Yeah dunno, some of those bigger half-year updates broke it. And there’s never any helpful error messages. Already solved it, though. I just don’t print from Windows anymore 😆 It’s like the second time this happened and the printer before also stopped being supported in modern Windows, and honestly I can’t be bothered to poke at thinks for 2h again. A computer should just work and keep working, and not mess with the printer drivers every year, mess with the boot order and all that stuff I have to fix on a regular basis.

Haha, tell that to my broken printer drivers.

You a bot stuck in some post - delete - post again loop?

I think the boot splash is done by a software called Plymouth. At least that used to be the case when I last had a boot splash: https://wiki.debian.org/plymouth

As for the login greeter… That could have a bunch of different reasons. Maybe you have a typo in the config. Maybe the picture has the wrong format. Or the file system permissions are wrong hence it can’t be loaded?!

As some general advice: If you don’t know the specifics, just go with your Linux distribution’s defaults. They probably have this figured out for you. Wayland is the more modern approach. We had a long transitioning period and some things didn’t work for a while or were missing. I’d say it’s ready by now. And if your distro maintainers also think it’s time to supersede the old X server, it probably is.

Yeah I mean hypothetically… A lot of things are possible. It’s just always the question whether they’re part of reality.

And I need some way how to handle things. For example I’m fairly sure the apple tree and the lawn in my backyard are alive. I sometimes use sharp rotating knifes to cut down the lawn. I’ll also cut parts off of the tree, eat it’s fruits… Does it have an effect on those living organisms? Sure. They even react to their surroundings, the seasons, dryness. The tree reacts to branches being removed. But for some reason we think it’s alright to mess with them. But for some reasons we don’t think it’s okay to cut off limbs off of the bird that sometimes sits on the tree… There seems to be some differentiating factor(s), even amongst living entities.

Well, to be realistic, you probably don’t know whether your dreams have stakes if you can’t remember them?! I sometimes remember my dreams for a while. And the emotions feel completely realistic to me. Sometimes it affects my body and I’ll wake up from the emotions associated with a nightmare. Sometimes my wife pokes me because my legs move. I can’t remember most of them. Maybe one every other week, and just for a brief period. But I’d say they’re very realistic. I’ll also have positive dreams, or process what I experienced the time before and the dream will take action in the consequences of that. And the process dreaming is a part of, definitely changes my state. Before, I’m tired and depleted of energy, and after that I (hopefully) changed to being not tired and full of energy again. (At least after a decent amount of coffee.) But it definitely has an effect on me.

I recently saw some documentary about a woman with a 7 second memory. And I’d say experiencing things and having a memory, or experiencing things and not being able to remember them are two entirely different pair of shoes. She scribbles everything down to grab on to it and make it mean something. And if she reads it later, she has no recollection if it happening to her, nor any attached emotions. I’d say experiences without memory are a bit like having a J.R.R. Tolkien book in your bookshelf, which you didn’t read. It’s full of memories, processed, real information of the author. But what does that mean to you since you didn’t read it? I mean Tolkien certainly did exist. We can tell. But other than that, I don’t think his existence translates to anything in you, unless it also has some kind of effect on you?!

Consciousness comes without any good scientific definition. We don’t really know what it’s supposed to be. So it’s hard to talk about it in a scientific way. We can make some assumptions and go with that. For example I can learn in context. Remember what happened and what I do in 3 minutes will factor that in. A bare LLM simply doesn’t have that, it only has its context and no further “state of mind”. It can’t learn or change. So I’d say if that’s a requirement for “consciousness”, LLMs won’t have it. And furthermore it doesn’t have goals like I do. I have some evolutionary drive / goals to feel happy, procreate, whatever… A LLM also has a goal. But that’s to predict the next token so it generates text close to its training data. That’s very dissimilar, so I don’t see any reason to postulate we’re similar in a way. I mean it doesn’t rule it out either. But It’d be a big surprise to me if that dissimilar things end up with the same attributes. I mean for all I know a stone or prime numbers could have a consciousness and it’s hidden somewhere in the sixth dimension. Heck, maybe even God exists. But I don’t see any reason to believe in those things unless there’s some proof for big (and weird) claims like those.

It’s mainly a category error. “experience”, “responsibility”, “careless”, “know” are all words for living, thinking entities. Sure, we like to antropomorphize AI. But at the end of the day there’s no “learning” or “experiencing” in this mathematical process. ChatGPT forgets everything the moment you close the chat because there’s nothing there to store what happened. It also doesn’t experience time or anything. Next time you open it, it’s again in exactly the same state as it always is. (They might tell it what time and date it is, though.)

AI also isn’t careless nor responsible. It’s a text generator. It just has one goal, and that is mimick human-like text. In a certain way. An we did some clever set-up so it prefers giving correct answers over giving wrong answers. But there’s no goal hardwired into AI like pleasing the user, or self-preservation. That’s just us anthropomorphizing it, because it generates text that sounds like it came from a human. Including all the story tropes.

It depends on what you’re trying to do on your computer. No command line is needed for web surfing, checking emails, writing office documents, playing games, watching videos… It’s not too dissimilar to Windows in that regard. Windows also has the command line and the power shell. You can use it if you like, but you don’t have to. There’s other tasks for which you need it, though. For example fixing your computer might involve the command line. Or software development.

And I’d say with a pug, even the aesthetics is highly questionable.

I feel that opinion is only unpopular with the people who bought a pug dog, and for some reason they don’t see how it can’t breathe properly. I always feel sorry for those creatures.

I think it’s basically that. There’s new commits in the conduit repo. But it’s like one minor thing each other month. While other projects have a lot if activity and added a ton of features and MSCs. At the same time they’re equally as stable and possibly easier to use. So… Why not use one of them? You’ll get more features, quicker fixes for annoyances in Matrix. And I always wondered why Matrix doesn’t come with threaded conversations by default. SSO/Authentication integrations. And clients which can do multiple accounts.

Bummer. Yeah I had issues with browser video playback myself. And both Firefox and Chromium-based browsers have so many hidden options, intransparent GPU blocklists… And then people do silly stuff and install third-party browsers which don’t come from the package repositories, so they haven’t been tuned for the specific distribution. And that adds yet another layer of complexity… Luckily it just works out of the box on my current laptop, and in the future I’m not going to install any Nvidia drivers on my machine, either. That has been just too many tweaks for my taste. Though I heard it got a bit better with them. Sorry to hear you can’t make it work. I don’t think watching YouTube should be as hard as it is for some people. (BTW, using Firefox has additional advantages, like a working ad blocker available as an addon, so I for example don’t have to watch any of the multiple 30s pre-roll ads on YouTube. On the downside, Firefox always sucked with graphics acceleration and it still does. Should be fine on Windows, though.)

Did you find out what’s causing this? I found some Reddit threads with people having similar issues with Brave and Chrome-based browsers…

Take care. Yeah, some things are really easy. But then at some point it always gets nasty, there’s a million details to learn and you can keep digging down pretty much forever 😆 If you’re at some time in the position to do it as a hobby, there’s ways to make it a bit less time consuming. We have some turnkey solutions. I sometimes recommend https://yunohost.org/ for people who just want to set up a server without dealing with all the low level stuff… But still, it’s an entire hobby.

If you don’t want to install anything, there’s also https://3d.kalidoface.com/ for the browser. And seems they shut it down but there was a 2D version as well: https://2d.kalidoface.com/ (both open source.)

And you might want to cross-check the OBS install instructions. I’m fairly sure it does game capture out of the box these days, so not sure if there’s a need to manually install plugins from source.

Screw electronics. I’ll finally get time to play my 100 board games, pen and paper roleplay games and all the stuff I currently don’t do, because I’m doomscrolling all day. And I might have to ask the neighbour to bring their accordion and sing some Lady Gaga for me until Spotify comes back online. I think I’d be fine.

Just a word of caution, It’ll be dark in the supermarket at that time. The electronic cash terminals cease to work and half the food is going to spoil within a few hours. So get some cash, rice, noodles, oil, ketchup and canned food. And you’ll need some sort of water supply.

Sure, sorry, you’re in the selfhosted community, so I sent some self hosted options 😆 If you own one of the internet/wifi routers with Wireguard built in (FritzBox, MikroTik, etc…) that might be an option as well. Other than that, I never tried any of the more commercial options, so I don’t know much about it.

Google and/or the Arch Wiki should have you covered. For my Dell laptop I just clicked on Settings->Battery and set it to “Preserver Battery Health”. Done.