Microsoft’s Windows chief Pavan Davuluri had earlier hinted at such plans already about how the next evolution of OS will make it capable enough to “semantically understand you” as Windows will get “more ambient, more pervasive, more multi-modal”. Using features like Copilot Vision it will be able to “look at your screen” and do more.

Since when did corpos try to reframe the word “pervasive” as something positive?

Aside from a really good advice on putting activity before home, make sure you sleep enough.

While it may sound tempting to have a few extra hours in the evening, the way you spend them when you’re exhausted is meaningless.

When you get proper sleep, you may have a bit less time on your hands, but you can actually turn the time you do have into something nice - and finally get the kind of rest you deserve.

Trust me - you’ll thank yourself for this when you find out you still have energy after your work.

With that energy, you can not only go to wherever you want to go, you can also make the home a nicer place. Make yourself a spa evening. Watch autumn movies with tea and cookies. Read a book. Whatever strikes your fancy and makes you relaxed and…at home.

Poowned

First they laughed at Russians

Then they laughed at Chinese

Now they laugh at Americans and Brits

Who’s gonna laugh the last?

No system is good enough to prevent abuse and dismantling of democracy. Europeans already lose footing and need radical action to stop repeating same mistakes. Authoritarians are already knocking on the doors, and they will not be quiet.

Interesting

X11 is heavily outdated and vulnerable, but it features one thing Wayland doesn’t: it works with everything.

So, if Wayland checks your points, go Wayland. If something breaks - X11 is there to back you up.

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It is! But the extent to which it is used is limited by the efficiency losses that come with electrolysis, logistics, and reverse conversion.

I assume it could still be useful in applications that require long hauls, as dragging a heavy and expensive battery around can negate efficiency benefits over the long runs.

The expenses are mostly upfront though. I’ve spent like $400 on a relatively fancy NAS and two 3TB WD Red CMR drives five years ago, and since then, there was that.

Of course, depending on your use case, there could be extra expenses as well, some of them recurring:

• Bigger drives
• Backup storage (I already had a place I could back up to)
• Domain name and DNS records (if you expose it to the public Web with a URL; you can otherwise just use a VPN tunnel to access NAS from outside the home network, which is free unless you do anything fancy)
• Some kind of paid software (if you don’t enjoy the perfectly good collection of open-source apps)
• Etc.

Now, for the streaming alternative:

• Netflix Standard: $18/mo
• Spotify: $12/mo
• Total: $30/mo, or $360/yr. Just these two services alone.

Your NAS system will pay off in a little over a year (maybe two years if you go all in with huge drives, fancy NAS configs, extra expenses here and there), and it’s smooth sailing from there.

My unit works for 5 years already with no maintenance, is still fully supported by the manufacturer, and I don’t expect to replace it in a few more years.

Self-hosting allows you to have all your files on all your devices, like many have used to with the streaming services. Also, some smart TVs specifically require to connect to some server to grab movies from.

If you don’t need any of that, regular hard drive will suit you best.

Sounds fun! Can see how well it runs on Linux.

If you say something on Lemmy, people will guess you refer to Linux

Again, I’m not saying you should prompt AI to draw everything for you. There are tools that allow you to enhance the quality of your work using AI as a “make this, but properly” option. The person is still there, making the drafts.

Learning to draw again is not my current priority (focusing on other aspects of self-development at the moment), but I always appreciate the resources and revisit them once I come to it. I do not abandon the idea, and if you have resources that work well with the issue of being able to produce random shapes, I’d always welcome and appreciate them.

People don’t crave the system, they rather come to places that are advertised to them.

What they crave is:

• Easy onboarding without figuring out what is an “instance” (a concept entirely unknown to them), and which instances are good vs bad for them;
• A trusted place that won’t become unavailable or buggy because an admin is performing an update or screwed something up or decided they don’t want to do this anymore;
• Some sort of algorithm to filter out crap out of their feed (not having any algorithm is often not good);
• Having their favorite creators and friends on the platform (which, again, boils out to advertising for a large part);

etc.

Fediverse as a whole and Mastodon in particular is yet to answer to a lot of these challenges.

It already happens

I don’t need anyone’s permission, least so from strangers on the Internet. Neither do I think someone owes me anything - your response is one of scorn, and honestly, I couldn’t care less.

But I’m arguing for why, in general, AI assistance in art is a good thing. I, for one, am an apt learner when it comes to nearly anything but painting - yet, I too have something to show and illustrate. And I’m not alone. For some people, it’s not a matter of effort but of genuine lack of abilities, and others just can’t afford spending thousands of hours learning how to draw well when all they need is to illustrate a point, or just create something beautiful for themselves and others to enjoy in the meantime.

Some artists see it as a threat, as a way to devalue their effort and contribution - but it’s not; nothing will ever replace manual art, and it will always be seen as more valuable. Also, only learning to do everything yourself can give you the ultimate control over what the outcome will be. But for people who can’t do it so well themselves, AI assistance is a good way of creative expression, of making the voices we never heard to be heard. You can, of course, plug your ears and ignore it - or you can listen. It’s up to you and your beliefs, and I’m not here policing your decisions.

On the other hand, maybe it will prop up PeerTube for once…

That’s a well thought out response, and I appreciate it. There is certainly something important between what you want and what you end up creating, but any kind of AI art that is harder than “make an image by a simple text prompt” still has that step.

What I’m saying is, AI is not just one thing. When people hear it, they think of text prompts and automatic responses - yet I think of AI being the assistant in the creative process. You provide the vision, and AI tools help illustrate it the way you wouldn’t be able to.

Personally, painting is just something that never clicked for me. I can draw a line, an exact shape, I understand perspective and shadows, but the second it moves to “let’s draw that irregular line”, everything gets messy no matter how many hours I put into this. Back in the school years painting and choreography were two only things I failed at, because it requires a lot of intuitive behavior people never care or are never able to put into algorithm. Later, as I tried again and again, I always stumbled with the same thing - circles and squares are all fine, but how am I supposed to draw THAT? For me every break out of basic geometry feels like a good old meme about drawing a horse:

And for me, AI tools are essential to make my vision into something more complex than a stickman figure. It is still a creative process - AI gets something wrong, some ideas are physically impossible and can’t fit the composition, etc. etc. Any struggle a competent artist faces is still there.

It’s not as easy as it looks, and I bet you $100 that most people wouldn’t be able to recreate this work. Comic art is a bit of a separate discipline: it looks extremely simplistic, yet it’s not.

Oh, I know the struggle - it’s not that I never made any art whatsoever. What’s in the artist’s head is less of an image and more of an impression to be put into words or lines.

And I believe that, given more truly free time and less of the simple mind-eating distractions, much more people would embark on an artistic journey, even in the age of AI. It’s just a very human thing to do.

But while we’re at it, we have what we have, and sometimes having a medium to express yourself right now is better than only having hope to get the tools you need.