1000% this. Without giving away too much information, I work(ed) for a cloud provider (not one of the big ones, there are a surprising number of smaller ones in the field you’ve probably never heard of before). I quit this week to take a position in local government with some quaint, on-prem setup.

1. We were always understaffed for what we promised. Two guys per shift and if one of us took vacation; oops, lol. No extra coverage, just deal.
2. Everyone was super smart but we didn’t have time to work the tickets. Between crashes, outages, maintenance, and horrendous tickets that took way too much work to dig into, there was just never enough time. If you had a serious problem that took lengthy troubleshooting, good luck!
3. We over-promised on support we could provide, often taking tickets that were outside of infrastructure scope (guest OS shit, you broke your own server, what do you want me to do about it?) and working them anyway to please the customer or forwarding them directly to one of our vendors and chaining their support until they caught wise and often pushed back.
4. AI is going to ruin Support. To be clear, there will always be support and escalation engineers who have to work real problems outside the scope of AI. However without naming names, there’s a big push (it’ll be everyone before too long, mark it) for FREE tier support to only chat with AI bots. If you need to talk to a real human being, you gotta start dishing out that enterprise cash.

Mix all that together and then put the remaining pressure on the human aspect still holding things up and there’s a collapse coming. Once businesses get so big they’re no longer “obligated” to provide support, they’ll start charging you for it. This has always been a thing of course, anyone who’s worked enterprise agreements knows that. But in classic corpo values, they’re closing the gap. Pay more for support, get less in return. They’ll keep turning that dial until something breaks catastrophically, that’s capitalism baby.

Check out https://www.giuspen.net/cherrytree/, lightweight note-taking app with interesting scripting function built in.

Even if that’s not your cup of tea, it has the option to save your notebook to a single sqlite file, so I take that as good enough proof it’ll work for your similar purposes as well.

Other backers include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

WTF, no, this is worse in every way. So instead of being involved with the people and topics I choose, it’s instead left up to an algorithm? Somehow even more opaque than usual because of AI involvement.

This isn’t solving any problem, this is yet another mask to push content in front of people.

So it could possibly be construed to “Microsoft’s Dirty Operating System”, yeah?

There is a very meaningful difference between humane, highly regulated animal testing and what Musk is doing. Compounding this is the feeling that Musk’s high profile is what’s letting him get away with this in the first place. He wants to slap his name and face on everything for the credit when it’s good, be gets to be the lightning rod when it’s not.

There are no legitimate uses, full stop.

As others have pointed out, it’s just a fully public database. Its use case is among trustless parties, and that’s why it fails. At some point, somebody is going to want to take action off the data and that’s going to involve a trusted party enforcing it. Sooo … just have the trusted party host the data (and make it public if you really care). And if all the parties are truly that trustless, 1) why are they dealing with either and 2) get a third party trustee to broker your deals

No.

If I’m sitting on the couch and I want sushi, I can open up a website, pick exactly what I want, even maybe make a few substitutions for me specificity, and get it delivered right to my house, but that doesn’t mean I made sushi. I just HAVE sushi.

Anyone who has ever actually supported a real artist and commissioned work understands that they don’t own the copyright, unless extra agreements have been made to transfer it. It still belongs to the original artist.

And as stated, AI can’t own that. So no one does. Who would want to? It’s garbled, derivative work and anyone with access to the same prompt and models could generate it themselves, which is why I find the prompt guarding so hilarious. It’s all so blatantly dumb and transparent.

Am I missing something obvious here? What is motivating such stringent measures to be put in place when things have been sufficient without them thus far? Who is asking for this?

I live in my own little online echo chambers, but even I can’t believe there’s enough ground swell for the government to step in on … What? Violence? Addiction? This is very confusing.

I think the sooner the better. Something I’ve been mulling over for awhile now is the differences between Mastodon and Lemmy. Mastodon has growth issues (or not, depending on how you want to frame it) due to the type of social media it is. A lot of people that use Twitter are looking to follow particular voices in the chatter, or simply be where friends are. That’s a much steeper barrier for Mastodon to overcome. Lemmy on the other hand is just a place where conversation happens in general. People will come here for the content and the discourse. I know we’re all impatient wanting it to get back to that Reddit level, but it will happen in time. The stronger the foundation we build, the more tempting it will be for others to join.