Dr. Dabbles

Only now? It’s been two years of this and now they’ve had too much? No partial credit should be given for people that continued to participate when it was clear what was happening.

You’re missing a TON of history here. Like udev being a dependency to all those projects AND systemd, which led to systemd adding it to their project. Really it could be said that udev is the critical component here.

As you mentioned networkmanager, you clearly know that many popular distros use that rather than systemd-networkd.

Grub2 is by far the most popular boot loader, so far ahead that it’s not even worth considering others. Grub has had several major issues, every distro uses it, why not pick on grub as the risk?

Did you have these same concerns about sysvinit? About the various distro network scripts? What about libc? Good god if there’s a problem with libc we’re all in deep trouble.

Yes, code has bugs. But New code has new bugs (ironically an argument previously used against systemd). Whatever you replace these components with will be just as likely to have a critical vulnerability, but far fewer maintainers and resources to fix it. Systemd has simplified and improved features of so many parts of Linux that it’s funny to see how vehemently people argued against it. Feel free to disable any parts you don’t need, but I think you’re missing 20 years of painful history that led us here.

Last year, the corporate-dominated web came alive, much thanks to the help of corporate-owned social media platforms - how long will it take until the open sections of the web do so?

Honestly, I’m not sure how someone could come to this conclusion. The “corporate-dominated web” has been around a real long time. Remember Digg? Facebook? Myspace? We also already see several corporations using ActivityPub protocols for federation for a few years. Companies are real good at adopting technologies that work. For better or worse.

with stuff happening in the digital world that doesn’t in the real world

What? This is the real world.

it could actually be worthwile for people to immerse further into the digital world

That seems unlikely. But it’s a good set of tools to use.

Could that be the actual next iteration of the web and realize what was in the past considered the “smart” web or would it be a dystopia?

I think what you’re asking here is whether the “next iteration” will be users using more services? “Metaverse” is simply Facebook adding a bunch of new services beyond just facebook. Like Google does, really. Get your email, chat, social media (once upon a time), video service, books, etc. all from one place. Baidu does this too.

would it be possible to make the LLMs somehow run independently

This question doesn’t make sense, TBH. Independently of what? They already run independently. You can turn off websites arbitrarily and an LLM will keep predicting the next word for you.

and how would all of that be experienced like from the user perspective

You already experience this. Whenever you use the translation app on your phone, or your phone offers the next word you might want to type? That’s you experiencing this.

could the blockchain maybe be finally put to some use here?

Block chains have nothing at all to do with LLMs, or neural networks generally really. So I’m not sure if this post was produced by a prompt given to an LLM at this point.

I’m not here to defend racism, phobias, or any other kind of discriminatory behavior. But if you look deep enough into anybody, you’re going to find something you or someone you know doesn’t like. I can guarantee it. Are some of the original developers of a specific set of software “problematic”? Yup. Have more contributors come forward and added to the software in meaningful ways since then? Yup.

Do you use Linux? Windows? Mac OS? Do you use Ethernet? Wifi? What about IP, or TCP, or even application protocols like HTTP? Do you enjoy TLS and AES encryption? What about the Internet as a concept? Every single one of these was developed by fallible people, funded by organizations I bet you’d have problems with. The military industrial complex has contributed heavily to every single one of the above technologies.

And just for the record, a lot of the people that originally designed the ActivityStream and ActivityPub standards were people concerned about marginalized Internet users. Use the software, choose an instance that’s like-minded, contribute improvements where you have expertise, and move on. The original developers of the Lemmy software don’t matter, nor do their politics or their biases. They simply wrote some Rust and Javascript to run a webserver and interface that saves data to a database. What you do with that tool is what really matters.