Plasma is the desktop-mode interface for the Steam Deck SteamOS, which is the only way I use it. I'm usually a Gnome person, as I'm one of the people Gnome just "clicks" for, despite all its issues, but I've been really enjoying using the Steam Deck as a mini computer and Plasma has been quite stable and solid for that. Did some minor customizing, and no issues at all so far!
Moft doesn't sound too out-of-place for the current start-up name landscape. I can already imagine "At Moft, we are building an AI-first data platform and agent marketplace at scale, because we know what businesses like yours need most."
It's not fully clear yet but they definitely gave up on the current Xbox strategy, after firing both the CEO and the next-in-line and replacing them with people previously working on integrating AI around the entire product line. Sure they said they won't fill up Xbox with soulless AI slop, not sure I believe them.
Consoles are probably getting phased out, which makes financial sense at this point if they don't manage a massive comeback, and Xbox might try to go with a more Steam-based model (they've been trying for the last decade with not much success), maybe trying to make PCs more console-like with their new Xbox Windows changes, as well as putting AI everywhere, so that's going to be fun!
I also put "non-binary" somewhere on Instagram, and almost every single ad is clothing related, mostly alternative fashion. I'm guessing that's partially aimed at my interests but I almost never buy clothes online, especially not from Instagram. Occasionally I see advertisements for surveys about LGBT people and also sometimes very rarely support sites on how to find queer-friendly therapists, and I bet I could find someone to prescribe something on such a site, but in total I've probably only seen 1-2 ads like that. Never direct pharmaceutical ads though, I do wonder what that would look like...
I also wanted to add a story about my fiancé's Instagram account feed, which degenerated into this sort of stuff out of nowhere one day. He has an account about art, he curated his feed, reels, explore tab so that he can see content by other people in his niche, I've seen it myself, all his reels were correctly related to what the account was about. Then one day, out of nowhere, all that disappeared. It's as if the algorithm completely reset, and reverted this account to a completely blank slate, around 1-2 years back. To this day if you look at his explore tab, it's about 75% thirst traps (and I doubt this is the kind he'd be interested in), alongside some extremely broad reaching content, some soccer memes in foreign languages, some "skits", if you can call them that, and extremely bad generic "memes". I saw it happen in front of me, he did not engage with anything like that, he's also not really the type to click on random thirst traps and he has no trouble spotting the usual AI slop. It happened from one hour to another, in an instant. He's still mad about it.
Agh I really wish these awesome community wikis would be easier to find when you don't know about them, they usually have such a cool trove of information. The one I love quite I love is the OSDev Forums Wiki, though that one is well known and loved by a lot of people in the space. We really need to protect these projects somehow, more and more stuff and expertise is getting hidden in Discord servers, completely unsearchable and locked away within the minds of the members...
It's interesting... Different LLM models seem to have a few sentence structures that they seem to vastly overprefer. GPT seems to love "It's not just X, it's Y", Claude loves "The key insight is..." and Gemini, for me, in every second response, uses the phrase "X is the smoking gun". I hear the smoking gun phrase around 5 times a day at this point.
Hm, that YouTube video made me think a bit, sure if you put it all like that, it does feel like a lot of stuff to get right, but whenever I do it, it takes about 30 minutes to lock down the firewall, do some port-scans to verify, punch a VPN through and hide SSH behind it. That way you're already protected from 99.9% of attacks, and then hope that that last tenth of a percent won't stumble upon you, and also that the VPN is secure enough, though I guess if that is breached it's not only you who's fucked. Also you need to look out that Docker doesn't destroy your firewall. I don't know, it doesn't feel like that much work, right? Maybe I'm just blind to it.
What you and I consider routine work, someone who works with mostly Webdev or might consider extremely difficult. There a lot of programmers who have never used a Linux shell, or know much about networking beyond TCP, or used Linux before outside of a uni class 20 years ago.
But I remember when Discord began, I was actually the person who got around 10~ people onboarded onto the platform back in 2015-2018, because I simply thought it was the best way to communicate with a group of people or single person, in multiple ways like text, voice and video, with extremely low friction to do all of these things. Eventually the hold-outs joined too on their own volition, and that was because of network effects.
A platform does not start growing because of network effects, that's what keeps a platform alive and growing later on, but it starts its growth because people really prefer it to the alternatives (which back then for me was Skype and TeamSpeak).
Nowadays I'm not too happy with Discord anymore, some of it because of enshittification, but most of it is me being spoiled by what we already have, and being used to having this huge centralized (as in, can handle lots of different activities without switching to another platform) social tool that does everything I want it to, without me having to think about it at all.
Thing is, the alternatives, are not as good as Discord, and it really isn't close enough for me. Matrix would be the one I would love most to succeed, but everytime I used Matrix and Element, it's been a massive struggle, encryption constantly breaks (still), joining rooms still fails, rooms are spread about randomly, either standalone or in the new Spaces, searching for rooms is usually broken except on the large matrix.org instance, recently a bunch of rooms migrated because the event syncing completely failed and the decentralized state was broken. Not to mention the contant CSAM attacks (Does anyone know why this happens so much on Matrix? Is it really only because of the bad moderation and the fact that it auto-downloads the illegal images? Just feels so disappointing...).
I really hope we get a really good Discord alternative, maybe even an open-source and decentralized one, if possible. I would really rather not jump onto another proprietary platform.
No I kind of see this too, but the 80% is very much the more simple stuff. AI genuinely saves me some time, but I always notice that if I try to "finish" a relatively complex task that's a bit unique in some regards, when a bit more complex work is necessary, something slightly domain-related maybe, I start prompting and prompting and banging my head against the terminal window to make it try to understand the issue, but somehow it still doesn't turn out well at all, and I end up throwing out most of the work done from that point on.
Sometimes it looks like some of that comes from AI generally being very very sure of its initial idea "The issue is actually very simple, it's because..." and then it starts running around in circles once it tries and fails, you can pull it out with a bit more prompting, but it's tough. The thing is, it is sometimes actually right, from the very beginning, but if it isn't...
This is just my own perspective after working with these agents for some time, I've definitely heard of people having different experiences.
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