There is no progression up a ladder in evolution, not towards sophistication nor complexity.
Every single species alive on earth comes from a genetic lineage precisely as old and thus “evolved” as we do. Species can shed complexity and capabilities from evolutionary pressures just as much they can gain them.
I know this is a meme but framings subconciously slip into our ways of thinking like this very easily.
Video games, especially ones that fully engage and inspire you, are utterly unlike mindlessly scrolling for your brain.
Agreed, it is a great example of how painfully naive tech people can be.
It is hilarious that people don’t think AI ads are going to be astronomically worse than search engine ads, and you won’t be able to adblock them either.
In any case, if you trust Oracle and OpenAI, this is what you are believing:
The AI compute industry will grow by, at the very least, 500% by 2030, to over $200 billion in annual revenue, and almost all of that growth will come from one company: OpenAI.
That Oracle can successfully complete the data centers in question, and that said data centers will be operational in time to provide that compute.
That OpenAI — a company with no plan for profitability — will be able to afford three hundred billion dollars spread over 2027, 2028, 2029, and 2030.
Oracle will, at this point, become a dominant player in cloud compute, with $144 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue, and it will do so mostly from one customer.
Oracle’s cloud infrastructure revenue will increase by 700% — from $18 billion in FY2026 to $144 billion in FY2030. This represents a growth rate of 68.2% a year, again from one customer.
Oracle will, by FY2028, be making more in cloud infrastructure (it projects to make $73 billion) than all of Google Cloud did in 2024 ($43 billion). And it’ll make it from one customer.
That Oracle has more incoming revenue than Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, and will be making almost the entirety of that from one god damn customer.
I would recommend syncthing and plain text files organized in a simple clear file structure.
I would alternatively recommend Logseq, Obsidian or Joplin but the issue is file syncing/file share.
Actually Cryptpad!
I recommend using a general tool in a simple way rather than look for a specific niche tool in this case but that is just me.
Unfortunately not understanding or being sufficiently motivated by the threat of corporate social media is still prevalent among a good amount of lefties I know, but I find even when they are uninterested in leaving corporate social media they can at least understand the logic behind it in a way a lot of techy type people start to just get combatitive when you try to explain.
Most often when I have a conversation about this with someone who is very technically well versed with computers and the types of systems that are relevant to federated social media their response is to answer every one of my broader ethical questions by changing the topic to a conversation about technical details and they either utterly miss the point or outright refuse to have a discussion about it because they think I am being too cynical.
Ultimately these people only have one real argument which is to just repeat the mantra “stop being so negative, lets just wait and see before we jump to conclusions” endlessly about the same cycle of bullshit repeating over and over again.
Intelligence and expertise is worth pursuing for the benefit that comes from learning for the sake of learning, but it is true that there is a danger to knowing more and more about a very narrow subject in that it becomes more and more seductive to believe that the thing you are an expert in is a key to understanding everything else and that this gives you a righteous vantage to look down upon the genius of others and judge from afar.
Some of the smartest people there has ever been or likely will ever be throughout history have time and time again completely undermined their potential by falling prey to this delusional drug of a belief.
So what are the “two” sides here then?
Because silicon valley thinks it can define reality however it wants and keep telling us not to believe our lying eyes.
Weirdly this seems to work better on techy people who don’t like thinking about politics but understand the technical details of this extremely well than it does on normie progressives because progressives just see the obvious predatory reality and don’t get distracted in minutiae connected to very obviously empty promises.
The tech press does not ever talk to progressives though…
Stephen Miller is a nazi, he doesn’t give a shit about health except as a narrative device to create permission for more authoritarian violence.
No, GIMP got really good recently!
GIMP is the ultimate behemoth presence lurking below in the deepest extent of Linux it seems.
Yeah then I think it is a no-brainer thing for you to get the Steam Deck, the only situation I see someone like you being truly disappointed in your Steam Deck is if they REALLLLY wanted to play more graphically intensive games and the Steam Deck just couldn’t quite cut it. If you already own a gaming computer worst comes to worst you sit there and think “damn, I will have to play this once I get my hands on my desktop gaming rig again!” and move onto another game in your library.
Another note in the Steam Deck’s favor for gaming, the suspend feature where if you press the power button the Steam Deck instantly sleeps is incredibly useful for jumping in and out of games. Even if you don’t hit pause the way the Steam Deck runs games the environment the game is running in is paused when you press the power button… so you can jump in and out of games really easy that weren’t necessarily designed to be rapidly started and stopped.
I would recommend getting a dock so you can use a keyboard and mouse sitting at a desk with a larger monitor when needed. Bonus points you can use the steam deck dock for splitscreen local gaming hangouts with friends, normal ass bluetooth gamepads usually work fine connecting to the Steam Deck (xbox controllers are great) and with the dock you can bring a backpack with everything you need to set up awesome indie splitscreen gaming sessions. It is a blast and the Steam Deck is underappreciated in this realm especially given how many good indie local splitscreen games there are out there.
Yeah the Logitech k780 is a bit bulky, but it is by far my favorite keyboard ever. It isn’t a mechanical keyboard but the keys feel AWESOME (and yet are still nice and quiet unlike most mechanical keyboards) and I really like the typewriter-like circular keys.
The phone holder is amazing. I cannot live without it now lol.
Also, heck yes! I love hyping people up on the Steam Deck because even if you purchase one impulsively they are just so useful and flexible as fun handheld computers that you will find uses for it for years to come.
Do it!!!
I love my steam deck and regularly run all sorts of non-gaming software on it like Blender, QGIS, emacs, logseq, Kdenlive, Inkscape, Gimp etc…
You just gotta find a keyboard you like, for me it is the Logitech K780 because it is a large keyboard with superb feeling keys and an awesome built in stand for a phone so you can switch between using the keyboard for different devices quickly.
The Steam Deck definitely isn’t insanely powerful, if you are going to lean on it as your main gaming device you have to understand that but if you aren’t someone that needs the latest and greatest graphics on all the most processing heavy new AAA games, the Steam Deck’s advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.
The simple fact is that because the Steam Deck is handheld you end up using it far more than you would a non-handheld device (or even laptop) simply because it is comfortable to do so in more situations, and this fundamentally is the reason I think the Steam Deck is such a good buy. You will use the shit out of it in a ton of different contexts you don’t even expect going into getting the device.
A slight annoying thing is that people are still getting used to what a Steam Deck is, most people really have a hard time understanding they are looking at a general computing device not a disposable recreational toy like a Nintendo Switch. People act oddly about it because they weren’t told this was the future by massive corporations and that makes people confused and almost…uncomfortable? If you use your Steam Deck for a presentation or to demonstate something to someone else they will barely listen because they will just still be staring at it going “wait… so that is a… computer…? Like a laptop computer not a Nintendo Switch? Why though?”.
My point is about the conceptual framing of a ladder leading to a narrow frame of view about evolution, not that this particular meme is portraying itself literally as an evolutionary ladder.