I have tried to use Pinta at several independent points in time over the past 10+ years, and every time I have tried it, it has been so buggy as to be practically unusable.
It's a shame. It would be the perfect application for my basic image editing needs, if only I could actually rely on it to work.
These days, I just use Krita. It's on the heavier side, but functionally, it does what I need.
> Stand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization.
Students have been cheating and taking shortcuts on their work long before the current generation of AI tools existed (and probably for as long as graded exams have existed).
When you lower the barrier to taking the shortcut, you get more people to take it who wouldn’t otherwise have done so. If cheating becomes incredibly easy, lots of students who would have otherwise been honest take the easy way out. Moral conviction gets harder to keep as doing the right thing becomes less rational.
Doing the right thing never becomes less rational. It may suck compared to the temptation towards the alternative, but part of growing up and being responsible is realizing there is a reason the shortcut isn't supposed to be normalized.
And civilizations do fall. The bronze age civilizations did collapse. There was something dark about the dark ages. There is no law of nature which says that things will be okay, and plenty of examples where things have fallen apart.
Just to add to this, if AI is as epochal a change as its boosters say (and I am open to that argument), then surely it must have the potential for awful consequences, in proportion to its potential for good.
Interesting, the internet confirms that. I recall reading in a PC magazine that something was inofficial about it - maybe it was wrong, or I misunderstood or misremembered something.
I'd add the move from feature phones to smart phones and later tablets. Early adopters were getting them 2007/08, 5 years on from that the platform was well on its way to maturing and with a broader range of hardware and the software ecosystem was moving to target it too. Then there's the question of what form best suits the usage the tasks the netbook audience have, if you're doing the very basic browsing/comms tasks, why take a comparatively big slab when a 4-5" will do, and if you do need a portable PC why constrain yourself to a weak system, netbooks were in no-mans-land.
perhaps, but chromebooks still come in laptop sizes these days. Other than a few stragglers (e.g lenovo duet), the majority of chromebooks are 12-14 inches.
If you are chasing the form factor, macbooks are serious competitors with really good battery life and tactile feel.
The beauty of netbooks was that ~10 inch form factor. Really the perfect companion device without needing a special bag to carry.
In many ways netbooks were a over a decade too early, and came right before the mobile hardware computing boom.
Netbooks are still not feasibile today, modern web design has made smaller lower res displays completely unusable today.
Tech Companies are trying to push foldable phones and tablets into this niche - but there was always something nice about a keyboard.
I have user account on my personal Google Workspace domain that is used purely for superuser access (my day-to-day account doesn't have special access).
I recently had to log into it for the first time in a few years to make a config change to the domain, and it wouldn't let me in because the 2FA code wasn't working, and a recovery code wasn't sufficient to enable privileged access. I had to reach out to Google Workspace support to regain admin access to my domain.
Thankfully, they were able to do so (although it took a few days and I had prove ownership of it).
So there's an example of a situation where an account that's not logged into for a long time doesn't mean that it's forgotten or unused.
I can't speak for Firefox, but Google Chrome (and presumably anything Chromium-based) has working hardware-accelerated video on AMD and Intel GPUs.
It does admittedly take some effort to set up; I assume Google is hesitant to enable it by default because of issues with Nvidia GPUs. But when configured, it works and has for years.
> I work at Red Hat. Mostly on AArch64 support in several projects.
So an ARM developer, working for a major Linux distro vendor and trying to dogfood their work, used the closest thing to an ARM workstation that Linux can run on.
What other alternatives would you suggest? The various Apple Silicon or Snapdragon laptops that have their own well-documented problems running Linux? A smartphone running as a desktop?
There aren't very many ARM-based options that are even feasible for use as a developer desktop, even if the software did work correctly.
Apart from the obvious "well, don't do that then", I'd probably use an ARM-based ODroid for development work, and if I needed more horsepower, the ODroid as a front-end for said thing with more horsepower.
(I actually do development on ODroids, they're quite nice, if underpowered compared to the Intel/AMD equivalents).
> We used to do that too from the late 1930's to the late 1970's, which is why we were the dominant industrial power in the world at that time as well.
I think there's another world event that happened in that time span that might better explain America's world-wide industrial dominance.
> Europe was devastated and bankrupt. Asia was devastated and bankrupt.
Well yeah. Because America's world wide industrial dominance soundly beat the shit out of everyone, due to deployment of a highly successful industrial policy.
Imagine if we needed to rapidly step up industrial output tomorrow to fight another global war and China was on the other side. How do you think it would go?
> Because America's world wide industrial dominance soundly beat the shit out of everyone, due to deployment of a highly successful industrial policy.
That industrial dominance came largely during the war, and was made possible by the fact that they weren't being bombed while it scaled up.
There's a huge element of geopolitical luck involved in the rise of the US.
> Imagine if we needed to rapidly step up industrial output tomorrow to fight another global war and China was on the other side. How do you think it would go?
Horribly! I think they're much more prepared for such a thing.
Well then we agree, that their industrial policy is working a little better than ours. Which was the original point.
They don't let western businesses overwhelm their domestic industry at all. For us to let them do it to us would be unilateral disarmament and suicide.
No I don't understand your objection. My argument is that preserving domestic capacity is necessary for our survival, and that limiting imports is necessary but insufficient to achieve that goal.
Banning stock buybacks would be another helpful step. Can you imagine being at the helm of a major US automaker as the transition to electric is happening and thinking you have no better investment to make in your own company than literally taking the revenue you're earning and sending it to hedge funds and Wall Street?
You're wrong about protectionism though. It is an essential part of industrial policy and heavily employed by every industrial powerhouse country including Japan, China, Germany, and yes the US. China uses it extensively and it's a core pillar of why they are now the center of world industry.
The long running argument to the contrary is better understood as propaganda by the financial sector.
It's a shame. It would be the perfect application for my basic image editing needs, if only I could actually rely on it to work.
These days, I just use Krita. It's on the heavier side, but functionally, it does what I need.
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