ANNOFlo

I agree, I don’t think it’s likely going to be helpful to mental health in the long run either, based on my totally unprofessional opinion.

I’ve argued with a friend about it who isn’t a tech-person at all. She just says “yeah, it’s her problem” and doesn’t seem to grasp that my issue is not with her doing it as an individual - instead with the fact that it’s possible and the greater societal ramifications it is likely to have.

I’ll make an AI boyfriend, too, and talk to him about it, that’ll show society!

Yeah, I actually just read that one a few minutes ago. And man, I’m incredibly torn on this whole thing.

On one side - good it makes that person happy. On the other side - being entirely reliant on a commercialized, sycophant AI that could be used for manipulation, investing large amounts of money in it…

I’ve had LDRs before - one could argue it’s similar there, just “text on a screen”, or calls via digital audio. However I always knew there was a human behind those texts and the voice I heard was real, a person with a personality, experiences, strengths and flaws. The feelings they have are real, or at least one can hope they are assuming one isn’t with a manipulative POS (that’s not an issue exclusive to LDRs, though).

Here you chat with text generated by a company, accuracy having been wildly clowned upon already and I’m sure we’re all ware of this here. Of course the LLM is going to always agree, why would the product of the company actively try to drive away their customers?

Adding the fact that all the personal information will obviously be harvested, used for training the LLM and other stuff… Detailed information about the daily life is provided to the “AI boyfriend”, allowing detailed recreation of everyday life.

Bleh.

Yeah, exactly. And the Lock-In-Effect is huge, too. You only need to have a piece of required software that doesn’t have a Linux version (we have this situation) and you’ll be stuck for a looong time.

As someone in German Government who has written a thesis on OSS in government:

Happens regularly, on a small scale, but almost always eventually leads to a rollback to Windows. People are discontent with the solutions on Linux since they have to get used to something else, and the aging governmental workers and exactly very keen on things changing.

The City of Munich had a similar program of switching to Linux before, only took Microsoft to open an office in the city to revert on those plans.

The federal government recently finished rolling out a centralised, unified client around all of their ministries and other institutions. Which OS? Guessed it, Windows 10.

Dont get me wrong, having something like the French Police would be amazing, but the highly federal nature and old workforce of government make it super unlikely for Linux to have a proper chance. Taking into consideration the lack of suitable employees to drive forward such a change, the lack of money at local government levels and the fact that most of the specific software required doesn’t have a version for Linux doesn’t fill me with hope.