the difference between a schizophrenia-spectrum psychosis individual and a beat poet or spoken word performance art? Word-salad in -> word-salad out.

It's all about context. Are you in a mental hospital or a cafe sipping an espresso? A human would be well aware of the context, but was the chatbot given that information?

It's different in the same way that mass surveillance by law enforcement is somehow legal. The law simply hasn't caught up with reality. In mass surveillance, the premise is that if the government could have put a cop there, they can put a camera there. Yet this is totally different in scale, expense, and ease of use -- making it not the same thing at all. These three factors put a natural limit on the scale of surveillance, limiting the reach of the government to high profile crimes. Cheap and pervasive cameras throw out that balance, and with it, the social contract.

In a FOSS project, the code is out in the wild (unlike most commercial software) and it would be incumbent on the LLM to prove it wasn't trained on that software, or derivative software, to be clean. Or arguably any open-source software.

Another way to evaluate this would be to ask if the LLM can do the same thing with closed source software. If it can, I would call that a legal work-alike, for any code base. I'll be asking for my legal open-source copy of Windows, Adobe, etc. If it can't, it's somehow using the copyrighted open-source code.

Ubuntu has made some questionable decisions, and it feels like they aspire to be a large corporate focused OS like RedHat or Microsoft, so the Mint team wants a Plan B if Ubuntu jumps the shark.

I've been meaning to try the Debian based version, but the standard has been working fine.

No, it is a free speech issue. But it's likely not a 1st amendment issue. There seems to be a lot of confusion on this point, but they are not the same thing. Free speech is the concept that people have the right to speak their minds. This is infringed because there is a limited number of big media companies that control the conversation. The first amendment is a restriction on the government to not pass laws infringing on free speech. This is a prime example of a free speech issue in the private sector as big media companies are effectively the new town square, but on private property.

I have a PC with the latest Mint Cinnamon and it can have a few browser tabs open and uses about 2GB of RAM. Meanwhile, Windows 11 is a dog at 8GB of RAM because of all of the Microsoft and Dell bloatware.

Of course people who want a nostalgia "retro-classic" muscle car want a petrol V8. Detroit built the market through their advertising campaigns that pushed power and performance, and associated that with manhood. They've put decades of time a countless millions of dollars into it.

Detroit will have a hell of a time shifting their marketing message and an even worse time trying to compete with Asian imports on price.

Given those two likely paths to failure, their executives are taking the easy, quarterly profits focused path and pumping out V8 Mustangs and monster trucks. Don't sell short the effects of advertising on consumer tastes.

I don't see a huge problem IF, when you set up a new user on the family PC or a phone, you check a box that says the user is under age, and that boolean value gets passed along. I think this addresses the concerns of parents who want to protect their kids. Maybe you can put in a date when the flag is deactivated, and leave this up to the parents?

Will there be a way to get around it? Of course, but that's probably going to be true of any system that doesn't validate a government issued ID, and create huge privacy concerns.

I would venture that you, like me, formed that opinion in regard to the old not-for-profit internet. It's the commercialization and unbridled greed that destroyed that vision.

Make the fine for paying ransomware 3x any ransom paid. If a company is really set one paying the ransom, it will come with a much higher price, and use that money to fight cybercrime and protect infrastructure.

If you found a company -- any company -- not just in tech, you probably put in a lot more than 40 hours a week, especially for the first few years. But the founders also expect to reap large rewards for that hard work. They are "all in". The same is not true for the average employee. They don't stand to reap a large reward if the company is successful. They could get fired at any moment. It's unrealistic to ask for that much time and dedication without the same reward potential. Some companies do stock options that let employees share in potential gains, but that's not true for most employees.

Companies refuse, time and time again, to train employees in the skills they value, and shift blame back on employees.

They are trying to invent digital cocaine.

It's the hard-to-remove bloatware and background processes that make older PCs slow on Windows 11. A PC that worked reasonably well on Windows 7 with a HDD is painfully slow with Windows 11, for very little end-user benefit. I wish MS would release a bloatware-free SKU of Windows 11 that would run on Windows 7 hardware.

This. Most people have no respect for copyright anymore because of the ludicrous terms. The bargain that is copyright was protection for a relatively short time. If something really sparked my imagination as a child, I could write a derivative work as a young adult. Now it would be more like my great grand children.

A long time ago I read that around the time Linux was getting started, the BSD/UNIX wars were putting a legal cloud around any BSD derivative. IIRC, Linux started a year or two before FreeBSD. This gave Linux an early first-mover advantage, which proves to be quite important. I would also say the Linux had a bit more desktop/multi-media support, which helped adoption. FreeBSD also had low-cost competition from Wind River or something like that, that had a BSD derivative.

Oracle was just one more company to use Linux, to most people. It was Google, Amazon, Facebook, and many other internet 1.0 companies that were household names and "Tech-darlings" that gave it credibility and associated it with innovative start-up culture. Oracle was more of a me-too. Linux was a huge behind-the-scenes part of the internet boom.