There's an app called Private AI that will let you run models locally on Android. It has a few smaller models available for free to try it out, but the larger models like Llama 3 (or the option to use your own downloaded models) require a $10 unlock purchase.
Thankfully that is how a lot of AI is working right now, open source models for both LLM and Stable Diffusion let people have access to uncensored reasonably decent quality AI tools.
In other categories of AI generated content though, such as speech and music, the open source alternatives are either lacking or completely absent. And with the company behind Stable Diffusion being on the verge of financial collapse, we may see Stable Diffusion fall far behind it's closed source counterparts.
What would you recommend as an alternative to advertisements? I do think a lot of ads go too far, but I think some form of advertisement is necessary to get new awareness of new brands and products. Otherwise only the pre-established large brands and products will ever get sales, which would lead to a lack of competition and all the negatives that come with that.
It sometimes confuses me how people seem to not think that word of mouth is a thing. It absolutely is. In the games industry, there are endless examples. Because on places like Steam, you generally only get promoted if you're already doing well - yet there are countless games that flop at launch meaning 0 visibility, yet they also see great long-tail success.
One of my favorite is Kenshi. [1] Within a few months after launch, the dev was left with literally tens of users. Yet he continued working on it endlessly (while working as a part time security guard) and today it has near to more players than ever. And that's because of word of mouth. Which I suppose is something I'm also here partaking in. It's a great game!
Word of mouth is a great way to grow, but only once you already have users. Word of mouth requires people to already be your customer to bring in new customers, so the less business you have the less potentially useful it is.
If word of mouth is the only advertisement replacement allowed, it would force many companies to rely on fake sockpuppet customers to try to get started.
I don't propose any alternatives to advertisements. The simple fact of the matter is that as long as people also need to pay for mobile data or are subject to data caps that advertisements are a giant waste of bandwidth and at their very worst a distribution method for malware and other malfeasance on the web. It's a giant "pay for placement" that has no regulation because as long as the advertising companies are making money hand over fist they have no obligation to police the content being pushed through their networks because they get paid either way!
The age old use of advertisements that were generic and placed on TV channels were IMHO the "peak" of what advertising could be. All other forms of advertisements have proven to be predatory. Sites DEMAND you view their ads so that they can receive money to keep the site going.... That inevitably results in traffic to the site going elsewhere and the same result is that the site dies so I absolutely agree that if the site/product requires continuous profit through advertisements because otherwise it would not be able to continue operating then maybe that site/product does not need to continue existing.
In a civilised society, among other regulations, advertisements would be shown only to people that have pro-actively searched for a service or product.
I mean, we're basically heading towards a basic minimum income at that point, where you truncate the top 5% of the tax ladder and redistribute it to the bottom 25%. At that point, people could pay for services.
Dig a little into the idea that people can "pay" with their attention (and with their poor health, crappy buying decisions, personal freedoms) might fit the dictionary definition of sinister.
> truncate the top 5% of the tax ladder and redistribute it to the bottom 25%. At that point, people could pay for services.
why should those at the top 5% pay for more than basic subsistence to the 25% at the bottom? Welfare is for survival (and survival only), not for services that is not essential.
I suspect you have no idea what the “top 5%” looks like (in the US).
The bottom of that 5% looks like extremely upper middle class. Big houses, probably a vacation somewhere nice once a year, new cars fairly regularly, etc.
The middle most likely live in gated communities, with any kids going to private schools. They fly first/business class everywhere and can probably even afford to buy one of those tickets at a moments notice. Their closet is worth more than most people will earn in several years of working.
At the top end, these people have multiple tennis courts, pools, basketball courts, etc in their back yard. If there is something they want, they most likely have staff on hand to handle it. If they want to go somewhere, they hop in one of their private jets, helicopters, or chauffeured cars and go there. Oh, and they have a team of lawyers ensuring they never pay a dime in taxes.
Source: spent some time with each of these personas in my life.
This space is too small for a philosophical debate about the merits of UBI. Suffice it to say, when the top 5% has 1,000x more than they need for subsistence and the bottom 25% has never had access to more than 1x more than they need for subsistence, nothing will ever change. And more to the point, because having 10-20 times more than you need for subsistence has a demonstrable impact on your ability to generate more wealth 1) some will always get richer and pull away from the majority over time and 2) eventually the majority of people without subsistence amounts of wealth will rise up and kill you.
Maybe that wont happen in our current system for a generation or two. But then the question those 5% at the top have to ask themselves is whether they feel lucky to avoid an uprising against them in their lifetime.
Yeah, the trade-off of switching money for attention is not obviously beneficial to society. For example I can easily imagine that there's a significant mental health impact of being constantly advertised newer and better things.
> What would you recommend as an alternative to advertisements?
Not Having Enough Information is the least of anyone’s problems.
> I do think a lot of ads go too far, but I think some form of advertisement is necessary to get new awareness of new brands and products. Otherwise only the pre-established large brands and products will ever get sales, which would lead to a lack of competition and all the negatives that come with that.
This is a very post-hoc rationalization. Given that this isn’t how advertisement was invented and I have seen no evidence that this is how it works in practice, I don’t see a reason to accept it as a premise.
See political advertisement in America. That massively, massively favors the big players, not the little ones. Not only to boost them directly but also by actively smearing the other candidates, which moves the outsider candidates from the category of “never heard of” to “scumbag” in the minds of voters. (If you have no other information you have nothing else to go on.)
I would argue that larger brands have to have more ads to sway opinion because people are already familiar with their products. Coca-cola is one of the bigger advertisers, but everyone already knows what Coke tastes like and if they like it. Seeing dozens of Coke ads won't change someone's opinion much, compared with seeing a single ad for a new drink can take them from 100% unawareness of the product to knowing it exists.
Ads are not chiefly about awareness. They are about producing want, manufacturing desire. The idea that ads are about “hey we have a product, just thought we’d let you know my good sir” hasn’t been true for over a century.
You don’t advertise until you are confident that 90% of your potential market segment knows about you. You advertise continuously as long as the desire-making makes a profit according to whatever projections the marketing department makes.
You say that that Coca-cola is one of the biggest advertisers. At the same time everyone knows about them. Are they simply pouring money down the drain?
I'm not convinced. I've seen these ads work on myself- I see an Oreo ad and think, oh an Oreo does sound nice now actually. Or that something is popular and the best: why go to Bush Gardens when we all know that Disney is the Premiere theme park.
I do love AMD because its drivers are open source as opposed to nVidia. However, is "less issues" really the case? I sure hope not, for nVidia's sake.
My AMD graphics experience, on APUs and dedicated GPUs, has been plagued with basic issues and random crashes. AMD cards and their driver/firmware issues are without a question the IT product that affects my daily life most.
I tried AMD exactly once for Linux graphics, it was so unstable that I bought a NVIDIA card within a month and have never looked back. Potentially NVidias approach of staying as far away as possible from the Linux kernel abstractions is much saner than to play ball with them.
The immense majority of Linux users use these "abstractions". Even on the steam survey which is going to be extremely biased to favor nvidia users Intel/AMD GPUs are the majority, and if you include the Steam Deck then it's a no contest.
Compare the number of issues here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Vulkan. The only issue with the Nvidia driver is that there might be another (open-source) driver installed. AMD has several drivers which fail in different situations. The same has been true for OpenGL implementations, the only truly good implementation is the one by Nvidia, this is even well known in the PC game development industry.
What is this trying to prove? It's just one random page of a publicly editable wiki. AMD/Intel having more entries may just be because it is more popular (which it is indeed), or because (being opensource) it is actually easier to debug+solve problems, and/or a million other reasons.
Frankly, I think all the argument you need is that despite the huge advantage nvidia has on other platforms, it is almost completely reversed (even on steam) for Linux. It conveys very heavily that at least nvidia has a very poor reputation on Linux desktops.
In my experience, AMD still has some massive stability issues with the VBIOS of their GPUs. But it's not a component that the users can officially update on their own (whichever version the graphic card comes with when you receive it, is what you are stuck with), and most users are not even aware of its existence (even on Windows, the official driver doesn't provide any way to update it, or even check its version). Resulting in two seemingly similar cards, with the same drivers and firmware, behaving wildly differently in some case depending on the production batches the card was part of. Ask me how I know.
From what I remember from the ATI days (aah, sweet memories), it was often the case of either you card was working great and the driver was much more up to date with the latest kernel tech, or the card was a mess to make work under linux.
With NVidia, you were more sure that your car was going to work, but they were often not implementing certain kernel tech, or they had their own weird way to do things, which often mean that you had to configure Xorg and some app with some weird workaround for NVidia.
> I do love AMD because its drivers are open source as opposed to nVidia.
AMD's drivers are not really more open that Nvidia's. Similar to Nvidia's Open GPU Kernel Module's[0], AMD's opensource drivers are mostly a shim that wrap firmware blobs[1] in which the functionality you really care about is contained.
That's still a huge difference though. You get in kernel drivers that properly support wayland and don't require recompiling modules all the time. Plus all the hacks one has to go through to run wlroots based compositors with nvidia.
Normally, firmware does not make the driver itself less open source.
I get it and I'd also like for all components of my devices to be open source. Still, the parts I really care about and have any idea of how to fix stuff in, are open source.
For nvidia devices there is (or was? It's been a while) a whole other set of horrible user-space closed-source stuff.
> AMD's opensource drivers are mostly a shim that wrap firmware blobs
I went and checked the size of AMDs vs NVs firmware blobs and the 2 GSP firmware that are used for new NV cards in the linux-firmware package (https://archlinux.org/packages/core/any/linux-firmware as references for what I checked) result in it being the single largest folder in there (40MiB). Compare that to the largest amdgpu firmware file which is at 392KiB with the entire folder of 562 items being <20MiB.
Not to say that AMDs firmware is open source or so, it certainly isn't, but even comparing the amount that is possibly done is somewhat laughable.
AMD _has_ open drivers which include not only the kernel parts but also DRM, video acceleration, and mesa/llvm backends. NVIDIA doesn't release any of this.
Are you going to claim that because both have proprietary firmware, it doesn't matter if you are forced to run proprietary software to use it?
Using Mesa is already an order of improvement of openness, and frankly, calling it "a shim which wraps firmware" is a ridiculous thing to say.
As far as I am aware, ROCm itself has been open since its release in 2016. Whatever they were trying to convey will have little impact on ROCm being a valid competitor. Frankly, AMD should just trash ROCm and go all in on Intel's oneAPI. AMD seems helpless on software and reports are Google and Qualcomm have interest in pushing oneAPI.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/03/once-...