great depression. Canada was about to elect their own version of Trump, but instead elected Carney in direct response to Trump’s aggression. So I’m confident if it wasn’t Germany back in the 30s, it would have been someone else, possibly even the US. We did our own internment camp stuff towards the japanese, and there was famously a pro-nazi rally that was held at Madison Square Garden in NYC in 1939. The fear was everywhere, it just came to a head with Germany first.

You kinda want to avoid it.

Hah, understatement. And yet democracies still reliably fall for it. And the reason is they have fears that make them prone to exploitation.

I still don’t see any reason to completely sell out to some specific big companies…they’re trying to manipulate you.

Absolutely not what I’m suggesting. The opposite. As I mentioned before, I tend to believe that any models trained on stolen public data should be made public domain, and to whatever extent possible, the companies using them should need to license the resulting models from us.

Edit: but I’m specifically against any govts taking a stake in these companies, because that’s effectively a bailout for them. They would love to unload their risk on the people.

I’m really unsure about how to compare timeframes.

Totally fair. I think the relevant difference is that we’re still in the middle of the advent of this technology, we still have a hardware shortage that limits access to it, and it began as we were already entering a crisis era and economic downturn. From our vantage point, we only see the damage caused by the tech, not the potential long term impact, and we are (rationally) assuming the worst.

But if a new scientific revolution could happen as a result of AI for the betterment of humanity, do we want to accidentally prevent that by throwing it out with fascism?

(And if that is in our future, the next question historians 500y from now will ask is, could it have even been avoided? Much like we could ask now, was there a timeline where the original printing presses were destroyed out of fear of corrupting the masses? And realistically, how long would that have lasted before a new one was built?)

3 years ago is an arbitrary point in time. Neural networks were invented 70 years ago.

But we both know that when people say “fuck AI” they’re not talking about anything other than generative AI made in the last few years.

I don’t really get what you mean by fear…I think it’s natural to feel a lot of rejection towards all of that.

Fear has defined the Trump era for the last 10+ years. It is why countries all over the world are tilting to the right. It is the necessary ingredient for fascism to gain traction. It happened during the great depression all over the world, even in the US, and it’s happening now.

I’m not saying it’s an unnatural or unreasonable reaction, I’m saying it’s causing democracies to be prone to rash decisions. If you recall, this thread is about the use of AI in FOSS projects. The most prominent sentiment by 99% of people in this thread is “fuck AI, burn it down and anyone who uses it”. And if that fear-based reaction is what prevents well-meaning, intelligent open source maintainers from being allowed to leverage an objectively powerful phenomenon to responsibly and ethically usher in a new scientific/FOSS revolution, we would be remiss to stifle that opportunity out of fear.

Edit: and to be completely honest, I don’t know who is upvoting me, because it’s very uncharacteristic of randos to follow a thread this dense between two people. I get the sense that there are bots in this thread voting for/against their favorite ideologies.

The first time a child is caught using Linux to circumvent this law, they’ll update the law.

I think they were assuming that people would use linux to dodge these restrictions. Ex. a teen who can’t use a site on windows/ios might boot linux in an attempt to make it work. But as others have pointed out, it’s more likely that sites will just blanket-flag a linux useragent as being used by a child to be safe. And then a linux user changing their useragent to get around this will then be hw attestation challenged like any other OS. So yeah, it’s just going to make it more inconvenient to use an open system.

Consider that you’re comparing hundreds of years of the printing press without much lived-context, vs about 3 years of LLMs in the context of the country you live in. It’s not the case that when the printing press was invented, that suddenly everyone had access to a bunch of free, unbiased information. It was a complex piece of machinery, it took decades to be adopted widely, and when it did, it wasn’t in the hands of the proletariat at first. The people wielding it most effectively were kings. And in the present day, if you live in China today, odds are you are not nearly as pessimistic about the advent of AI as people in the west, primarily because your government has actively taken steps to make you feel safe. Most recently, China made it outright illegal to replace workers with AI. Say what you will about China, but I think americans would like to see something even 1/10th this effective right now.

I otherwise can’t disagree with your summary of the current sad state of AI. The only part I would contend with is that, while it can be misused to “make people more stupid”, when wielded correctly it is also a great tool for education. It is able to point you in the right direction of the information you’re looking for faster than any other algorithm. Like with any new information, you have to be trained in the ways of skepticism. You have to know how to vet the output for yourself. But it’s so much faster at finding that relevant information for vetting than combing through reams of irrelevant text, or renting time from a domain expert, if you’re privileged enough to have access to one. Used correctly, LLMs are an incredible accelerator for learning.

And while not all open models are full open-training, there are many viable open-weight models that you can both fine-tune on your own content, and run locally so that no one is MITMing your prompts; and they do rival the best that openai/anthropic/etc. have to offer. There is currently a whole ecosystem of normal people iterating on various open models outside of the purview of the oligarchs. Yes, we’re in a hardware shortage right now, which super sucks, but we’re still talking on the order of thousands to 10s of thousands to have your own model running, not hundreds of thousands to millions.

Outside of LLMs, we are seeing breakthroughs in healthcare. A year ago, doctors were leveraging AI to significantly speed up chemo treatment schedules, leading to a measurable number of lives saved. And just last week we saw Moderna announce a personalized cancer vaccine pass phase 3 testing! The ability to create a personalized vaccine that teaches your immune system how to fight your cancer cells in spite of them constantly mutating was thought to be impossible even 5y ago. Meanwhile, the work is still ongoing, but AI seems promising in its ability to approximate solutions to previously intractable problems in fusion power generation.

Issue isn’t the maths… It’s the fascists being in control of it. We need to get rid of those.

Yep, that’s all I’m claiming. To me, the active ingredient for fascism is fear. The internet could be full of all the slop propaganda that grok can cook up, but if people aren’t afraid of their neighbors or afraid of losing their livelihood, it’s all rendered powerless. We can take 100 specific steps to combat fascism, but to quote one of my favorite metal albums, “the fear is what keeps us here”.

The printing press has been a crucial tool for fascist propagandists ever since its inception. Does that make the technology fascist?

I just got done reading The Demon Haunted World, and can’t help but draw a comparison. It’s perfectly reasonable to be afraid for the future of democracy right now, but it really feels like people think AI is powered by literal sprites, dancing around on puppet strings at the whim of the fascists who summoned them. It’s math. Math isn’t ideological. It is simply a fact of the universe that an LLM is possible.

Yeah, we have to make sure it is applied responsibly, because yeah it’s a very powerful phenomenon. Yes, they were made using stolen information, and I fully believe that all LLMs and training data should be fully open sourced for public use as a result, and making any profit from them is unethical. It’s stealing from Peter and Paul to sell to Peter and Paul.

But one day fascists are bound to fail, and you know what will still exist in the world that comes next? AI/LLMs/some future iteration of a transformer-based neural network. It’s not the first technology loved and/or invented by fascists, and it won’t be the last. But I think in a panic, people are willing to burn down anything in an 50ft radius of any fascist. Keep the knowledge, ditch the fascism, stop acting out of fear.

I don’t know how much IT experience you have, but at the end of the day when an organization pays for license, they’re paying for a fall-guy. They want to have someone to go to when there’s a problem with the software, because that’s cheaper than everyone needing to hire an expert at whatever issues pop up to be certain it’s solved.

They don’t want to have a bunch of PCs running whatever distro and domain software the last IT guy felt like going with. And when the next heartbleed/shell shock/spectre happens, they don’t want to have to figure out how to get the fix for the flavors of software they went with. They want to be able to say “hey company, this is what we pay you for” and the company to say “all good, we got you”.

Of course, it is possible to have both open software, and corporate support. This is why redhat exists. Just understand that your IT dept may have a preference based purely on how easy/hard it makes their job. When my PC has some bug or hw incompatibility, I’m willing to take the time to solve it. But someone who doesn’t have that time is going to prefer to just tell the company that made it to solve it.

I’m also on-board with no computers in schools, as someone else brought up. Phones should not be allowed in classrooms. Before we had LLMs running on calculators, my idea was to have a series of optional classes where you build your own calculator starting from logic gates, and that’s the only computer you’re allowed to use.

It should not be allowed to be part of the terms of service for a product. But two consenting parties should be allowed to use it.

It’s also basically destroying Xbox. I’m surprised they’re still offering it.

But sometimes a product comes with free month of gamepass or something, and I don’t fault anyone for using that to game. And if I were going to do that, I’d rather do it on Linux.

Yeah I’ve mostly avoided GN ever since that incident. There was a time when they just objectively reviewed hardware and reported their findings. The LTT debacle was an uncalled-for hit piece in an attempt to drum up drama for views.

It was eye opening to hear Alex’s take in that whole situation. How they did so much damage over qualms they could have addressed to LTT directly. LTT, like any company, has a lot of issues, but that was just so uncalled for.

I would agree with you 6mo ago, but ever since their last Linux challenge, it feels like LTT is full linux-pilled now. Before, they seemed to exclusively compare capabilities vs mainstream OSes, and only focus on where Linux fell short, because realistically, that’s all mainstream gamers care about. But after the last Linux challenge, they all chose to stay with Linux on their personal machines, because they all felt like it was worth any compromises to not have to deal with windows.

As Linus put it, if something doesn’t work in windows it’s because of bugs or lack of money. If something doesn’t work in Linux, it’s because no one in the community has been annoyed enough by it to fix it.

As Luke put it, every time he’s had to fix an issue on Linux, he’s actually enjoyed it because it felt like he was learning about his machine.

Linus recently did a call with Ludwig about the feasibility of non-tech YouTubers using Linux. Ludwig said “I just think it’s better to have more options, so everyone can use the option they want”, which is historically the line Linus goes with, except that he countered with “consider that windows actively uses their status to limit people’s options, does that change your mind?”

Overall, I think the channel still has to be realistic about the general public’s adoption of Linux. They review the latest tech, and if the latest tech is built exclusively for windows, then they have to review it there. But they do seem to be much more critical of window’s enshittification, and openly advocate for people to try Linux in spite of a rocky transition. It’s been refreshing to finally see the self-professed tech nerds actually cross that threshold into owning their hardware. And whether you like it or not, LTT and Pewdiepie are driving orders of magnitude more people to Linux than we are.

Edit: oh and Linus openly declared that It’s the year of the Linux Desktop, telling viewers it is ready for mainstream adoption.

No. No one is telling anyone to “trust Microsoft”, no one is saying “the numbers Microsoft reports are true”. That is a quote the guy above invented from thin air.

Edit: but for the record, it would be lawsuit territory for MSFT to actually publish false numbers. The shareholders would absolutely ream them. They’re allowed to not post numbers, but they’re not allowed to post false numbers.