utopiah

Read few months ago, warmly recommended. Basically on self selection bias and sharing "impressive" results while ignoring whatever does not work... then claiming it's just the "beginning".

I haven't seriously read the article for now unfortunately (deadline tomorrow) but if there is one thing that I believe is reliable, it's computational complexity. It's one thing to be creative, ingenious, find new algorithms and build very efficient processors and datacenters to make things extremely efficient, letting us computer things increasingly complex. It's another though to "break" free of complexity. It's just, as far as we currently know, is impossible. What is counter intuitive is that seemingly "simple" behaviors scale terribly, in the sense that one can compute few iterations alone, or with a computer, or with a very powerful set of computers... or with every single existing computers... only to realize that the next iteration of that well understood problem would still NOT be solvable with every computer (even quantum ones) ever made or that could be made based on resources available in say our solar system.

So... yes, it is a "stretch", maybe even counter intuitive, to go as far as saying it is not and NEVER will be possible to realize AGI, but that's what their paper claims. It's a least interesting precisely because it goes against the trend we hear CONSTANTLY pretty much everywhere else.

It's a classic BigTech marketing trick. They are the only one able to build "it" and it doesn't matter if we like "it" or not because "it" is coming.

I believed in this BS for longer than I care to admit. I though "Oh yes, that's progress" so of course it will come, it must come. It's also very complex so nobody else but such large entities with so much resources can do it.

Then... you start to encounter more and more vaporware. Grandiose announcement and when you try the result you can't help but be disappointed. You compare what was promised with the result, think it's cool, kind of, shrug, and move on with your day. It happens again, and again. Sometimes you see something really impressive, you dig and realize it's a partnership with a startup or a university doing the actual research. The more time passes, the more you realize that all BigTech do it, across technologies. You also realize that your artist friend did something just as cool and as open-source. Their version does not look polished but it works. You find a KickStarter about a product that is genuinely novel (say Oculus DK1) and has no link (initially) with BigTech...

You finally realize, year after year, you have been brain washed to believe only BigTech can do it. It's false. It's self serving BS to both prevent you from building and depend on them.

You can build, we can build and we can build better.

Can we build AGI? Maybe. Can they build AGI? They sure want us to believe it but they have lied through their teeth before so until they do deliver, they can NOT.

TL;DR: BigTech is not as powerful as they claim to be and they benefit from the hype, in this AI hype cycle and otherwise. They can't be trusted.

DIY is difficult

Well, arguably it's difficult at first then become much easier BUT I understand one might not want to dedicate time to it. There are solutions though to buy hardware that is open hardware and with open-source firmware. I personally do NOT recommend reverse engineering except for the pursuit of knowledge. I do NOT recommend RE for "liberating" products because even though it is amazing, it is adversarial. The companies are making money still while NOT supporting Linux or even preventing it from being supported by the community without them spending a cent. That's fine, that's their strategy. I don't approve of it but from a business standpoint I can understand it.

What I do recommend though is spending few minutes looking for proper alternatives. I clarified that a bit in another thread about inputs, cf https://lemmy.world/comment/12550034 so please consider having a look.

TL;DR: DIY/RE can be too much work but there are open hardware with open-source firmware projects sold on e.g https://crowdsupply.com which are "just" plug&play.

Tool lazy to read it all with existing comments but still want to help so :

Recommendations for Notepad++ replacement

vim/gvim (and derivatives, e.g. neovim) or emacs or derivatives, if you are serious about text editing, being text or otherwise, they are the foundations. They probably include most of what you need out of the box and if not they do and a lot more through their extensions

I have an iPhone, I like to back it up and sync

You are swimming upstream there. Apple is doing everything it legally and technically can to lock up its own ecosystem. You might managed few things with e.g libimobiledevice/ifuse or ish or even KDE Connect

I do some gaming.

Me too, playing both 2D and XR on a nearly daily basis. It works. Sadly, just like the previous answer some are trying to sabotage anything they can via DRM or "anticheat" and this might screw up your experience entirely. A good heuristic is if works on the SteamDeck (cf ProtonDB) it probably works on Linux.

How do Xbox One controllers work wired with Linux?

They work. I don't have an Xbox controller but SteelSeries ones and I play near daily on them, either with their dongle or via BT, with Steam or anything else.

Recommendations for GUI mpv frontend?

VLC

I use software called AdvancedRenamer.

As suggested in the first answer, learn Bash or any other CLI environment, it's made for this kind of tasks and is the de facto standard for literally.

Keyboard shortcuts.

They work. If you need more it takes second with your desktop environment, e.g KDE Plasma for me, to add new ones.

I don’t understand Linux distro segmentation especially when it comes to software availability

That's the "cost" of freedom. You do whatever you want with your computer. It sounds trivial but it's not. We have been trained for years if not decades to see someone else get to decide for us. It's false. It's amazing. It is also daunting. Now YOU get to decide. You can use you distribution package manager or a binary or... anything in between (AppImage, AM, dbin, cloning a repository and building from source, etc). It's crazy... but it works so it's up to you.

Last but not least. I’m looking for suggestions for a Linux distro to use that fits my needs.

Who cares, picks any one BUT keep your data safe! Try it for an hour, a day, a week and try another one if you feel like it. Switch whenever YOU want for whatever reason YOU care. Cf previous answer.

They already sell the Pinetab RISC-V so quite feasible. I'm not sure I'd buy one as I already have a Banana-Pi (SpacemiT K1 8 so not exactly "next-gen") so my next purchase on that would probably be something that would be relatively powerful enough to "forget" it's not ARM/AMD64 for daily usage (which we might not be very far from, not really sure).

Very cool, sincere thank you for the clarification and even on-boarding process. Installed this way, feels quite efficient. Will dig a big deeper while using them more.

We need a complete CoreBoot + OSS silicon-chips + OSS firmware + all-community / all-commercial dual production lines.

Where are the gaps?

Both global and EU store still sell things. They are still active on social media. I have plenty of their products (PinePhone with keyboard case, PinePhone Pro with LoRA add-on, Pinecil, PineTab2, PineNote, PineTime) which I use often, some on a daily basis, other weekly basis. They just work. As others have pointers out they don't do software, "just" hardware with some community fostering. If tomorrow they announce another product (not sure what that could be as, simply by listing now they are covering already a LOT) and if I need it, I would buy it without much hesitation.

Now I imagine if they don't have anything new they don't announce much, which is reasonable. They might not need the "buzz" as long as they manage the sales in their pipelines.

I would honestly like to see more products but arguably they already have good coverage. Let me ask you then, what do you wish they would add to their existing product line?

Now you can finally relax and enjoy repaying your $100K+ loan!

Ah! Wonderful. I'm always a bit reluctant with system-wide install so I'll put AM on hold for now but probably tinker with AppMan/dbin soon.

Out of curiosity, one of the app I'd usually get outside my package manager is Chromium. I'd usually download the latest build from https://download-chromium.appspot.com/ so in this situation, how would you do it using any of those solutions? Would it support adding extensions e.g https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/immersive-web-emulator/cgffilbpcibhmcfbgggfhfolhkfbhmik that I need for development?

PS: note to self, go through bash history to see which failed apt install attempts could be replaced with such tools.

Agreed, cf https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-vs-nvidia-which-more-popular-linux and I do hope to have the choice soon.