We’re not talking about firing up chat gpt in a web browser here. Microsoft is installing “agentic AI” on windows machines regardless of whether or not customers want it. They don’t have a say in the matter except the more tech savvy of them who will find ways to edge around the restrictions on how long you can delay downloads or whether or not certain features get downloaded at all.

Saying otherwise (that it’s just consumers deciding to use this “feature”) is as disingenuous as your first bad analogy about the lock. Especially since you haven’t explained what function this AI performs. The lock performs a singular function adequately enough for the risk involved for most people. And it does it passively. The AI is not the same no matter how often or how hard you try to shoehorn it into your silly analogy.

You explained your doubling and tripling down quite adequately when you said you work in AI. It would be helpful to this conversation if you could stop drinking the flavorade for five minutes and just think about the fact that people don’t want this and Microsoft is saying that they know it’s problematic but they are forcing it on people anyway.

This conversation is over though because you want to be right more than you want to be logical and correct and so now you are neither. Have a nice life.

To be fair (even though I also am both happy and relieved to see articles like this), just because you convert to Linux, that doesn’t mean everyone else will. I have used so many guides to help debloat windows computers, and turn off nonsense I don’t want (mostly so I can use proprietary software for work). My choice to not use windows in my personal life on my personal devices doesn’t really change my situation with needing those guides to help others circumvent windows BS.

I wish we didn’t have to live in interesting times and all that, but the guides are helpful.

It technically shouldn’t happen unless you don’t create a separate EFI partition for your Linux install.

It is generally recommended that you create a separate EFI partition for Linux specifically so that windows cannot mess with your Linux install when it updates.

I could see a bios update having some affect though.

But it can let in a burglar who can find your credit card inside and do the same. And why are you giving AI access to your CC#? You’d better post it here in a reply so I can keep it safe for you.

You aren’t giving your door lock access to your credit card information. And it didn’t “let the burglar in” so much as it has a failure ceiling. Meaning that there is more of a chance that a burglar can get in than zero, but less of a chance than if you didn’t have a lock at all. An outside party is circumventing the protections you put into place to protect your credit card number. Or perhaps (possibly) you are circumventing it by accident by leaving the door lock unlocked.

However, in both those cases, the door lock is not doing anything of its own volition, and won’t be doing that outside your control. The AI LLM is doing stuff both of its own volition (perhaps within parameters you set, but more likely outside of parameters you set, but within parameters the company that makes it set and only that to a degree).

You don’t do any banking except in person? Any shopping except in person with cash? Because that’s what you’re suggesting when you say things like “why are you giving it access to your credit card”.

Microsoft is suggesting that they will run “Agentic AI” on the windows 11 computers of hundreds of millions of peoples personal devices in the background without their direct input, and that this AI may download malware or be a threat vector that malicious apps, services, etc can take advantage of. But they’re going to do it anyway.

Microsoft is not installing door locks in my house, and if they tried I’d kindly escort them off the property, by force if necessary.

The negligence lies in marketing a product without considering the implications of what it can do in scenarios that would make it a danger to the public.

No company is supposed to be allowed to endanger the public without accepting due responsibility, and all companies are expected to mitigate public endangerment risks through safeguards.

“We didn’t know it could do that, but we’re fixing it now” doesn’t absolve them of liability for what happened before because they lacked foresight, did no preliminary testing, and or planning to mitigate their liability. And I’m sure that sounds heartless. But companies do this all the time.

It’s why we have warning labels and don’t sell specific chemicals in bulk without a license, or to children etc. it’s why, even if you had the money, you can’t just go buy 20 tonnes of fertilizer without the proper documentation and licenses, as well as an acceptable use case for 20 tonnes.

The changes they have made don’t protect Monsanto from litigation for the deaths their products caused in the before times. The only difference there is that there was proof they had knowledge of the detrimental affects of those products and didn’t disclose them.

So I suppose we’ll see.

I like your username, and generally even agree with you up to a point.

But I think the problem is there are a lot of mentally unwell people out there who are isolated and using this tool (with no safeguards) to interact with socially as a sort of human stand in.

If a human actually agrees that you should kill yourself and talks you into doing it, they are complicit and can be held accountable.

Because chatbots are being… Billed as a product that passes the Turing test, I can understand why people would want the companies that own them to be held accountable.

These companies won’t let you look up how to make a bomb on their LLM, but they’ll let people confide suicidal ideation and not put in any safeguards for that, and because they’re designed to be agreeable, the LLM will agree with a person who tells it they think they should be dead.

This is just a poor analogy.

A door lock can’t buy up Amazon’s entire stock of tide pods on my credit card.

A door lock can’t turn on someone’s iot oven while they’re out of town.

A door lock can’t publish every email some journalist has ever received to xitter.

A mechanical door lock doesn’t hallucinate extra fingers, and draw them into all the family photos saved on a person’s hard drive.

This comment has Bender “oh you’re serious” energy and I love that about it.

My experience was pretty simple. But you will have to make some decisions.

If you just want to blanket install Linux over whatever you run currently (and wipe out windows or whatever), that’s honestly the easiest way in my opinion.

You don’t need things like gparted or other utilities to partition drives or anything. You burn a bootable USB stick with the Linux distro of your choice, go into bios and select it as the boot media, and go through the prompts to install once it boots.

This has been my experience with bazzite on both a handheld and an older windows desktop PC.

There are so many helpful guides out there.

Your use case will determine a lot of things. If you just need a PC for media watching and web surfing, out of the box, simple immutable Linux distros will likely give you what you want.

If your needs are more complex (video/photo editing, sound production, CAD, or something) you’ll need to research what distro fits your needs.

https://vger.to/feddit.org/post/21797858

Good news, everyone!

By asking them to verify their age via selfie. We live in the worst time line.

This is one of the things that smart phones have done for me.

I may not remember I wrote it down, but I will remember where because it’s in the notes app on my smart phone.

That being said, this obviously still doesn’t really solve anything if I don’t even remember there was something to be written down.

And it creates a brand new problem if I do remember because then I get caught up scrolling through notes trying to figure out what they mean, if I still need them, and lamenting that I didn’t remember to check notes for these other things back then.

Technically not. But only technically. The only reason to allow side loading at all is to allow “experienced users” to put unverified apps on their devices. Otherwise it doesn’t make much sense to even make such a concession.

It looks like they’re going to have two different solutions: one for power users and one for hobbyists and students.

My main problem with this is twofold. They explain exactly nothing about how they achieve “experienced user sideloading”, they don’t explain what an “experienced user” is, and they don’t explain in any detail whether or not they’re going to allow sideloaded apps to be unverified.

The other part of the problem is that I don’t trust Google. There’s way too many instances of them backing down publicly from a decision they made and then implementing it in a different way over time.

The truth is this announcement doesn’t give us any details so all we can make are assumptions.

Exactly. Valve created SteamOS, so it’s weird that they’re having so much trouble porting it to other hardware while other, volunteer-led communities are having no such problems.

Here’s the thing. You haven’t provided anything (except time) to show that Valve are struggling with porting Steam OS to other hardware. You keep saying that they are (even when it has been explained that Steam OS is part and parcel of their physical hardware, and therefore a product that is currently being paid for), but you have nothing to show for it except that it wasn’t their main focus over time.

That doesn’t prove it’s not a priority of theirs. It just proves it’s not the very first priority on their list.

If you thought I was suggesting that we should give Valve more grace than the developers of Bazzite, I think perhaps you focused on the wrong part of what I was trying to explain.

When you consider just how many people (reviewers especially) have been heavily critical of how difficult Steam Os was for them to run on other hardware (this was after steam announced that it would be available on other handhelds, mind you), you can perhaps understand that steam didn’t start out trying to make their OS compatible with every hardware under the sun. Instead they started out making it work on one device (a device they were selling), and have now switched focus (since that device is successful) to making it run on other hardware.

But Bazzite started out making their software run on a couple of devices and then continued to add devices to that stable until it got where it is today because it already had a template in Steam OS, and because it had that particular focus from the start.

Even now, if you go to the Bazzite home page you’re met with a statement about who bazzite is for and that statement is still relatively limited in its scope. The number of devices that they provide guides for are growing all the time, but that was the point of Bazzite, wasn’t it?

And, for what it’s worth, Bazzite has the added benefit of the internet at large helping them. Valve is a company and their R&D isn’t handled by crowd source.

These two entities are working from separate and very different road maps.

I believe it’s device dependent, but on pixels:

“On Pixel 6 and later, including Fold: Press and hold the Power button + Volume up button for a few seconds.” Either way, glad you figured out what was wrong.

Can you boot into safe mode and try accessing it there?

Is it weird that a group of volunteers who aren’t charging for the privilege can and do implement a software skew across multiple different hardware, vs a company (who are charging for the privilege) to focus on one piece of hardware to get that working as good as they can for paying customers before moving on to allow their software on other hardware?

Because as you said yourself that’s the difference. Even if that’s not what you meant, that’s literally the difference here. When you are using the software volunteers made you are more willing to give them grace. When you are paying for a product, you are less likely to give a company grace (even if that company is one you like). Because when you pay for a product you expect it to be polished, usable, and generally with little to no flaws.

I’m sure you can and will argue that steam isn’t selling the OS. But the thing is, to a certain extent that’s exactly what they’re doing.

So in response to your question “what does your point have to do with steam OS vs bazzite”, I’ll ask you what this means:“how is it strange that they’re working so hard on this when bazzite/similar will run on anything”.

Because from my view of things there wouldn’t really be a bazzite without steam OS. Steam OS walked so Bazzite could run.

If your argument is that steam OS has flaws and bazzite doesn’t, then I think that’s probably not how I took it. Even if your argument is that both have flaws, that’s not how I took your initial comment.

On the steam deck, the hardware where steam OS launched initially, and where it has lived for the better part of almost 4 years, it’s a pretty polished thing. Steam OS focused first and foremost on making sure that it ran on that hardware because they are a business selling a physical piece of hardware coupled with an OS to provide an experience that people pay for.

When it officially started expanding to other handhelds, it obviously had some teething problems but all in all it’s still improving.

So if you think it’s not a priority, then I guess, but, at the end of the day what you mean is that it’s not their main priority and that’s not “weird”.

So what you’re saying is that you don’t think steam has any interest in providing compatibility across various hardware?

You brought up bazzite like it and steam OS are the exact same thing. So you tell me what it has to do with bazzite.

In steam on windows the devices onboard controller actually works as intended. I dual boot so I’ve tested this extensively.

Your experience of “almost never” and my experience of “happens sometimes” create a null, my friend. This is what is called anecdotal evidence.

None of that anecdotal evidence (yours or mine) actually undermines the main point which is that bazzite started out telling users to install their skew of fedora at their own risk on hardware they didn’t directly provide a guide for. And that’s part of the fun of Linux for some people.

But there are a lot of people who don’t do PC gaming full stop specifically because they don’t want to fiddle with anything, they just want to play a game, and steam is courting those people. That’s my point. They don’t want to give those people a bad experience, and they are spending time attempting to make their experience as clean and positive as possible.