If you're hired specifically to develop a good AI, then you *should* push back against folks that want you do act in ways that would cause you to create an inferior one.

OTOH, for Meta to fail at this is devoutly to be wished for. I'd prefer almost anyone else.

A lot depends on how much you believe their explanation. I don't. In fact, I suspect the person making the explanation didn't know the reason, and either invented what they thought would sound good, or just read something someone else handed them.

Corporations don't have a "central mind" that knows all the things they are doing and why they do them. To get a reasoned answer takes a long time, and usually isn't what they want to deliver anyway.

Since China was already trying to get local chips used rather than NVIDIA, they'll probably be in favor of this move.

It's not a matter of the knowledge not existing, it's that in order to make an HDMI port you need to license a package of patents and agree to them. Random hacker might not care, but Valve, unfortunately, would be sued up the wazoo if it didn't license the package or broke the agreement that goes with it.

A DisplayPort to HDMI 2.1 dongle is the way to go, and honestly I'd either put it in the box, or if it's not legal to do that, advise people to order one at the same time, preferably using language along the lines of "to connect your console to a legacy television or monitor that doesn't support DisplayPort, you can buy this adapter here." If the HDMI group is going to impose arbitrary and nasty conditions, encourage people to switch to DisplayPort. It's better anyway.

There are plenty of dongles around that convert it, I'm kinda surprised they just didn't bundle one rather than add the port directly.

Here's one: https://www.amazon.com/CalDigi...

My favorite is Gill Sans which, like Calibri, is sans but is extremely readable on both screen and print. It in turn is based on Johnston, the London Underground font, which had to be readable given it was being used for signage and notices throughout the LU system. British Rail also had a variant of Helvetica intended for the same purpose and again ability-to-read-quickly was considered critical.

The thing is the whole "Serif is easier to read" is more of a spectrum than a hard rule. There are very readable sans fonts, and God-knows some pretty awful seriffed fonts.

In addition to Rubio's motives (you want to make it harder for people with poor vision to read? What a fucking asshole), Rubio is fucking up for one other reason: In the mid-1980s Times Roman and Helvetica were pretty much the only fonts going that weren't computer fonts, thanks to the influence of the Apple Macintosh and Adobe Postscript. Variants came with most operating systems, and these were translated to Times or Helvetica. There were a tiny number of other fonts that also came with PCs/Macs but they were rarely useful for anything but logos and titles. Only a handful of people actually bought other fonts and used them.

The result is that nothing says "Tired, no effort" than Times Roman. Think of the reaction you probably have when you see a 404 message in Times Roman. Which is an absolute tragedy because it's a classic font.

So, that's what Rubio wants, America to appear lazy and tech illiterate, all to own the libs^H^H^H^Hsight impaired. What the fuck? I once voted for that asshole. I was impressed by his work trying to make a legal path to residency for Dreamers. I genuinely thought he wasn't a typical conservative, he was the type of conservative I wanted to encourage to thrive in that party. What a dumbass I was.

I care about the kids, and I don't think this is treading on them, I think it's pushing them to have IRL relationships, and that's a good thing. I say that as a nerd who had few friends when I was a teen (in the 80s), but even normal, social kids today have far fewer real friendships and many of the geeky kids like I was now have none at all.

We're a social species, we need and crave socialization, but social media is to real relationships like drugs are to the normal joys of life; a false but massively-amped substitute for the real thing, addictive and harmful. It's perfectly possible to get high or drunk from time to time and still enjoy real life, but you have to use the artificial happiness in moderation and control. There are really good reasons why we try to keep kids away from drugs and alcohol, and keep adults away from the really powerful and addictive stuff, and get them into treatment when they get hooked (well, in the US we mostly just put them in prison, but some parts of the world are getting smarter and focusing on treatment).

The same logic applies to social media. We need to figure out how to tame its effects on adults, especially those who are for some reason especially vulnerable and get very warped by it. IMO, it makes perfect sense to just try to keep kids off of it entirely, especially since we don't really understand it yet.

Yeah, Calibri isn't serifed but I believe a design goal was to make it readable on screen (hence sans) and off screen (hence more elegant lettering and differentiation of widths)

Rubio's a fucking idiot, but what do you expect from a group that constantly demonstrates it has no idea why woke (which literally just means "aware of racism") and DEI (which literally just means "Remove artificial barriers that discriminate against certain groups, rather than imposing quotas") are not bad things or even the things they claim they are.

Well, OTOH, they can't get their head around antifa either. Being against "antifa" is such an obvious confession I don't know why they get offended when we point out they're fa.

I said "Way North", not "Slightly North".

A typical basic package, sans Internet and phone service, from a typical ISP is well over $100. And that's for something that's all ads with the exception, maybe, of C-SPAN.

Now compare that to a bundle of ad-free streaming services. I can get HBO Max, Hulu, and Disney+ as a bundle for slightly over $30. That leaves Paramount+ and Peacock I believe, which maybe adds $30 to that if you don't want the ads, and much, much cheaper if you're OK with them. No cable package compares to that.

Like I said though, the streaming equivalent of basic cable is $0. There are many, many, free, ad-supported, services with huge libraries. Just add them to your Roku.

No, absolutely fucking not.

AI may or may not go away, but it's at the "Everything will be a touchscreen!" stage of hype. Just as Windows 8 was a bad idea, so is trying to graft an "Agentic OS" onto a desktop OS. It's fucking stupid.

And AI isn't going to become open until the processing and storage requirements are within normal parameters, which is at least 10-20 years off, possibly longer given Moore's law is what it is. Some people are running it locally, but they're not getting responses that are quick, and they are extremely limited in the data they can use. In reality, LLMs will continue to be something cloud based for the foreseeable future, and if you can't see the dangers in that, the control it gives to others, the spying, and so on, then you've been asleep the last 15 years.

Fuck AI anyway because it's fucking everything up right now, but fuck the Linux Foundation in particular for trying to tie Linux to cloud based services that are, literally, destroying knowledge.

True. If we were to make the decision based on medical and scientific bases, the drinking age would be 25.

> 99.9/100 Wayland beefs are based on ignorance and regurgitation of others' ignorance

That's irony right there.

Virtually every criticism of X11, that it's "inefficient" or "insecure" is based upon ignorance and regurgitation of other's ignorance. And it was that ignorance that lead it to be left unmaintained and developed for 15 years while the former devs worked instead on an awful, less efficient, replacement that only has superficial compatibility and still, today, lacks critical features - some of which the devs are actually opposed to like applications giving hints as to where their windows should be positioned upon opening.

Basically we have a bunch of clowns who replaced the experienced X11 developers who were leaving, who didn't understand the code because it was old fashioned C and part of an application that, after 15 years, had inevitably become a little rough to maintain, who decided the protocol, not the code base, was the problem, and who really only had one legitimate reason - in the mid-2000s - for criticizing the protocol, which was back then it was difficult to add much in the way of security to the protocol so applications can't spy on each other.

And why was that? Because 15 years ago it wasn't possible to give applications unique identifiers that could be used to give them different privileges without integrating X11 into the OS itself.

So they waste 15 years developing an entirely new X11 replacement that cuts out functionality users actually use because "it's insecure" and create new ways to do the same thing but in an awkward kludgy way, only for the rest of the GNU/Linux community to wholly embrace containerization for desktop applications, and, woah, wouldn't you know, but containerization makes it possible to give applications their own individual identifiers so they can now tell an X server that they're Firefox, OpenOffice, and program-pretending-to-be-firefox, and the X server could - if they'd added the protocol - determine these are three different applications and should have different rights, preventing the latter from getting Firefox's privileges.

Nobody has implemented that extension because it'd literally blow all the serious reasons for Wayland out of the water. But it is now possible to implement.

So what's left? "Efficiency"? Wayland is less efficient, it has measurably poorer latency, and this is a design issue, not an implementation issue. The only reason this might be a surprise to anyone is there are still Slashdotters unaware that X11 generally doesn't run over a network and hasn't been reliant upon network protocols since the early 1990s. Memory usage? A traditional Wayland stack is a bigger memory hog than X11 ever was. Better maintainability? Wayland isn't modular and the entire protocol, not just the code base, and everything reliant upon it will need to be thrown out the next time a major change happens - by comparison it took a few months to add compositing to X11.

But sure, it's the Wayland critics who are "misinformed". Your entire shitty windowing system is based upon misinformation. It's literally why it exists - people being unaware of the implications of X11's SHM extension or not realizing that user space security improvements over the last few years had even made the (already less than convincing) X11-can't-have-security argument obsolete.

Go away, and take your crappy functionalty-impaired windowing stack with you.

So you'd rather wait to fix the bigger social problems first before fixing smaller ones? I don't know, I think it's good to attack the smaller problems first. It makes you feel good about small victories, you gain experience with similar problems, and it prevents analysis paralysis. It also builds momentum, everyone likes a winner.

You also have to remember that minors aren't full people, they are legal dependents and censorship is the wrong word to use in this case. It is absolutely the right and obligation of guardians and governments to make decisions for them about what they can and cannot do on the Internet, among other things. The kids will grow up soon enough, and be free to choose by then.

There is nothing open about any of the "open" AI shops. Every "open" model from them is the equivalent of a free mp4, that runs on a simple player, to whet your appetite and make you want to rent their more powerful models.

A real open project supplies the preferred components for completely rebuilding the software. That means, you should get from such a project all the source documents (not preparsed token datasets) for training and all the training scripts they use themselves and all the specs. If you don't, it's only a pretend open AI project.

The Linux Foundation has what now?

I know it's a corporate front group but this is a whole new level of fucked up shit. Fuck the Linux Foundation.