This is exactly why I can't understand the AI mental health stuff about it being demotivating. I find it exciting to build apps in the same way, I don't pump out apps like a machine gun, but I do manage to make high quality apps I can maintain myself, as I've discovered. It just takes effort, which I'm willing to put in with AI. Never understood the hate around that. It's possible to have "soul" or anything that normal, "artisanal" apps have if you put in effort, and AI made it easier, at least for me, to put in effort.
You could also say the same with desktops. Desktops abstracted CLI commands like mv or ls. People who are taught on desktops will get scared when they see a terminal.
Yet programmers will still know commands.
Abstractions can make things easier but it doesn't require losing skills.
Desktops don't abstract CLI commands. Both are different interfaces on the same thing underlying. Both coreutils and Windows Explorer are "abstractions" (as you call them, but they're actually interfaces) on filesystems.
Not CLI commands but system calls. Technically, in that sense, both commands and desktops abstract system calls. It's just that desktops handle a lot more than individual commands, aiming to make it easier for the user to use the computer.
I call it an "abstraction" because that's what it is. Instead of you writing commands manually into the terminal, you use a program that calls it for you and does the hard work. That's what an abstraction is, you're abstracting away something by making an interface around it.
All interfaces, as a matter of fact, are abstractions.
Guitar Hero is a "rhythm game", perhaps calling it a "guitar simulator" is a bit incorrect. A rhythm game is one where you, for example, push buttons in tune with a song, exactly what Guitar hero is.
So you are good at different things. Maybe not at a real guitar but perhaps at reaction times.
I say this as someone who had one of those plug-in guitars but never knew how to use it, hah.
Except Guitar Hero is a game, and is marketed as such. Guitar Hero is like Bitcoin mining, you are doing useless computations to make some number go up, in the case of Bitcoin, your money, and Guitar Hero, your score.
But AI actually does something unlike Guitar Hero. There is a real output that can be used tomorrow even if AI "goes away".
You say AI helps you learn no skills, essentially. I don't know about you, but AI helped me understand Linux better in a way I didn't feel confident I would be able to before AI. I have created code with AI that I can maintain, and understand without it.
AI can go in conjunction with learning manually and can be helpful. Just because many examples exist of AI being unhelpful does not mean the whole technology is unhelpful.
It's not impossible to skew an LLM into a specific style of writing, one to reflect the author's intentions.
I think that LLMs made everything easier, as in, lowered the barrier. With that, comes a natual inscentive to be lazy, and not implement your style of writing into it. This will mean the production of more "slop" articles but also a chance for great novels with the help of LLMs. As I say, both human and AI slop exists, as well as truly great things from both. Similarly to how before AI, we had "little to no code!" promises, "make your app with no experience", as well as the endless WordPress/"PHP scripts" promising "SEO optimization" and likes from everyone.
Except all these pre LLM methods were limited and could easily be ignored; now the machine can truly get "smarter" and output new content to the point where beginners can truly become something better (or output beginner quality work at mass) with little to no work, exactly as promised before.
What strikes me about (some, or most of, as I see nowadays) Anti AI is that you never really cared about the human before AI, it was all about quality. But only now do you decide to care about the human? If you truly did, won't you have cared about the human before?
I think it might be a good idea to pause updates on our Android devices, as horrible as it is for security just to prevent this from happening. My OEM has a lot of bloat (Facebook and other junk apps you can't uninstall, useless system services, etc) that mostly do nothing except provide some functionality I don't use along with analytics every minute so they are uninstalled.
"Disabling" an app does not do that much, the OS can re enable it with an update or prevent you from disabling it.
I doubt there is true full privacy on a phone anymore with a stock ROM.
Every single reboot on my lower end Motorola phone, they have decided it fit to re-enable com.glance.lockscreenM every single boot and on every single update.
It's horrible. I don't think I can trust them to produce a Graphene phone at all, really, despite all of everyone's assurances.
At least you can disable it; on some phones (especially Chinese phones) you cannot do anything to the system services, they intercept all app requests, essentially what Google did but with their system. The only recommendation I can give you is to look into Hail (device-owner app that can "freeze" apps, a "lower level" form of disabling, see https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aistra.hail/) which will mean even if the app gets reinstalled on system update, the device owner app will prevent it from running.
I think GrapheneOS might have issues in the future considering that Android will be getting more and more locked down. People say GrapheneOS is the better OS when it just is hardened Android; it is doomed purely because of the Android base.
Perhaps a Linux based edition of GrapheneOS would do well, even if it will not have a lot of app compatibility. There's only so much patching you have to do to Android before it just becomes more work than good.
Despite it's name it can also block IPs and specific apps from connecting to specific servers. I use it to block all manufacturer and OEM related apps that I cannot uninstall through adb or disable. Very handy for blocking constant Chinese phone telemetry pings, as well as additional network level blocklists for ads (Pi-hole like), completely locally so you can trust it unlike a shady VPN.
I checked out your link; it seems to be a mailing list for a hosts file for telemetry? Why is there no option to just see the file without giving in my email? Not the most private.
You're right, our Telemetry Blocklist is a mailing list for a hosts file. I can offer you the list directly, no email required. Just visit https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lightinthedarksolutions/te... and copy the file to your device. This will block common telemetry servers without any external dependencies.
I love rethink but stopped using it on my up-to-date GOS. It randomly stops and no app can reach the internet (or me), randomly it doesn't obey the split tunneling rules or doesn't forward the connections to the tunnel at all (thus blocking all internet if wg proxy is enabled), and couple of other things.
I'll check Rethink again because all in all it's a fantastic software, just doesn't work very stable for me.
But this is an economy / capitalism problem, not an AI problem? AI isn't at fault that you can't get a job, your boss is for replacing you with AI.
That's like saying we should ban cars because millions of people who would upkeep horses for others to use just lost their jobs.
You're essentially making your life purposely harder because you want uninterrupted money. Perhaps look at the issues of the system that does this?
> What great things...
Aside from the medical AI stuff (detecting breast cancer, etc) that's mostly covered, AI can be helpful if you have to do a boring task that you don't want to do yourself. This is pretty much what every technology does - your phone is created so you don't have to run home and use the landline to make a phone call - it's making an already existing task easier.
>...and why would I get access to those things?
Why not? Seriously, why not? It's a bit like asking why should I get access to a car instead of keeping my horse around. You can keep your horse or car. Nobody's pressuring you to replace your horse with a car.
> Nowadays people hardly answer unknown numbers or might ignore inconvinient calls.
So your phone does make calls and it is useful but you don't want to use it nowadays NOT because the technology is useless but because of phone spammers and because phones may have potentially made it easier for phone spammers to exist?
Which, once again, is the exact point I raised with AI. You don't like it NOT because the technology is trash - but because the current capitalist system makes businesses profit less when they have to pay you, so they work hard to use technology to replace you in hopes of paying less.
Which is why I say, this is less an AI problem and more a capitalist one. If there was no benefit to replacing people with technology then people would not be replaced. But currently the current system tries to give you benefits for not having to pay people.
So even if we all fight AI and get it banned it won't solve the underlying problem which will mean that it will repeat with a different thing.
Linux phones exist but work on a limited number of devices (see PostMarketOS) or Linux primary devices like Purism or Pinephone (which I've heard are expensive). That's the primary issue, you either need to buy an expensive and potentially underpowered phone OR have one that is supported most of the way with PostMarketOS (Wifi, SIM card, GPU, etc. sometimes may not work even though the phone can boot PostMarketOS).
I personally don't have a problem with a mediocre-performance phone but it should not be expensive. Not to mention app ecosystems - there aren't a lot of Linux apps for Linux phones.
I've paid 200€ for my PinePhone. It is underpowered, but at least it doesn't have to waste its resources on rendering ads.
Where Android/iPhone users have "apps", I mostly end up writing small shell scripts around existing linux tools. My alarm clock "app" is realized via cron jobs; my TOTP "app" is a one-liner around `oathtool`.
Messenger apps are a bit tricky; I'll probably end up hosting my own matrix homeserver and then have bridges running for Signal and the likes.
I'm not saying Linux phones are junk, but if you want more people to adopt these phones you do need "easier" solutions. Not everyone will want a cron job alarm.
Because if we leave linux phones in their current state then getting hardware for them will be difficult and the software will end up being a pain.
Adoption of Linux phones is kind of the only way that hardware for them will get more mainstream and will allow more people to use Linux phones. And adoption is partly helped by ease of use.
There are plenty of apps for Linux phones because you get all of the Linux software automatically. What there isn’t plenty of is commercial pop culture apps from social media companies, banks, and other businesses but for some of those you can run an android emulator or use their website.
But really, blaming AI (software) for this is a similar situation to "old man yells at cloud".
The software didn't want more RAM. AI companies did. Not to mention that RAM companies may have purposely raised prices and blamed it on AI, I've heard about a class-action lawsuit against the big three RAM companies for coordinating a price increase.
If you don't want to use AI at work, you should really file a complaint. Again, the software didn't do anything, someone else did something to force it on you.
I'm not saying this as something to anger people, but because hating AI has no effect on whether you make AI optional at work or stop big tech companies and RAM manufacturers from price increases. Software has no mind or consciousness, it has no sense of being evil and purposely doing these things. People do, and people do it on purpose. People made AI, after all. It didn't spawn into existence.
The root cause of not being able to afford PCs might just be RAM companies themselves, along with some real demand from AI companies.
> Not to mention that RAM companies may have purposely raised prices and blamed it on AI... The root cause of not being able to afford PCs might just be RAM companies themselves, along with some real demand from AI companies.
I mean, it sounds to me like responding to market forces. It's not as if the RAM companies can charge the AI companies a higher unit price than everyone else. The bigger question is why the AI companies have so much capital (including borrowing) at their disposal.
This is exactly why I can't understand the AI mental health stuff about it being demotivating. I find it exciting to build apps in the same way, I don't pump out apps like a machine gun, but I do manage to make high quality apps I can maintain myself, as I've discovered. It just takes effort, which I'm willing to put in with AI. Never understood the hate around that. It's possible to have "soul" or anything that normal, "artisanal" apps have if you put in effort, and AI made it easier, at least for me, to put in effort.