I largely agree, but I will say that it isn’t only about a financial safety net. AI corporations are using huge trawling nets to pull in the work of everyone in the world, and then resell it in a convenient box. The fact that the profits will be unevenly distributed is only one negative side effect. Because just like ocean trawling, the other side effect is that it will leave the ecosystem damaged and diminished.

Note that the comic in this case is Penny Arcade. Those guys are part of the first original wave of web-comics. They are pioneers and veterans. Their regular blog posts are a level-headed contemporary commentary of the state of the internet and of games. The website is amusing, but it is also a good historical document. And although their huge success is largely due to luck of their timing, and perseverance; they have used their success to make great contributions well beyond just the comics. (I’m thinking mostly of their charity “Child’s play”, and the various PAX gaming expos.) So that’s the kind of value we risk losing, even if AI profits are shared ‘fairly’.

In the comic, (and in a couple of recent blog posts), they are basically concerned that their work is being used without their permission to train AI to mimic their work, and the work of other artists. Partially this is about money, but it is also about clarity of communication. The comics, and their blog have always been a way of communicating their thoughts and chronicling history. And a flood of low-effort AI replicas can dilute this to a level of pointlessness.

And its a similar situation with all artists, with some artists being far more vulnerable than others. Artists generally are not simply drawing stuff to get paid. They are trying to communicate something about the world. So this isn’t only about getting paid for art. It’s about being able to contribute meaning. With AI being produced at a rate far far higher than human art, the signal-to-noise ratio will drop sharply.

AI is a lot like plastic:

It is versatile and easy to use. There are some cases for which it is the highest quality product for the job; but for most cases it is just a far cheaper alternative, with bit of a quality reduction.

So what we end up with is plastic being used a lot, to reduce costs and maximise profits; but mostly the products it is used for are worse than they would otherwise be. They look worse. They degrade faster. They produce mountains of waste that end up contaminating every food source of every animal in the world. As a species, we want to use it less; but individual companies and people continue to use it for everything because it is cheap and convenient.

I think AI will be the same. It is relatively cheap and convenient. It can be used for a very wide range of things, and does a pretty good job. But in most cases it is not quite as good as what we were doing before. In any case, AI output will dominate everything we consume because of how cheap and easy it is. News, reviews, social media comments, web searches, all sorts of products… a huge proportion will be AI created - and although we’ll wish they weren’t (because of the unreliable quality), it will be almost impossible to avoid; because its easier to produce 1000 articles with AI than a single one by a human. So people will churn junk and hope to get lucky rather than putting in work to insure high quality.

For individual people creating stuff, the AI makes it easier and faster and cheaper; and can create good results. But for the world as a whole, we’ll end up choking on a mountain of rubbish, as we now have to wade through vastly more low-quality works to find what we’re looking for. It will contaminate everything we consume, and we won’t be able to get rid of it.

(and when things go bad…)

Ad! Ad!! Oh, it’s an ad. :(

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Nevertheless, Valve’s work with proton has pretty much crushed the argument that Windows is needed for games. That use to be a major sticking point, preventing people from leaving Windows - but now not so much.

Well, if your GPU is NVIDIA, you will also need a bleeding edge rolling release distro for now. Other than that, anything that ships recent version of KDE Plasma or GNOME (the first one handles Xwayland with DPI scaling a bit better imo and is generally more functional)

I keep hearing people say this. But I’ve got an nvidia card, and I just went with the default Mint Cinnamon install and I’ve had no problems whatsoever. I guess maybe my card isn’t new enough to run into whatever problems other people are talking about.

… Actually, there is one minor annoyance. I get lots of nvidia flatpak updates; and they are large downloads. I’d prefer not to be downloading gigabytes of graphics card updates every week. But other flatpaks demand that I have the latest nvidia stuff, so … I guess that is an nvidia annoyance that I experience. I don’t expect that to be fixed by a bleeding edge distro though!

But we’re talking about proportions of Desktop operating systems. People using the desktop less might decrease (or slow the increase) of total desktop usage; but there would need to be more reason that just that for it to impact Windows disproportionately.

Password managers are good; but keeping track of passwords is not the main problem with making online accounts for everything.

I think we can find better things to bitch about than the price of games.

I’m sure you’re right about that. But this topic isn’t about games being too expensive. It’s about ads being forced on people with no compensation. (Many people don’t want ads under any circumstances, while some people say they would accept ads if they get financially compensated.)

I have shared a computer with people, but we definitely don’t want our stuff open at the same time. I would find that confusing and a bit of a violation of privacy. So that leaves me (and most people I assume) just trying to imagine what it is that you are not happy with. And I honestly don’t know what you are talking about when you say ‘regular shortcut’. As far as I know, there is only one kind of shortcut in windows. It’s a icon that runs a command of your choice, with an icon of your choice, placed in a location of your choice (any folder, any part of the start menu, or somewhere on the taskbar). So when you talk about shortcuts not being the regular one, I don’t know what you mean.

But look, if you say it’s bad for your use-case - I believe you. When I said that it was a stretch to blame Firefox, I didn’t mean it was a non-issue. What I had in mind was that your primary complaint seems to be about what Windows is doing rather than what Firefox is doing. In any case, like I said before: if it isn’t doing what you need then it makes sense to look elsewhere. Good luck to you.

I’m not really sure what you are asking for. From what I understand it sounds like you have multiple people using the same computer, and they all want their own Firefox profile open at the same time. You’ve got a shortcut for each profile; and it works… but you are unhappy with how the Windows taskbar looks when you have these multiple profiles open at once?

I feel like its a bit of a stretch to blame Firefox for what the Windows taskbar does while you have multiple people simultaneously trying to use the same web-browser. But sure, everyone has their own use-case. And if this isn’t doing what you need, then it makes sense to look elsewhere.

What’s wrong with profiles in Firefox? I have 3 different Firefox profiles that I use, just for myself. (1 for general usage, 1 for banking, and one for a particular email account.) From my point of view, the profile system works fine. I don’t know what else I’d even ask for to improve it.

And even still, I wouldn’t expect most people would even want multiple Firefox accounts for a single computer login anyway; which is why the Firefox profile selector is disabled by default. (Tab-containers are a bit different, but related. I can certainly imagine a lot of people befit from those.)

Yeah. It makes no sense. A totally crazy mental block. Irrational and nonsensical. No sane person would ever write like that. No chance anyone would ever want to express themselves in that way unless that had some kind of twisted sinister motive. We shouldn’t allow that kind of thing here. We need to make sure everyone on lemmy knows that it is not what we want in this community. Lets keep this discussion going to make sure this wisdom is heard.

Oh my god! You’re right! I see now! Thanks for clarifying that. It was totally absurdly juvenile and silly of them to write like that. Should we really even tolerate that kind of behaviour here on lemmy? I didn’t understand how bad it was until you explained it to me - but I’m sure glad you did, because now it is so crystal clear that the way that they expressed themselves was ridiculous and possibly even harmful to the community.

You think it’s juvenile to self-censor? Have you never heard and adult use swear-adjacent words when talking? This happens for all sorts of reasons. If you think this is a childish thing to do, then I can only assume social norms are very different where you. I can’t think of any child I know ever self-censoring in this way. They’d either swear, or not swear. But I do know of adults who do it.

Obviously the semi-censored version isn’t the same - otherwise you wouldn’t be talking about it. And the author has told you that it was a stylistic choice to use that different version. That’s enough, isn’t it? And judging by the reactions here, apparently the semi-censored version is even more hard-hitting than the full word!

Swearing is used for emphasis and to invoke a reaction. The attention it has brought here seems to show that it has invoked a reaction and captured people’s attention. Maybe that drawing of attention means it was fit for purpose - or maybe not. In any case, it was the choice of the author to do it like that.

If we are separated from our parents shortly after birth, and grow up in isolation from other humans - then we would not learn to talk anyway. Note that that’s what happens with most pets that humans keep. Maybe we get to walk past some other humans in the park a couple of times a week, but that’s it.

It’s pretty easy to imagine fusion being great - but it’s still just in our imaginations. No one has yet been able to build a working fusion power plant. There has been progress over the decades that people have tried, but its still a way to go yet. So although we can imagine that it could produce clean and plentiful energy, we just comparing sci-fi tech to current tech. The future reality might not be so great, and the current reality is that fusion power isn’t possible at all.

To illustrate my point, lets imagine solar power from a ‘theoretical’ point of view, like fusion is described. Solar power uses no fuel; gets its power from sunlight. There is enough energy coming from the sun to meet the whole world’s energy needs with just reality small amount of area. Solar power produces no waste biproducts… So if we just imagine the benefits of solar power, it sounds pretty much perfect. In in reality though, although solar is very good, it is still far from perfect. Construction, maintenance, and disposal of the panels are where the costs are. And so to compare to fusion, we’d need to know what it would take to build, maintain, and disposal of the fusion power plants. Currently we can’t do it at all - so the costs are basically infinite. But even if our tech improves to the point where it is possible… it’s hard to imagine it will be easy or cheap - especially because there will be radioactive waste. (Radioactive waste not from the fuel, but from the walls and shielding of the reactor, as it absorbs high-energy particles produced by the operation of the power plant.)

If you weren’t looking to pick a fight, then your actions did not match your intentions. Because it’s bloody obvious that what you are saying is inflammatory.

… seven different stories, my arse.

This comic is pretty bad. It oversimplifies both positions to the point of complete triviality, then uses it to mock a group of people. The comic is not insightful, or funny, or representative or any real people in any sense. It’s basically just a jab at some people that the author doesn’t like.

In this context, ‘you guys’ refers to USA as a whole.

It is important for the world that the USA doesn’t elect a deranged dictator. So I hope you, as an individual, will vote for the better candidate.