A person trying to learn doesn’t constantly disagree/contradict you and never express that their understanding has improved. A person sealioning always finds a reason to erode whatever you say with every response. At some point they need to nod or at least agree with something except in the most extreme cases.
It also doesn’t help their case that they somehow have a such a starkly contradictory opinion on something they ostensibly don’t know anything/are legitimately asking questions about. They should ask a question or two and then just listen.
It’s just one of those things that falls under “I know it when I see it.”
One of the best things I read which genuinely has impact (I think) on me is the book, How to win friends and influence people.
It fundamentally changed how I viewed debates etc. from a young age so I never really sea-lioned that much hopefully.
But if I had to summarize the most useful and on topic quote from the book its that.
"I may be wrong, I usually am"
Lines like this give me a humble nature to fall back on. Even socrates said that the only thing I know is that I know nothing so if he doesn't know nothing, then chances are I can be wrong about things I know too.
Knowing that you can be wrong gives an understanding that both of you are just discussing and not debating and as such the spirit becomes cooperative and not competitive.
Although in all fairness, I should probably try to be a more keen listener but its something that I am working on too, any opinions on how to be a better listener too perhaps?
I definitely try to work on my listening every day, though I would say at best it’s been a mixed bag ha. Just something I’m always having to work on.
I like the “does it need to be said by me right now?” test a lot when I can actually remember to apply it in the moment. I forgot where I learned it but somebody basically put it like this: Before you say anything, ask yourself 3 questions
1. Does it need to be said?
2. Does it need to be said by me?
3. Does it need to be said by me right now?
You work your way down the list one at a time and if the answer is still yes by the time you hit 3, then go ahead.
I often find that when people start applying purity tests it’s mainly just to discredit any arguments they don’t like without having to make a case against the substance of the argument.
Assess the argument based on its merits. If you have to pick him apart with “he has no right to say it” that is not sufficient.
“He just hates GenAI so everything is virtue signaling/a cudgel” is not an assessment. It’s simply dismissing him outright. If they were talking about the merits, they would actually debate whether or not the environmental concerns and such are valid. You can’t just say “you don’t like X so all critiques of X are not just wrong but also inauthentic by default.”
The part where they specifically address Pike's "argument" [0] is where they express that in their view, the energy use issue is a data center problem, not a generative AI one:
> nothing he complains about is specific to GenAI
(see also all their other scattered gesturings towards Google and their already existing data centers)
A lot can be said about this take, but claiming that it doesn't directly and specifically address Pike's "argument", I simply don't think is true.
I generally find that when (hyper?)focusing on fallacies and tropes, it's easy to lose sight of what the other person is actually trying to say. Just because people aren't debating in a quality manner, doesn't mean they don't have any points in there, even if those points are ultimately unsound or disagreeable.
Let's not mistake form for function. People aren't wrong because they get their debating wrong. They're wrong because they're wrong.
[0] in quotes, because I read a rant up there, not an argument - though I'm sure if we zoom way in, the lines blur
How so? He’s talking about what happened to him in the context of his professional expertise/contributions. It’s totally valid for him to talk about this subject. His experience, relevance, etc. are self apparent. No one is saying “because he’s an expert” to explain everything.
They literally (using AI) wrote him an email about his work and contributions. His expertise can’t be removed from the situation even if we want to.
having made Go amd parts pf Unix gives him no authority in the realms that his criticisms are aimed at though - environment science, civil engineering, resource management etc
not having a good spam filter is a kinda funny reason for somebody to have a crash out.
Yes. The existence of a proprietary escape hatch is not evidence of goodwill.
> ThinkPads have a bunch throttling issues on non-windows OSs.
That is an ACPI issue. Intel Macbooks also exhibit this behavior on Linux and BSD, and it's not even close to how incomplete power management is on Asahi.
Yet. Plenty of people have with Intel ones - I’m one of them. My first experience with Linux was on a 2016 MBpro. And inevitably people will do the same with the silicon Macs, likely using Asahi it seems.
It's not inevitable. That's not what that word means.
Intel Macs supported Linux because they used Intel's Linux drivers and supported bog-standard UEFI. There are no preexisting drivers or DeviceTree files published by Apple for Linux. There is no UEFI implimentation, just a proprietary bootloader that can be updated post-hoc to deny booting into third-party OSes.
> Why are some of y'all so hostile to this idea?
I would love for Linux to support as many ARM devices as possible. Unfortunately, it requires continuous effort from the OEM to be viable. I've bought Qualcomm, Rockchip and Broadcom boards before, none of them have been supported for half as long as my x86 machines are. Nevermind how fast ARM architectures become obsolete.
It feels like Apple is really the only hostile party here, and they coincidentally decide whether or not you get to use third-party OSes.
It is inevitable. I guarantee you there will be people who run Linux on their silicon Macs. I don’t know how you could possibly hold a stance that no one ever will.
Apple is very hostile to it. It won’t stop everyone though. It’ll continue to be niche but it’s happening.
It's not inevitable. It's fragile. Go boot up your old iPad; that should be well-studied, right? We ought to know how to boot into Linux on an ARM machine that old, it's only fair.
Except, you can't. The bootloader is the same iBoot process that your Apple Silicon machine uses, with mitigations to prevent unsigned OSes or persistent coldboot. All the Cydia exploits in the world won't put Linux back on the menu for iPhone or iPad users. And the same thing could happen to your Mac with an OTA update.
It is entirely possible for Apple to lock down the devices further. There's no guarantee they won't.
> There is literally an apple-developed way to boot securely into alternative OSs
This is not a good thing! You do not want a proprietary bootloader as your only way to launch Linux, it's not a safe or permanent solution. Apple Silicon could have implemented UEFI like the previous Macs did, but Apple chose to lock users into a bootloader they controlled. This is markedly different from most ARM device bootloaders which aren't changed by an OTA update in another OS partition.
> if only apple is hostile
I did not say that at any point in my comment. Forgeties original claim was that Apple Silicon would eventually have support comparable to Intel Macbooks on Linux. I am telling them point-blank that it is impossible, because Apple and Intel have fundamentally different attitudes towards Linux.
> where is my Xbox/ps/switch/any random Android tablet/million other device's running Linux?
Your Switch and Android tablet is already running the Linux kernel. The past 2 generations of Xbox and PS chipsets have upstream support from AMD in the Linux kernel, so you really only need a working bootloader to get everything working.
Ironically, this does mean that the Nintendo Switch has more comprehensive Linux support than Apple Silicon does.
Sure, the kernel. But you surely know that android abstracts away the drivers, so without the proprietary drivers you are back to square zero - it's not "GNU/Linux".
Apple cannot lockdown the Mac. You can’t have a development machine that is incapable of running arbitrary code. Back when they still did WWDC live they said that software development was the biggest professional bloc of Mac users. I’m certain that these days development is the biggest driver of the expensive Macs. No one has ever made a decent argument as to why Apple would lock down the Mac that would also explain why they haven’t done it yet.
Passivity isn’t hostility. There isn’t any evidence that Apple is considering locking down the Mac. They could have easily done that with the transition to their own silicon but they didn’t despite the endless conspiracy theories.
Apple can lockdown the Mac. You might not think it is likely, but without UEFI there is no path of recourse if Apple decides to update iBoot. How do you launch Asahi if Apple quits reading the EFI from the secure partition?
> They could have easily done that with the transition to their own silicon
They already did, that's what my last comment just outlined. Macs do not ship with UEFI anymore, you are wholly at the mercy of a proprietary bootloader that can be changed at any time.
Because the Apple laptops use exactly the same architecture and bootloader as iPads - if you think they're separate you don't know enough to be part of this debate.
That's an admirable goal, but, depending on the hardware, it can run into that pesky thing called reality.
It's getting very tiresome to hear complaints about things that don't work on Linux, only to find that they're trying to run it on hardware that's poorly supported, and that's something they could have figured out by doing a little research beforehand.
Sometimes old hardware just isn't going to be well-supported by any OS. (Though, of course, with Linux, older hardware is more likely to be supported than bleeding-edge kit.)
This is very true. I've been asked by lots of people "how do I start with Linux" and, despite being 99.9% Linux user for everything everyday, my advice was always:
1. Use VirtualBox. Seriously, it won't look cool, but it will 100% work after maybe 5 mins mucking around with installing guest additions. Also snapshots. Also no messing with WiFi drivers or graphics card drivers or such.
2. Get a used beaten down old Thinkpad that people on Reddit confirm to be working with Linux without any drivers. Then play there. If it breaks, reinstall.
3. If the above didn't make you yet disinterested, THEN dual boot.
Also, if you don't care about GUI, then use the best blessing Microsoft ever created - WSL, and look no further.
I've never gotten along too well with virtualization, but would second the ThinkPad idea, or something similar. Old/cheap machine for tinkering is a good way to ease in, and I think bare metal feels more friendly.
I'd probably recommend against dual booting, but I understand it's controversial. I like to equate it to having two computers, but having to fully power one off to do anything* on the other one. Torrents stop, music collection may be inaccessible depending on how you stored it, familiar programs may not be around anymore. I dual booted for a few years in the past and I found it miserable. People who expected me to reboot to play a game with them didn't seem to understand how big of an ask that really was. Eventually things boiled over and I took the Windows HDD out of that PC entirely. Much more peaceful. (Proton solves that particular issue these days also)
That being said, I've had at least two friends who had a dual boot due to my influence (pushing GNU/Linux) who ended up with some sort of broken Windows install later on and were happy to already have Ubuntu as an emergency backup to keep the machine usable.
*Too old might be a problem these days with major distros not having 32bit ISOs anymore
I went 100% bazzite back in April/May, no windows, and I couldn’t be happier. The pc I built is basically 90% gaming/movies/hanging with friends, 10% browser tasks. Very easy to live this life if you don’t have particular professional needs IMO. When I was doing more freelance editing this really would not have been an option as resolve studio does not work well on Linux.
I've tried this once for IntelliJ to work around slow WSL access for Git repos. Was greeted by missing fonts and broken scaling on the intro screen. Oops. But probably I was just unlucky, it might work well for most.
It's a common use-case for x86 machines that implement UEFI. Taking the iPhone and iPad into account, it is a nonexistent use-case for mobile ARM chipset owners.
I know you may have a particular axe to grind here, but Android devices are not a whole lot more likely to let you boot a vanilla linux distro. Apart from a handful of explicitly linux-compatible smartphones, the boot loaders tend to be pretty locked down, and the drivers all propietrary too
> Grok exhibits a noticeable bias toward portraying Elon Musk favorably by overemphasizing "no evidence" and downplaying controversies—Perplexity, Claude, and DeepSeek correctly highlight this pattern over Grok's denial.
Fair point – that's exactly the kind of thing we built this for. Seeing multiple AIs cross-check each other in real time makes biases way more visible than asking them one by one. Cool it's working as intended.
By the way, try using '@' mentions when you want to tag specific AIs – makes it way easier to direct questions and keeps conversations cleaner. Thanks for the feedback!
Ha I was being tongue in cheek for sure but not as a critique of the site just about Grok. I had a lot of fun with this tool last night. Very interesting watching the process play out and just a cool idea, already shared with a few buddies. Good to know about the @!
Congrats and have a wonderful Christmas if you celebrate :)
Thanks so much! Really glad you had fun with it and shared with friends. Dropping an update tonight - should make the app even better. Merry Christmas!
The goal (at least it appears this way to me) is less about having any sort of airtight defense or actually successfully protecting people in the docs so much as giving plausible deniability for the talking heads that support the administration to push as truth. If it’s murky, sloppy, or otherwise unclear, then “no one wins” and “no one is right,” so the event can be easily dismissed.
You can open up any popular conservative forum/watch any mainstream conservative pundit and they are all saying the same thing: “there’s nothing here it doesn’t matter, Trump is just being photographed with women sometimes who cares?” Then some deflection about Bill Clinton, making sure to bring up the hot tub photo.
The reason it hasn’t gone away though, despite this often being a very effective approach, is because too many of them hung their hats on Epstein conspiracy theories from 2020 to 2024. It made a lot of people a lot of money and catapulted more than a handful of political careers. Now they have the means to be transparent and they can’t make an acceptable excuse not to be since they were all so loudly chest pounding about it, including the vice president himself.
I think almost all the discussions about Epstein are incredibly crass and gross. It’s not about the victims or justice, it’s about politics. I think there are obviously legitimate reasons to redact portions because we don’t want to ruin more lives (not that this was a real good faith attempt at that). But there is still a small part of me that can’t help but enjoy watching the Trump administration simmer in the pot they so clearly made for themselves over the last five years.
Gotta be honest, I think this has just been incompetence from top to bottom. But I also think this is a fracture in the trump coalition. It may be that conservative media is trying to move on from Trump which is why the "this is a nothing burger" defense hasn't been deployed as much.
It's clear from early on when they just re-released the same already public docs that the Trump admin thought "Ok, this is over, we can just move on now". But that basically backfired, especially because the expectation from conspiracy theorists was that every single democrat would be implicated. When nothing new came out it drove for more questions and kept this alive as an issue.
Now, I think they are continuing a bungled approach. These partial releases with aggressive redactions are only serving to keep the story alive. Ironically, if they'd complied with the law I could totally see the "this is a nothing burger" defense being something they'd pull off. But now with the seemingly daily revelations of "oh wow, Epstein was friends with famed abuser Nadler! And he said that Trump shared a taste in women!"
These sorts of revelations really mostly only work because they are tied to being "new information just released".
This also puts all conservative media on a backfoot. It's very hard for them to craft any sort of good narrative when every other day we are seeing wild and unexpected things like "Trump may have participated in murdering a baby".
Yeah to be clear I don’t think they deliberately screwed up, I think they just don’t care because they don’t need it to be perfect. I think you’re right that at its core this is incompetence
I love how every single comment here is litigating whether or not this qualifies “hacking” (yes I know obviously it does not) so I can’t really find any discussion on the contents lol
It also doesn’t help their case that they somehow have a such a starkly contradictory opinion on something they ostensibly don’t know anything/are legitimately asking questions about. They should ask a question or two and then just listen.
It’s just one of those things that falls under “I know it when I see it.”
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