This would be awesome. Imagine you would need to build excellent products, that advertise through word of mouth. And all that slot machines that only exist to force ads onto you would actually need to provide real value that people want to pay for.
how would you want to keep having free journalism without advertising? (and we all know where any democracy goes to die). historically nothing else worked at scale minus a few exceptions.
i think the sentiment against ads from the educated bubble really completely takes a working democracy for granted. spoiler: its not and look whats happening in the US... and the budget shift from openweb/newspapers towards video (mainly google) in the advertising industry is massive...
disclaimer: i work in adtech but we do not profile users and do not track them.
I don't know, but is "free journalism" actually good? If the incentives of free journalism (thanks to being ad funded) are to increase engagement and avoid criticizing their advertisers is the product actually journalism at all?
The press has largely depended on ads since the 17th century. The revenue from subscriptions and individual paper sales typically only covered about 20% of the costs.
The weak point of journalism has always been the larger-tier patrons. Can't report negative things if money-man says "no".
The advertising industry at large is at fault for our degradation in journalism.
Advertising needs clicks and eyes, the providers produce highly targeted profile algorithms to ensure maximum clicks and eyes, which degrades the information conveyed into the smallest, most enraging snippets possible. Those rise to the top as the most profitable ways to convey information, and continues the cycle, further destroying news that doesn't profit in this ecosystem.
Killing most forms of advertising across the board would of course basically destroy these large tech companies that rely on them. But the same companies have completely derailed society with their "services". We'd be better off without them.
Of course this would likely hurt "GDP" and "The Economy", but that would just mean we have an unproductive economy primarily inflated by a pointless circle of advertisement.
not sure if the ad industry per se can be blamed for the degradation of journalism. at least not in the way you imply. Newspapers used to have even more ads. i also don't see much higher quality in outlets that are financed by oligarchs etc...
what degraded the journalism in my view is consumer shift towards UGC and social media (which in turn is ad funded and drew away advertiser budgets, leaving the Journalistic outlets with low(er) quality ads).
but its a rather complex topic and possibly all views here are too simplistic
The idea of banning all ads sounds great, but legitimate content is paid for with ads. Ban tracking and targeted ads. It’s not a far stretch into cyberstalking, wiretapping, and other privacy laws.
There was 75 or more years of media ads that had no feedback except when very explicitly asking (Nielsen). Everyone was making money and doing just fine.
If content is truly legitimate, people will pay a fair price for it. If your business model collapses without ads, maybe you didn't deserve one to begin with
But how would you actually do it? Ban the exchange of money for delivering specific messages? I guess it could work. It would require judgement calls, but we have other laws that require even more subtle judgement calls.
I don't have a horse in the "is nicotine good/bad" race, but having lots of references and being argued to death isn't a proxy for being true. Gwern is a former wikipedia admin so peppering everything with references and going line by line, usenet style, to demolish someone's argument is his bread and butter. That just makes him an excellent rhetorician in the online community of people who relate to this argumentative style (typically people who read wikipedia a lot), not a source of truth. When it comes to fields I know a bit more about it's pretty easy to see through the irrelevant citation gish gallop.
Rust is fast, both at run and compile time (both important for the speed of the agent loop), its nazi compiler excludes many categories of errors that LLMs might make, the compiler's helpful error messages give precious hints for the agent to iterate upon, it's relatively new so not encumbered with half a century of legacy cruft with obsolete syntax, it has many modern first class features, it neatly compiles into a single portable executable. It's the language that's best positioned to mitigate the issues of LLMs while leveraging their (and its own) strength.
I don't disagree with your other points, but calling Rust fast at compile time is... questionable.
I've been doing Rust full time for the last half-decade and hobby before that, and its slow compile times have always been a pain point.
And I've found its slow cycle around compile-then-test is a real pain point with agentic development. Agents get into loops trying things out, and verifying their results, and they tend to accumulate a pile of tests on top of that (which require periodic cleanup). Forward progress often gets successively more slow and painful as compile times start to dominate most of what the agent is doing.
For application -- not systems dev work -- I've been considering making a move to using something like OCaml instead.
I also wonder if some deprecated practises and packages will linger in the training data for a long time. I remember the Python 2 to 3 transition. A lot of people parroted all kinds of outdated information on Python 3 and that made people hesitant to switch to Python 3.
I found it amusing I used to push Rust so many years ago not knowing that I’d eventually get everything I asked for. And especially not how it would happen.
Just like many open source maintainers lectured their unhappy users that their broken and featureless software was given for free and they should make PRs instead of complaining.
This is wrong. Training data is almost irrelevant because LLMs can apply cross-language semantic understanding. JS training data applies equally to JS, TS, C or Haskell.
Ukraine's admin life is extremely well digitized, moreso than most developed countries. You can do pretty much anything with the Dia app. Most amazingly it's a very recent development
A cursory look up of the dude very quickly turned up links with far-right terrorist and Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant, including receiving money from him, so I don't think it's the "opinion" that's the issue.
Replying to your edit: this is not a discussion about whether debanking or state control of the financial system is good or bad in general. I don't have a much opinion on such a complex topic (though I do hope that your principled opposition to state debanking also extends to muslims). What I replied to is your allegation of that he was debanked for his "opinions", which is categorically false. He was put on some sort of list, rightly or wrongly, because he had links with a far-right terrorist* who shot and killed dozens of people at a mosque. You omitting that fact and crying about authoritarianism when confronted leads me to think that you are not arguing in good faith.
*in the strictest definition of the word: openly subscribing (and self-describing) to far-right ideologies, and committing acts of terror
> though I do hope that your principled opposition to state debanking also extends to muslims).
Of course. With the restriction that Muslims in non-Muslim countries are not entitled to Islamic banking if no bank provides it, as well as non-Muslims in Muslim countries are not entitled to non-Islamic banking.
Back to Sellner. If he is a far-right terrorist, arrest him for God's sake. Don't leave it to banks to emulate justice in their own internal processes.
I don't have a horse in this race and didn't even know who this noname Austrian firebrand was prior to this discussion but the evidence is not exactly hard to find. By all means feel free to deny, shoot the messenger, call me names, etc. Won't change anything, people can just fact check stuff themselves
Not sure about the verbosity but that's probably where the useless and annoying claudisms come from, they are rewarded by (rationalist adjacent) users because they feel good about understanding the jargon and it reinforces the feeling of communicating with a superior alien intelligence (and that oneself is also somewhat superior for being able to understand it).
I'm speculating but there must be someone who writes a style guide for how Claude is supposed to speak then they design a way to reward for that style? So the problem could be they employ rationalist adjacent people who think this is peak A.I. design.
It's a mix of bad writing ability, contrived arguments (coming up with weird hypotheticals or simulating what an opponent would say), cargo-culting rationalist thought leaders (Yarvin, Scott, Yudkowsky, gwern) and the concealing of unsavory ideas.
There's also a culture of not knowing when to stop posting and touch grass - when all your friends are way too online and probably also rationalists and much of your identity and status is tied to online posting, you invest a lot in cultivating that social identity and signaling to your community, even to a degree that would look unhealthy to normies.
Obscurantism as a form of deliberate concealment is definitely a large part of it, and adds weight to the idea that rationalism is essentially a post-modern take on libertarianism.
Maybe it's time to grow up and download binary builds like a normal person. I had my 'let's compile the linux kernel from source for 3.5% hypothetical performance gains' phase but you can't expect professional devs to cater to source-obsessed hobbyists
I doubt this oft-repeated stereotype was every particularly accurate. I'm not aware of any current Gentoo users on the distro specifically for performance reasons. Gentoo users are in it for control over their system and customization.
> In the early days, there was much promotion of Gentoo as being “faster”, because you could compile everything based on your particular processor, etc. And you could increase the optimization level for a boost. Their web site still touts this as a reason to use Gentoo.
> In reality, the performance is more or less the same as on any other distribution. The folks who stick to Gentoo tend not to care about performance as much. Unfortunately, this perception of Gentoo remains, and I wish they would remove the verbiage from their site.
A friend of mine got me on Gentoo in 2004. He spent all of his time tweaking compiler flags like -O3 -ffast-math -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops and running into so many issues in the process. I think he only lasted about 9 months on Gentoo. To this day, he's the only person I've ever met that was there for performance.
Good timing! If memory serves, you missed the Big Libpng Upgrade that either got the concept of Package Slots into Portage or convinced everyone that they were a _really_ good feature to have and use where appropriate.
> In reality, the performance is more or less the same as on any other distribution.
It is now but in the 32-bit days there was a nontrivial boost form compiling for e.g. a Pentium 4 when most binary distros were still stuck targetting generic i586 or something old like that.
> Unfortunately, this perception of Gentoo remains, and I wish they would remove the verbiage from their site.
Based on what I can see after putting a minute or two into searching, that verbiage being referred to only appears on the About page. [0]
The distro's home page says
Welcome to Gentoo, a highly flexible, source-based Linux distribution.
and has used those words since at least January 2023 [1]. Its home page has spoken about flexibility and has not spoken about performance since the big redesign in April 2016... seven years prior to the publication of that guy's blog post. [2][3]
And -speaking as a Gentoo user since 2002- neither the user community nor the maintainer community hold the opinion that Ultimate Maxxximum Performance is the distro's goal. Trouble reports that come from "ricers" pretty much always get told "Set your compiler flags to something sane (try '-O2 -pipe' or '-O2 -pipe -march=native') and rebuild. If you can still repro the problem, file a new report because this one is getting closed INVALID.".
And -while the old Gentoo Wiki burned down so I can't prove it- [4] the advice about GCC optimization in the wiki has always cautioned against using aggressive compiler flags and warned that doing so will -among other things- not substantially improve performance. The advice about reasonable compiler flags has pretty consistently been "Use -O2, -pipe, -march=$THE_CORRECT_SETTING_FOR_YOUR_CPU, and maybe -fomit-frame-pointer"... though the "-fomit-frame-pointer" advice has always come with a warning that doing that may make debugging either extremely difficult or impossible, and the "-march" advice the warning that this may make it impossible to run those binaries on another computer.
Anyway. There's only so much you can do to erase an -allegedly- pervasive myth. The fact that some folks have the belief that Gentoo Linux is all about Maxxximum Performance doesn't change the fact that nearly all of the people who use it and -almost certainly- all of the people who maintain it strongly disagree with that claim. The distro is and always has been about flexibility, user choice, and having fun. And it's a nice bonus if building for -say- -march=athlon-xp instead of -march=i586 happens to get you a bit of extra performance here and there.
[3] That year's April 1 redesign was a bit cool, IMO.
[4] The oldest copy that I can easily find is from mid 2013 [5], so you'll just have to trust me that this has been the long-standing opinion of the overwhelming majority of users and maintainers. While you're there, take a minute or two to skim the prose and notice how it consistently warns against using aggressive compiler flags.
> Extreme configurability, performance, and a top-notch user and developer community are all hallmarks of the Gentoo experience.
It's the performance part I was referring to.
Going back to when I started using it:
> Gentoo Linux is a high-performance ports-based Linux metadistribution
Regarding -O2 vs -O3, in the early days, -O3 was considered quite safe (I don't recall if it was recommended, but it wasn't discouraged). I think only after a certain GCC upgrade did they start discouraging -O3. I vaguely recall them announcing that quite a few of the -O3 benefits were now part of -O2, and that some (new?) -O3 stuff was unstable.
At the time, I knew little about compiler flags. I went with -O3 because of guidance from the Gentoo folks.
-O3 is still quite safe and the rare cases where it causes issues have always been due to bugs in the source code being compiled from my experience. It isn't guaranteed to produce codue faster than -O2 though.
Yep, when I started using it in _2002_ that was on the home page. Ten years ago, it stopped being on the home page because folks finally got the motivation to do a bunch of work to it. As I said:
Its home page has spoken about flexibility and has not spoken about performance since the big redesign in *April 2016*... seven years prior to the publication of that guy's blog post.
There's only so much you can do to erase an -allegedly- pervasive myth. The fact that some folks have the belief that Gentoo Linux is all about Maxxximum Performance doesn't change the fact that nearly all of the people who use it and -almost certainly- all of the people who maintain it strongly disagree with that claim.
> Regarding -O2 vs -O3, in the early days, -O3 was considered quite safe (I don't recall if it was recommended, but it wasn't discouraged). ... I went with -O3 because of guidance from the Gentoo folks.
It has been too long for me to remember what -O level my first Gentoo box ended up using (and I can't be bothered to pull it out of the closet and power it on to see), but the box I installed in ~2007 is using -O2. A random sampling of the few Gentoo forum posts from the early days that are in the Wayback Machine [0], as well as a handful of Bugzilla reports from the 2002->2005 era _suggests_ that most folks in the early days were using -O2. I'm certain that I played with all of the optimization levels on my first box, didn't notice any performance difference, and then settled on one that I can no longer remember.
And like, you say that -O3 wasn't discouraged. Well, -O3 isn't really discouraged today. The advice about -O3 gives you a summary of the facts and trusts you to make the choice that's right for you [1][2]
WARNING: Using `-O3` may cause some packages to break either during the compilation or misbehave at runtime, although `-O3` retains standard conformance, hence any breakage is either undefined behaviour in the application, or (very rarely) a compiler bug.
<irrelevant stuff elided>
`-O3`: enables `-O2` as well as optimizations that are expensive in terms of compile time and memory usage. Compiling with `-O3` is likely to improve performance (although not guaranteed). While historically `-O3` could expose compiler bugs, nowadays issues with `-O3` are almost always instances of undefined behavior (UB) and the code is at fault and should be fixed. Some packages are still known-broken with `-O3`. Using `-O3` is not recommended unless running test suites for packages.
(I'm pretty sure that "unless running test suites" thing means "you shouldn't use this optimization level unless you're also using FEATURES="test" to run the package's tests".)
FWIW, it's my maybe-incorrect understanding that many (most? all?) packages that are known-broken with specific flags get those flags filtered out and replaced with known-good ones... unless they're nutball "ricer" flags, in which case the user gets told "Don't do that!".
[2] Even the advice from a decade ago [3] is substantially similar: «This makes compilation take longer, and it not only might not make things faster, it may make things slower and is known to break things sometimes.»
The vast majority of desktop Linux users run Ubuntu (initial motto: Linux for human beings). So one may argue the literal opposite of what you wrote, in that if Canonical didn't invest into making a Linux distro that's accessible to normal people, it wouldn't have the relevance it now does. On top of that, Linux has (or had) a number of clear advantages over Windows that dwarf the presumed upsides of compiling everything from source vs. downloading builds.
There's not much of an argument for adopting obscure niche practices for their own sake
The rather large giant collosal planet sized argument that you somehow missed despite that, is that every single thing that you consider good and normal today doesn't exist except for the fact that at one point it was the obscure niche thing that annoyed intolerant "normal" people.
You, like the other commenter, disregarded the core argument of the matter in favor of contrarianness for its own sake: are you trying to argue that building literally everything from source is cool and good because it's niche and weird, whereas Linux was niche and weird once but it's cool and good now? As I said, Linux had and still has clear advantages over Windows to the point that Microsoft felt threatened by it fairly soon (cue Ballmer's chair throwing, cancer remark, etc.) and tried to undermine it before giving up with Nadella. What, exactly, are the obvious and objective upsides of compiling everything from source? Many posters in the thread dispelled performance-maxxing as a meme so it can't be that. You are comparing apples to oranges here.
I feel like I'm trying to explain a shade of colour to a blind person.
building from source has uses which you believe are worthless and other people don't think are worthless.
Anyone who uses cargo or installs a module for golang is building from source. But that, probably, is considered useful. It's only people who build C code from source who are niche and wierd. ....
Linux was obscure and niche for a very long time before Ubuntu existed and Ubuntu only existed because someone bothered to use and develop Linux when it wasn't normal.
The Ubuntu users are only there because after they had told the rest of us how silly we were for using Linux they eventually had to use it themselves for work.
Now we're going to listen to that sort of stuff again without rolling our eyes? ....
SLS for me. haha. :-) But now at least you have the choice! It's great really. I can use Artix because I like being nearer the bleeding edge but even that is really a lot easier to use than Linux was in the days when I had to compile my kernel.
Nevertheless I remember lots of my friends who started off saying Linux was hopeless and ended up using it and Ubuntu was their gateway. The Linux world now is full of people who are fairly conformist and don't care about how it all began and who don't value the idea that open source has margins from which who knows what world beating things might eventually come. The fact that margins can exist is what makes open source great.
Gentoo’s decision to support source builds seems eminently reasonable to me, and I don’t think we should reward it with condescension.
The bigger problem, to me, is that it’s not really clear why this is actually a problem for Gentoo. I am glad they perform user-facing source builds, however, because they see things that other distributors don’t.
Firefox built from source is sufficiently sped up that I can notice it starting up at least 1-2 seconds faster. Not that I use the distro for speed, but I'm not complaining about a faster browser.
If you insist on acting like a normal person, no one stops you from using something normal.
Gentoo made a lot of sense WAY back in a pre-docker world, where you had to run the whole world on the host OS. Being able to compile it all meant you could link it all together with whatever weird combination of optional libraries you wanted. Things like getting sendmail to auth over LDAP, that nobody packaged in the base distro, become possible. And with Gentoo's tooling, you could build a coherent distro to your own unique demands.
Now though? It's way easier to have a herd of unicorn docker containers running that each handle one weird thing in isolation.
The herd of docker containers would in practice share almost nothing apart from the kernel and waste a lot of RAM. Didn't matter when RAM was cheap, but nowadays...
Less and less with the ongoing ads, taskbar issues, and RAM eaating bloatware.
By just adding
preempt=full
to most GNU/Linux distros to the grub kernel boot options (trivial even for Fedora Silverblue, just run
sudo rpm-ostree kargs --editor
) and append at the end of these boot flags you are seeing the mentioned string. Done, multimedia ready desktop for tons of tasks outperforming Windows 11.
