Sigh... Now - let me pour a bit more gasoline into this small fire, shall I? 😅

Quoting: JohnologueI don't mind it, but I also don't use Ubuntu. Honestly, the thing that put me off most in all of this was the mention of Snaps, since I've followed the seemingly popular opinion that they're Flatpaks with a vendor-locked store, etc. I am more averse to Snaps than open source, open weight, carefully-used AI.

Snaps did not come out of nowhere, you know...
Canonical needed some kind of containerization tech in order to manage apps on their then brand new & shiny Ubuntu Touch phones. It was called Clickable. And it was designed and ready to use already before 2013 - when Ubuntu Touch phones were released. "Non-mobile" version arrived later on to Ubuntu Core in a form of snaps in 2014...

So for Flatpacks - it seems to me that this is yet another technology, where Canonical was an acting technological trailblazer at the time and spawned a functional, real world tech which somebody else (looking at you, RedHat, yet again...😡) had to copy, because it worked and was cool....

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: Cat_fanIMO there are only three features using LLM which should be installed by default (on a desktop setup): LLM based text-to-speech, LLM based speech-to-text/voice commands and image description tied to tts.

And only the two first features should be active by default and opt-out with the first page of the installer asking if you want to keep them active or not. And the third features being opt-in with no model pre-uploaded (but uploading a local model being easy).

Because they are accessibility features.

You say that but there is one little problem. Where should they run? If it's an online service it shouldn't and can't be on by default. And if it's run locally, it'll take quite a bit of power to do so and the "accessibility" of it becomes a lot less. I which case a more targeted and less brute force solution might be preferable.

Well if you happen to posses more recent hardware (which also will be more are more prevalent and standard in the future) you will necessarily have either NPU or some similar possibility of hardware accelerating a LLM. In that case I believe it might not be such a big deal performance-wise...

View this comment - View article - View full comments

If it is used reasonably then I do not care too much...

(I'd really love to have e.g. a search feature through my huge picture archives. Or translation. I guess TTS and STT would be great too...)

Although I do see huge issues with how, for what and mainly by whom the AI is being used these days - and some huge negative questions and implications attached nobody has an answer for - there are some interesting and really useful usecases...

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Ummm..... I still need to finish both of the "new" SystemShocks, before I delve myself into another sci-fi horror... 😬

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: shadowofwardThe last time i tried gnome i couldn't even make a short cut on the desktop has this been changed?

Oh... And suddenly, just like that, we have all forgotten, that there are GNOME Extensions and we can "extend" the functionality any way we like... 🤔
Like e.g. add the icons back to the desktop... 😁

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Ah...
Love this beautiful and simulated universe 😊

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: amatai

Quoting: TevurI never tried Call to Power II, though. Is it still worth to invest some time into it?

The game was released before its development was over and it shows. The game then somehow went open source and the community finished it but last I tried 10 years ago I did not manage to compile it for Linux. It may be easier now.

It is actually not necessary to compile anything (although that might depend on Linux type you are using).
Just search for `Call to Power II download` and go to CivFanatics site....

Also there is official CivCtP2 project on github...

There might be also other/different sources of donwloads 😊

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Oooohh...
For me, CtP is THE best Civ ever made: There are so many amazing game concepts which totaly ouclass basically anything ever implemented on any of SM Civs, that any SM Civ I played was just too boring for me (maybe with the exception of Civ V). 🤔

A great classic (and CtP 2 too).❤️

View this comment - View article - View full comments

"ASUS Linux"? 🤔

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: ShadowXeldronThe rest of that looks fine... but doesn't AI actively reduce developer efficiency and code quality?

It depends heavily on how you use it and what for....
I guess majority of the market has no idea yet how and where to use it properly. That is because the technology itself is just not there yet; it cannot be used for 'anything' en masse; it makes sense for certain select tasks only...

View this comment - View article - View full comments