No, it cannot.
They are confronting what is obvious, effective tools to undermine democracy with some weird experiment that is at best a niche effort to do online social engineering much more than it is social media.
Social media is a destructive force. By nature. Yes, Fedi as well.
You learn to manage in society, maybe. Like you do addiction and cancer and crime. The techno-optimism stuff is borderline delusional at this point.
Nah, they did it with Youtube videos.
But on the underlying point of “everybody is freaking out about AI things that good old big data had been doing for years with zero pushback” I very strongly agree.
For me it got particularly bad back when I was running Manjaro and the GUI package manager showed you multiple package types for the same software all the time. Three metronomes is bad, but three differently packaged versions of Steam is worse and potentially unrecoverable.
Gonna raise the notion that a good, usable piece of software would not require much, if any level of awareness on this front, since most users aren’t willing or able to have that awareness in the first place.
The way this should work is you click on things you want in a package manager and then those are present and available transparently whether you use them or not. That goes for all OSs.
Hell, even Android’s semi-automatic hybernating of unused apps is a step too close to my face, as far as I’m concerned.
I hate modern reporting.
So, ok, here we go, fact checking dot lemmy dot com.
Tihs one seems to come from Google’s 2025 environmental report, which the article mentions but does not link despite being publicly available. The message Google would like you to take here is that while their power consumption has increased significantly their emissions have not (key chart below).
I guess that’s what you get for trying to spin these things. You get spun right back.
Anyway, Google would also like you to know that:
“However, it’s important to note that our growing electricity needs aren’t solely driven by AI. The accelerating growth of Google Cloud, continued investments in Search, the expanding reach of YouTube, and more, have also contributed to this overall growth.”
This tracks. While power consumption seems to be speeding up a bit, it’s been climbing for a while pretty consistently. I don’t know of Google’s implication that less CO2-heavy power generation is enough to not have to care about it, but I also don’t really see a way to reverse this trend. Data centers are data centers, and whether they’re crunching AI numbers or running every spreadsheet in the world, a bunch of big companies are committed to continuing to own a disproportionate chunk of the computing power of the entire planet so they can sell it to you by the minute.
Cool.
But the pitch wasn’t “everything will be interoperable unless the company doesn’t mean it or wants to make money or we aren’t “morally aligned”, whatever that means”.
I don’t understand how you can be a “walled garden” and still feature interoperability with a set of open source platforms under a pre-established set protocol. This is not an ethical problem or a problem of ideology, those two things are mutually exclusive.
This also sounds a whole lot like it disproves skrlet13’s point on the heterogeneous Fedi where everything fits under different but overlapping bubbles. Seems to me you think Fedi has the one moral and ethical position on this.
Yeah, we’re almost there. If you buy a pre-packaged box with Home Assistant you’re most of the way there. If you look under the hood most commercial NAS options and even some routers are scraping that territory as well.
I think the way it needs to work to go mainstream is you buy some box that you plug in to your router and it just sets up a handful of (what looks to you) like web services you can access from anywhere. No more steps needed.
The biggest blockers right now are that everybody in that space is too worried giving you the appearance of control and customizability to go that hard towards end-user focus… and that for some reason we as a planet are still dragging our feet on easily accessible permanent addresses for average users and still relying on hacks and workarounds.
The tech is there, though. You could be selling home server alternatives to the could leaning into enshittification annoyance with the tech we have today. There’s just nobody trying to do an iServe because everybody is chasing that subscription money instead, and those who aren’t are FOSS nerds that want their home server stuff to look weird and custom and hard.
Yeah, that’s exactly where it comes from. And it fits just fine for people like you, doing it for a living. It’s just a bit obnoxious when us normies dabbling with what is now fairly approachable hobbyist home networking try to cosplay as that. I mean, come on, Brad, you’re not unwinding after work with more server stuff, you just have a Plex and a Pi-hole you mess around with while avoiding having actual face time with your family.
And that’s alright, by the way. I think part of why the nomenclature makes me snarky is that I actually think we’re on the cusp of this stuff being very doable by everybody at scale. People are still running small services in dedicated Raspberry Pis and buying proprietary NASs that can do a bunch of one-button self-hosting. If you gave it a good push you could start marketing self-contained home server boxes as a mainstream product, it’s just that the people doing that are more concerned with selling you a bunch of hard drives and the current batch of midcore users like me are more than happy to go on about their “homelab” and pretend they’re doing a lot more work than they actually are to keep their couple of docker containers running.
Yeah, well, don’t tell them. The fields of Mastodon are still full of the debris of the Great Threads Arguments. Seemed to me everybody thought they had the correct and only Fedi.
I am remarkably annoyed by this guy making predictions on measurable things that he then entirely vibe-checks.
I am more surprised than I should be at how quickly the Fedi pitch went from “we want a future where everything is interoperable everywhere” to “we don’t want any interaction with for profit companies”.
I don’t mind either way, it’s all bad and I shouldn’t be here in the first place, but… you know, it’s weird seeing social patterns develop in real time.
Yeeeeah, I have less of a problem for that, because… well yeah, people host stuff for you all the time, right? Any time you’re a client the host is someone else. Self-hosting makes some sense for services where you’re both the host and the client.
Technically you’re not self hosting anything for your family in that case, you’re just… hosting it, but I can live with it.
I do think this would all go down easier if we had a nice marketable name for it. I don’t know, power-internetting, or “the information superdriveway”. This was all easier in the 90s, I guess is what I’m accidentally saying.
This is a me thing and not related to this video specifically, but I absolutely hate that we’ve settled on “homelab” as a term for “I have software in some computer I expose to my home network”.
It makes sense if you are also a system administrator of an online service and you’re testing stuff before you deploy it, but a home server isn’t a “lab” for anything, it’s the final server you’re using and don’t plan to do anything else with. Your kitchen isn’t a “test kitchen” just because you’re serving food to your family.
Sorry, pet peeve over. The video is actually ok.
It is entirely possible that the entire construct of copyright just isn’t fit to regulate this and the “right to train” or to avoid training needs to be formulated separately.
The maximalist, knee-jerk assumption that all AI training is copying is feeding into the interests of, ironically, a bunch of AI companies. That doesn’t mean that actual authors and artists don’t have an interest in regulating this space.
The big takeaway, in my book, is copyright is finally broken beyond all usability. Let’s scrap it and start over with the media landscape we actually have, not the eighteenth century version of it.
Less bad, maybe?
Either way it’s definitely a good example of why you should write good emails to your customers that explain things properly.
If this is what they’re saying I’m assuming they didn’t want to be too clear about what info they’re storing if you don’t opt out and ended up making an email that sounds like a threat.
Either way I won’t be using Gemini as an assistant any time soon. Or any other voice assistant, for that matter.
Right. They have an opt-out for Gemini storing your in-app activity, which I believe is a requirement to get the assistant to be able to do things in the app. This seems to say you may be able to interact with some messaging apps even if you opt out (presumably they would have a rebuilt way to interact with those that doesn’t store any of your data?).
So there’s an opt-out.
The article seems concerned that the email announcing this doesn’t include a specific path to the opt-out right in the email (which is a weird concern, considering the email provides two links to… presumably that information)?
I’m not sure what this means, either, but it seems the “whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off” line is saying that you can still have Gemini send texts for you even if you disable Google storing your apps usage server-side? I don’t use Gemini as an assistant, so I’m not sure, but looking at the Gemini settings menu on my Android phone that’s what it seems to map to.
And maybe I could get to some more in-depth solution that sorts it out, but that’s me spending time on a problem that a) I shouldn’t have to, and b) I have a functional workaround for already.
Communal troubleshooting is the nature of Linux desktop, but also a massive problem. You shouldn’t need communal troubleshooting in the first place. It’s not a stand-in for proper UX, hardware compatibility or reliable implementation. If the goal is for more people to migrate to Linux the community needs to get over the assumption that troubleshooting is a valid answer to these types of issues.
Which is not to say the community shouldn’t be helpful, but there’s this tendency to aggressively troubleshoot at people complaining about issues and limitations and then to snark at people actively asking for help troubleshooting for not reading documentation or not providing thorough enough logs and information. I find that obnoxious, admittedly because it’s been decades, so I may be on a hair trigger for it at this point.
The other option is to just use Windows, which is the issue with these types of hardware incompatibility. I also have an ASUS laptop that won’t use their slightly weird speakers correctly and, again, that whole thing makes it much less practical to boot into Linux instead.
It’s telling the guy went “what did Brave do now?”, though.
Maybe telling that we have a couple meme opinions in our head for these recurring arguments and we don’t particularly consider anything else, but telling nonetheless.