This is already a thing, there are a myriad of LLM chat interfaces where you can either connecting to models you are locally running or connect to APIs of providers. "Open WebUI", "librechat" and "Big-AGI" are web interfaces. On desktop you have things like jan.ai and a a lot more.

I don't know how to say this in a less direct way. If this is your take then you probably should look to get slightly more informed about what LLMs can do. Specifically, what they can do if you combine them with with some code to fill the gaps.

Things LLMs can do quite well:

• Generate useful search queries.
• Dig through provided text to determine what it contains.
• Summarize text.

These are all the building blocks for searching on the internet. If you are talking about local documents and such retrieval augmented generation (RAG) can be pretty damn useful.

You are glossing over a lot of infrastructure and development, when boiled down to the basics you are right. So it is basically a question of getting enough users to have that app installed. Which is not impossible given that we do have initiatives like OpenStreetMap.

At least for the instance this was posted on: the February 2024 Beehaw Financial Update

Long term wearing of vr headsets might indeed be not all that good. Though, the article is light on actual information and is mostly speculation. Which for the Apple Vision Pro can only be the case as it hasn't been out long enough to conduct anything more than a short term experiment. So that leaves very little data in the way of long term data points.

As far as the experiment they did, there was some information provided (although not much). From what was provided this bit did stand out to me.

The team wore Vision Pros and Quests around college campuses for a couple of weeks, trying to do all the things they would have done without them (with a minder nearby in case they tripped or walked into a wall).

I wonder why the Meta Oculus Quests were not included in the title. If it is the meta Quest 3, it is fairly capable as far as pass through goes. But, not nearly as good as I understand the Apple Vision Pro's passthrough is. I am not saying the Apple Vision Pro is perfect, in fact it isn't perfect if the reviews I have seen are any indicator. It is still very good, but there is still distortion around edges of vision, etc.

But given the price difference between the two I am wondering if the majority of the particpants actually used Quests as then I'd say that the next bit is basically a given:

They experienced "simulator sickness" — nausea, headaches, dizziness. That was weird, given how experienced they all were with headsets of all kinds.

VR Nausea is a known thing even experienced people will get. Truly walking around with these devices with the distorted views you get is bound to trigger that. Certainly with the distortion in pass through I have seen of Quests 3 videos. I'd assume there are no Quests 2 in play as the passthrough there is just grainy black and white video. :D

Even Apple with all their fancy promo videos mostly shows people using the Vision pro sitting down or in doors walking short distances.

So yeah, certainly with the current state of technology I am not surprised there are all sorts of weird side effects and distorted views of reality.

What I'd be more interested in, but what is not really possible to test yet, is what the effects will be when these devices become even better. To the point where there is barely a perceivable difference in having them on or off. That would be, I feel, the point where some speculated downsides from the article might actually come into play.

This feels like clickbait to me, as the fundamental problem clearly isn't AI. At least to me it isn't. The title would have worked as well without AI in the title. The fact that the images are AI generated isn't even that relevant. What is worrying is that the peer review process, at least for this journal clearly is faulty as no actual review of the material took place.

If we do want to talk about AI. I am impressed how well the model managed to actually create text made up of actual letters resembling words. From what I have seen so far that is often just as difficult for these models as hands are.

They’re for different needs.

Yes... but also extremely no. Superficially you are right, but a lot of the arguments of why many new distros are created is just because of human nature. This covers everything from infighting over inane issues to more pragmatic reasons. A lot of them, probably even a majority, don't provide enough actual differentiators to be able to honestly claim that it is because of different needs. In the end it all boils down to the fact that people can just create a new distro when they feel like it.

Which is a strength in one way, but not with regard to fragmentation.

This is such a cynical take. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of moderators do care about their subreddits or else they wouldn't be volunteering their free time. The allure of the power to remove some random person's post on the Internet, or to ban them just so they return with another account, pales in comparison to the thrill of watching your community grow and people having fun because of it. And it's not this weird selfish, hey-look-at-me-I'm-so-successful kind of thrill, it's like you joined this thing because you are interested it and now all these other people who are also interested in it are there talking about it. That's what's cool, you set off to make this place where people can talk about this thing that you think is cool and you get to watch it grow and be successful over time. Some of these communities have been around for over a decade, so, people have invested time and effort into them for over a decade.

Moving to elsewhere isn't really as easy as people make it out to be. At the moment "moving communities" means fracturing your community as there is no unified approach to doing this.

The operative word being "unified" which is next to impossible to achieve. If you get all mods to agree you will have a hard time reaching all your users. This in itself presents the biggest roadblock, ideally you'd close up shop and redirect users to the new platform. Reddit will most certainly not allow this, their approach to protesting subreddits that were not even aiming to migrate made that abundantly clear.

So this means that, at the very least, you are looking at splitting your community over platforms. This is far from a unified approach.

This isn't even touching on the lack of viable long term platforms out there. I'd love for people to move to Lemmy. But realistically speaking Lemmy is very immature, instance owners are confronted with new bugs every day, not to mention the costs of hosting an instance. That also ignores the piss poor state the moderation tooling is in on Lemmy. The same is true for many of the possible other "alternatives".
All the new attention these platforms have gotten also means they are getting much more attention from developers. So things might change in the future for the better, in fact I am counting on it. But that isn't the current state of the fediverse. Currently most of the fediverse, specifically Lemmy is still very much in a late Alpha maybe early Beta state as far as software stability and feature completeness goes.

And, yes, the situation on reddit is degrading and this latest round of things has accelerated something that has been going on for a while. But at the same time Reddit is the platform that has been around for a decade and where the currenty community is. Picking that up and moving elsewhere is difficult and sometimes next to impossible. I mean we haven't even talked about discoverability of communities for regular users.

Lemmy (or any fediverse platform) isn't exactly straightforward to figure out and start participating in. If you can even find the community you are looking for. Reddit also hosts a lot of support communities, who benefit from reddit generally speaking having a low barrier of entry. Many of those wouldn't be able to be as accessible for the groups they are targeting on other platforms.

In the article they actually state they believe it is actually better to have the keys included and not rely on some method of inserting them.

After this situation blew up, we received many requests, and even some demands, to remove all Wii keys from our codebase. We're disappointed that so many people on YouTube and social media didn't even consider that maybe the team had done their research and risk analysis before including the keys, and just assumed that now that it was "pointed out to us" we would remove them. However, we do not think that including the Wii Common Key actually matters - the law could easily be interpreted to say that circumventing a Wii disc's encryption by any means is a violation. As such, it is our interpetation that removing the Wii keys would not change whether the exemption in 17 U.S.C. § 1201(f) applies to us or not.

In fact, we think that offloading decryption tasks onto a potential 3rd party application would make the situation worse for everyone. As such, we believe leaving the keys as they are is the best course of action.

The only thing I could ever get anyone to say was that they hated emojis because they made people seem immature.

Depending on context, that can be a legitimate objection against using them. On the other hand, when used sparingly I don't mind them, I even see them being used internally at my work in a corporate environment. I am still not a fan of emojis on platforms like Lemmy depending on how they are used though. I just wrote a different comment about this and then saw yours, in order to not repeat myself: https://beehaw.org/comment/608537

Hopefully this is a bit more of an explanation that does make sense. 😉

I am not against emojis overall. But to put it in perspective, the way emojis work they do draw a lot of extra attention to themselves. Specifically because they don't follow text color so are really distinct. So to me, personally, a text with a lot of emojis sprinkled in can come across as busy to the point of distracting to read or a bit shouty.

In my (again personal) view emojis, smilies, etc are most useful when used in moderation on key points in a message. It's also with that reason that on platforms like Lemmy, reddit or basically any old forum I do think they generally don't have a place in titles.

I hope that this makes sense? 🙂

Edit: To maybe clarify it a bit further

Emojis can also basically be a type of "fluff content":

"The Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it."

Source: Article by Paul Graham

What this means is basically the following, say you have two submissions:

1. An article - takes a few minutes to judge.
2. An image - takes a few seconds to judge.

So in the time that it takes person A to read and judge he article person B, C, D, E and F already saw the image and made their judgement. So basically images will rise to the top not because they are more popular, but simply because it takes less time to vote on them, so they gather votes faster.

To get back to the title thing I mentioned. More often than not I see people use emojis in titles not to strengthen the title, but simply to draw attention to it. And the same thing I have seen in in messages in general. Like I said above, it then starts to approach "shouting" from my perspective. So it isn't emojis themselves I then have an issue with, it is just that they then fall in the same category as ALL CAPS and bolded text that shouldn't be bolded and all that.

This is such a cynical take. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of moderators do care about their subreddits or else they wouldn't be volunteering their free time. The allure of the power to remove some random person's post on the Internet, or to ban them just so they return with another account, pales in comparison to the thrill of watching your community grow and people having fun because of it. And it's not this weird selfish, hey-look-at-me-I'm-so-successful kind of thrill, it's like you joined this thing because you are interested it and now all these other people who are also interested in it are there talking about it. That's what's cool, you set off to make this place where people can talk about this thing that you think is cool and you get to watch it grow and be successful over time. Some of these communities have been around for over a decade, so, people have invested time and effort into them for over a decade.

Moving to elsewhere isn't really as easy as people make it out to be. At the moment "moving communities" means fracturing your community as there is no unified approach to doing this.

The operative word being "unified" which is next to impossible to achieve. If you get all mods to agree you will have a hard time reaching all your users. This in itself presents the biggest roadblock, ideally you'd close up shop and redirect users to the new platform. Reddit will most certainly not allow this, their approach to protesting subreddits that were not even aiming to migrate made that abundantly clear.

So this means that, at the very least, you are looking at splitting your community over platforms. This is far from a unified approach.

This isn't even touching on the lack of viable long term platforms out there. I'd love for people to move to Lemmy. But realistically speaking Lemmy is very immature, instance owners are confronted with new bugs every day, not to mention the costs of hosting an instance. That also ignores the piss poor state the moderation tooling is in on Lemmy. The same is true for many of the possible other "alternatives".
All the new attention these platforms have gotten also means they are getting much more attention from developers. So things might change in the future for the better, in fact I am counting on it. But that isn't the current state of the fediverse. Currently most of the fediverse, specifically Lemmy is still very much in a late Alpha maybe early Beta state as far as software stability and feature completeness goes.

And, yes, the situation on reddit is degrading and this latest round of things has accelerated something that has been going on for a while. But at the same time Reddit is the platform that has been around for a decade and where the currenty community is. Picking that up and moving elsewhere is difficult and sometimes next to impossible. I mean we haven't even talked about discoverability of communities for regular users.

Lemmy (or any fediverse platform) isn't exactly straightforward to figure out and start participating in. If you can even find the community you are looking for. Reddit also hosts a lot of support communities, who benefit from reddit generally speaking having a low barrier of entry. Many of those wouldn't be able to be as accessible for the groups they are targeting on other platforms.