I have had Bazzite on my gaming PC for a while now, never have to mess with the terminal much. It has come a long, long way. Even gentoo has become more accessible than ever. While some of this holds true, you most certainly do not need to live in the command line with some of these distros. Especially if you are just trying to play some games and browse the web, etc.

I imagine most of them were motivated by money. OpenAI was supposed to be Open. As I understand it, it was not created for shareholder profits and instead was made to benefit everyone? Hence the Open name. Then someone like Sam comes along who can make you incredibly rich by casually ignoring the initial mission. Would you go against this incredibly powerful billionaire who by many accounts is not encumbered by ethical quandaries? In doing so you risk your financial freedom, and for what? OAI is already a husk of its intended purpose. Mine as well get paid to be a sellout.

Like I said, as it currently stands the evidence is 5,000 with Sam and like 5-15 against him (from the article).

We can theorize on motivations all day, but since the hitpiece didn't bother contacting any 'pro Sam' employees, it's a moot point.

> OpenAI was on the verge of closing a large investment from Thrive, a venture-capital firm founded by Josh Kushner, Jared Kushner’s brother, whom Altman had known for years. The deal would value OpenAI at eighty-six billion dollars and allow many employees to cash out millions in equity.

Probably a factor in the pro Sam camp. Hard to stand up against a big payday.

Funny you bring this up because I always think back to a story, in the New York Times if I recall correctly but perhaps the Journal or SFC, talking about how him and his friends got upset when asked to leave a high end french restaurant due to him wearing sneakers. They pulled a "Do you know who he is?" well before he was even tied to OAI. Always left a bad taste in my mouth and stuck with me a decade on.

Tangentially, without being too specific, I have someone incredibly close to me that has recently had interactions with the upper echelons of OAI's exec team and... the stories are not kind. I imagine when your company is being run by a morally bankrupt tech bro you are short on integrity.

After 10+ years of hearing anecdotes about sama I am starting to wonder if maybe the word on the street is true and he really is just as selfish and blind as people make him out to be. At this point, the optics surrounding OAI vs. Anthropic are just plain bad. They should have gotten rid of him before when they had the chance.

My dog has been a beacon of hope through these last years of being alone. Highly agree. They can be a ton of work depending on the breed but there are plenty of dogs at the pound who might end up saving you in the end and not the other way around.

Loneliness is a state of mind. And sometimes when I am with people I feel the most alone. So above all else just be kind to yourself. Eat well, watch things you enjoy, do things you always dreamt of doing as a kid. That is how I stay sane at least, haha.

How many of those people are paying? I think many say “use ChatGPT” to mean any LLM. As you noted it seems you just see ChatGPT in the wild but that is anecdotal. It is certainly pervasive right now. But I know a lot of people currently switching to Gemini.

I personally prefer claude models for all my work. If I were them I would be very worried. They are never giving us AGI and I am skeptical they are worth .5 trillion. Their cash burn is insane. Once ads and price hikes come, people will migrate to companies that can still afford to subsidize (like Google).

Plus I heard they lowered projections recently? Sam honestly comes off as a grifter.

I'm very similar to the OP here, always hear about ChatGPT rarely anything else. Most people are definitely not paying, but of the few that are paying, outside of software developers, they are all paying for ChatGPT exclusively. I don't know of anyone paying for the basic chat versions of other AIs. A few developers paying for Claude and Gemini, but I know hundreds of people that talk of ChatGPT and no other AI, again most not paying though.

Outside of work I don't know anyone who pays for AI.

But I have noticed that everyone seems to be using ChatGPT as the generic term for AI. They will google something and then refer to the Gemini summary as "ChatGPT says...". I tried to find out what model/version one of my friends was using when he was talking about ChatGPT and it was "the free one that comes with Android"... So Gemini.

Is it anecdotal? The observation isn't _my_ experience using it, or of _my friends_. I have no influence over who I see in public using it. I know it's not exactly a scientific study but it's still pretty damn good as a random sample. If I went outside and saw the sky was dark, cloudy and my face got wet, would you tell me it was anecdotal evidence when I say it's raining out?

Only if you said it was raining everywhere these days.

Gemini is nearly unusable thanks to “subsidies”. I honestly don’t see what the path is to these companies making any money short of massive price hikes, or electricity suddenly becoming free.

This brings back great memories of a game I played as a kid called 24. Not so much modern, just cards with four numbers that you would add, subtract, multiply and divide to get the center number. Then you would slap the card and explain. It did something to my brain as even the thought of those cards makes me smile.

These days I wonder about that duty I have. It sure felt obligatory some time ago. I thought of myself as a patriot and that the rule of law was something we we should be proud of. A country whose own anthem spoke of "liberty and justice for all".

The current trajectory makes my question a lot of things, including this whole "government pays back that service with benefits" as it will be some time before I ever see a penny of SSI.

A lot of our taxes in this country seem like a giant waste or are grossly inefficient at best.

A lot of that here in the US is because we've lost the will to participate in the systems that establish these things. We leave that to other people, and those other people represent our interests poorly. The people in a democracy take a really long time to effect change. It can be a life's work for some people. But the premise is that if we can find common ground we can eventually see some of our ideas take shape. That does still work here, but we have to actually have real conversations with each other that respect each others' differences to get anywhere.

After a bit it just comes down to motivation. Who wants to win more: 1. Someone who has everyone's best interests at heart so is unwilling to really run against anyone and is trying to balance out support for multiple conflicting groups all while learning the landscape and job or 2. Someone who knows they can use the position to get tens of millions of dollars, and are supported by a few large groups similarly motivated? This is how you get people like Va Lecia Adams Kellum and Karen Bass.

> A lot of our taxes in this country seem like a giant waste or are grossly inefficient at best.

It's our duty to elect people who use tax dollars wisely and to vote out officials who neglect their responsibility to the people and use tax money to enrich themselves and anyone else willing to bribe them. Our government is filled with grifters because we've failed to hold them meaningfully accountable for robbing us and failing to provide the benefits we're funding.

Many of the grifters in government have been working hard to make it difficult to hold them accountable. They disenfranchise voters, they keep us afraid and our futures uncertain, they collude against efforts to reform the system they've established for their own benefit.

Government was never going to just let us have "liberty and justice for all" the job was always on "we the people" to insist on it. We can't just pay taxes and expect everything to work out. We have to use the democracy we have to force the government to work for us and not just for themselves. If we've reached a point where that's no longer possible then it's our duty to "refresh the tree of liberty" until we have a government that works for us.

Psychologically the deterioration of we the people's power happens at an even more basic level when children are taught to resolve their conflicts by seeking out an adult.

I wouldn't mind taxes if everyone paid their fair share and it went to improving the lives of everyone instead of the wealthy few. We live in the most productive times per capita that have ever existed. Why do we need to scrimp and save to buy food while the number of billionaires continues to climb?

Because we're failing to hold those billionaires accountable to the system that allows them to accumulate their wealth.

There is in fact a we. It's just not based on race, religion, ethnicity, language, gender, or sexuality. "We" are the ones who create and work for a living instead of living off the backs of others. "They" are immensely wealthy oligarchs that exploit us using their ownership of land, buildings, communication networks and machines we need to survive.

I live off your back yet am nowhere close to immensely wealthy. I know it's en-vogue to hate on shiny billionaires but reality is a lot less glamorous. It's just lazy gov workers not getting much done, then hiring more people to try to cover their work. By the millions.

Your reality sounds suspiciously similar to the lies told on the media platforms owned by the shiny billionaires.

Haha and yours sounds like the lies spread by communists/unions/etc attempting to wrest power from anyone who has it now. Your view leaves a lot of gaps. My view is easily verifiable by almost anyone working (barely) and getting paid by taxes. Or second and third parties getting that sweet, easy gov $$. It's also inclusive of your billionaires- many get money from the gov or gov policies too.

Your media platforms may be owned by the shiny billionaires, but the laws they adhere to are created and enforced by mobs of average 10-4 workers.

Funny that you think billionaires follow laws.

You argue that they never follow any laws? You have a weird world view, sounds like a high schooler on reddit and too much THC

What are you going to accuse me of next? Eating too much avocado toast?