On Ubuntu, I've purchased 3 different docking stations, and tried 2 existing ones, and none has worked quite right (some just flat out don't have all the drivers they need). The Windows laptop I have (which is extremely similar in hardware and generation), if you get a video signal out to a monitor, it's a very safe bet everything else works.

Back to "Practically Free" for old Dell docking stations. I acquired 3 of them for about 15-20 each shipped off eBay. lol At least I'm not sinking hundreds of dollars into each attempt at a docking station that may or may not work.

Then there is a third one which might be a hallucination (that one ironically appears to be me, and the other two are hallucinations).

> At this point I'm convinced that no matter how much or little Linux desktop is improved, its market share is solely dependent on how much Microsoft fucked up.

Lifelong Windows user here. If you could get the kind of driver support you have with Windows for just whatever the fuck you have lying around, I'd probably use my Ubuntu laptop as more of a daily driver.

I'm kind of surprised it hasn't happened already, but I guess there hasn't been enough unscrupulous LLM companies selling those "anonymous" chat logs yet.

That is never going to happen, lol. That's what Youtube was supposed to be, and the trend is to pay content creators less and less, while keeping them creating the same amount of content.

> It can be a place where every human publishes our daily content to our own websites for AI to pay us to access it and feed off of it.

Social media will still exist. People will want to share content with each other, and it has to live somewhere. Sure, a lot of the interactions with LLM's will go back into the training data, that's already happening. But people aren't going to stop publishing content - because what happens then when there's no more training data out there?

You can't train an AI model without updated repositories of information. There is a bit of a question on whether an AI agent should be the interface for those repositories. Today, that's a very expensive proposition, and probably a silly direction to go (at some point, cheaper ways of doing things are going to win out for some use cases).

> I see Trump saying he's going to be talking to AI companies about them providing Americans with stock.

And this is proof positive why it's a bad idea that will never gain traction.

I think he was actually saying that by calling it fiction, lol.

When you're trying to repair a Playstation motherboard, you gonna need some photos and text.

We have the biggest pile of disposable income (not per capita, but in total) of anywhere in the world. This enables people to sue when something is going on that they don't like, and once you start looking at things through this lens, lots of strange things start to make sense. For starters - a lot of the school-related controversies. Schools cave to many demands because they are afraid of being sued by monied parents, and you can see it with parents on both sides of the political spectrum.

You may also notice if you're in the US, consuming foreign content on Youtube that even non-English content has a tendency to put units in dollars, miles, pounds, etc. There's guides that talk about targeting the US lets you make the big money on Youtube.

And of course, the NIMBYism. People can slow down, raise the costs of or stop megaprojects entirely via flurries of lawsuits.

Money makes things happen or not happen. The town I went to college in was a wealthy town which had banned any kind of large structures to preserve the natural beauty of the town. But then all the wealthy residents got cell phones, and hated the cell coverage. The solution: A multi-million dollar bell tower which towered over the landscape, looking like a grand obelisk (and which tastefully concealed rather a lot of cell tower hardware).

My wife and I both would love for the voice assistants to do more. They just won't. Even with weather, anything more than "what's the weather like today" will usually not get a good result. "When will it rain today?" gets OK responses.

As soon as I figure out how to put a decent GPU into my old rack server(s), I'll see how far I can get with HomeAssistant. I suspect it'll be some effort, but it'll be better at the end of the day.

I've seen people on social media seriously claiming that coal plants are cleaner than wind energy or solar energy. It's aggravating. Never mind that it's easy to show that for the same amount of energy output, you get a similar amount of tons of coal ash yearly to the amount of materials it went into building a wind or solar plant...

I go back and forth if they are bots, or somehow people who are just really susceptible to this kind of garbage shill clickbait.

Hand wringing about AI datacenter's environmental impact is well and good. We should keep the data centers accountable for their consumption and waste.

I just wish the same people had been upset the last 20 years with poor water resource management in a lot of areas (the west US especially) with urban, ranching and farming development.

> That's true, and I am not anti-AI.

Me neither!