Hehe. I feel a bit “offended” by the …“stopped coding once they saw AI could do it.” Because that’s not my reality. I do a lot of computer hobby stuff, tinkering, electronics… And for me it does shit. Doing the maths for sensor values failed, can’t ever do memory allocation the way it’s done on microcontrollers. Fails with slightly complex regular software projects… I mean it can do some quick and dirty webdesign and code some rudimentary apps and games if you’re into that… Whatever people can do after they read a beginners coding book and a bit of copy-pasta. And it helps look up documentation. But I see zero reason to quit my hobbies with what AI can do as of today 😉

Doesn’t sound good, though. I mean a grandpa will consume a lot of media after he can’t get up and walk around any more. But that’s not how it’s supposed to be at 30yo. It is somehow modern society, though. Social interactions get displaced by para-social relations, like to a favorite streamer or influencer and you’d take part in their world. Combined with resignation we get people like incels. I’m about 10 years older and I still have a lot of friends who do stuff. Go running or whatever. Or they have kids and that takes up their time. I can see however, how things like social media steer attention away from human elements of life.

And what do they do now instead of memes and share stuff on social media? Did they detach and turn to useful hobbies like woodworking, or did they switch to consume only and they’re still on social media?

Well known in the industry how you don’t assess programmers by lines of code. You kind of want them to be efficient and clean. Spend their day thinking and design clever solutions… Not pump out lots of unmaintainable low quality stuff. And have a million lines of that by tomorrow. But yeah, guess every aspect of this aligns well. You should be using Linux by now. Or at least do the switch in the near future.

Interestingly enough, even the simpler things like removing the censoring of certain countries’ videos still look super wonky. I mean removing that mosaic is something I figure quite some people would be interested in. Yet technology doesn’t seem advanced enough to do it properly. And I’ve had a look at what people do with the video generators, and they’ve made quite some advancements. Pulling off clothes kinda works now. But it’s still fairly limited in all other aspects. They do a short clip of one specific thing. And seems they’re limited to one movement type and you’d need the next customized model for the next thing that happens. And then also make sure the people in the video look alike… Do 20 tries until those 5sec look somewhat realistic… And those clips don’t line up well. Fluids don’t seem to work, I have no clue whether they have some control over facial expressions or whatever is important when “acting” like realistic humans… I bet we’re still a bit away from it generating a video of “the act” from start to finish… I’d also predict this is a good use-case for generative AI, though. I mean why not? And it’ll lead to all kinds of issues, like the ability to generate videos of celebrities, other not-okay things… But all the human-made 30s clips aren’t really high quality to begin with either. So it shouldn’t be too hard for AI to get a foot in the door of the porn market.

But if there’s really 2-3 min videos out there like you said, I’d like to see them. Just for research purposes… Because all I’ve seen is longer videos with one thing repeating but nothing really happens. Or people stitching together clips, but they’ll be doing a million cuts to entirely different camera angles or narration to hide how all the clips aren’t really consistent.

Hmm. I think the main damage is done by other factors. I mean even before AI, everything turned into subscriptions and services. We use Office365 these days and the documents are in the cloud. There isn’t much need for Free Software Office Suites or mail clients anymore. Operating systems have less impact because honestly only old people use computers. Everyone else does their stuff on a phone. And then we finally crossed the barrier into a post-privacy world and people don’t care. And on top of that large companies take the nice database projects, libraries etc and monetize products with that. Without caring too much if that’s sustainable. And AI is one negative factor amongst many.

I think educational activities work best once they have some application to someones life. So it’d be something within the realm of a 7yo. And it’s not fun unless there’s a sense of achievement every now and then, along with all the stuff to learn. So probably not too steep of a learning curve.

Sadly they discontinued Lego Mindstorms. I think robotics is a great hands-on topic. People can grasp what they’re currently doing, why they do it, and what it’s good for. It has a tactile aspect, so you’ll train dexterity as well and gently connect the physical realm with the maths.

But other than that, I bet there’s a lot of things you can try. Design a website (and deploy a small webserver). Maybe some easy to use photo gallery if they have a tablet or camera. Maybe a Wordpress for them to write a Blog? They should be familiar with the concept of a diary. Kids love Minecraft, so maybe a Luanti server if you’re into Free Software. But learn how to add NPCs and animals, that is (or used to be?) a complicated process in Luanti and the world feels boring and empty without. A chat server to their loved ones could motivate them to read and write text (messages). Or skip the selfhosting aspect and do the kids games available for Linux. Paint, LibreOffice…

I like the recommendations from other people as well. Sadly I don’t know which kids programming language works best. I think I heard you can just go straight for Python as well. Not sure if that’s true or what age group that applies to. It’s a bit more involved to learn the syntax and why you need brackets around certain things etc but at least they get to learn the real deal and something properly useful. 7 might be a bit young, though. And there might be a language barrier. But that applies to all the computer stuff behind the scenes, unless you’re a native English speaker.

Nice. I guess that’s about when I was born, so I only remember copying 3½-inch floppy disks for friends. And it was music on my cassettes. 😉 But I don’t remember it being called piracy either. We had a lot of games, though. Monkey Island 2 and a nice collection of DOS games. None of them were bought in a store. And I remember struggling with the English language, some games were off the table since I didn’t learn English until middle school.

I guess copying things lost some of the social aspect after that. We shared a lot of stuff in digital form after CD writers became affordable in the mid- to late 90s. But these days you’d sit alone in front of the computer and just download whatever. And pretty much everything is available. Or just connect a phone to the car and have arbitrary things to listen to. Instead of a fixed set of 3 pre-made casettes for the entire summer vacation road trip.

No idea what books to recommend, but the concept of piracy is very old. That translated to the realm of home computers, pretty much when home computers were invented and software licensing became a thing. People would share floppy disks and cassettes. And then stuff got easier with modems and the internet.

https://kdenlive.org/

It’s the default open-source video editor and pretty much an allrounder.

If you just want something simple that does the job, you can try a turnkey solution like YunoHost. There’s several other ones out there. Some with containers, some with more or less pre-packaged software… If you want to learn more during the process, maybe don’t and do it yourself because these things don’t teach you a lot. There’s some resources like the awesome-selfhosted list in the sidebar of this community. But I think for installing services you’d mainly look at the specific documentation of the specific service you’re just about to tackle. And maybe read up on Docker containers etc to judge whether you want to do it that way.

Or maybe @[email protected] would like to do that for us?

Thanks. Yeah those would be great in an awesome-webhosting list. Or something concerned with household or businesses. But as far as I know you’re supposed to stick with a topic with those awesome lists and not make random lists of random projects… I’ve filed a bug report in the meantime: https://github.com/ccbikai/awesome-homelab/issues/24

Lol. Why isn’t Forgejo in Development but some predecessors are? And Gitea is listed twice. And why is a tower defense game listed under Automation? Also I think a few projects I use are missing. Why isn’t the most common content management system there? The second most common password manager? The reverse proxy everyone uses? And who on earth needs customer live chat and a lot of business-scale website analytics, webshop systems and CRM and ERP in their homelab?? I’m sorry but this looks like slop.

I use LibreWolf on the computer and IronWolf on the phone. Both modified versions of Firefox, both Free Software. Not sure what they do with AI, but as they’re both aimed at privacy, I’d expect them to disable AI features which send data to external services.

Grok is tuned to view Elon Musk as its God, Lord and Saviour, source of truth… And deny the holocaust. So naturally it’d say things like this.

Edit: And grok.com doesn’t. It says it would NOT flip any switch to kill 16M innocent people. Maybe this is just the persona it assumes on X… If someone doesn’t like it, I’d recommend to quit X. Try Mastodon or Bluesky instead.

I’m not sure if this translates to the content creators. There’s many of them whom I really like to watch who do (or did) Youtube as a business model. Tom Scott being one example or Derek Muller (Veritasium). I’m subscribed to many more. Simplicissimus and their yet better second channel (in German). We wouldn’t have those without monetization. The platform of course went shit over time. Fortunately my Ad blocker still works and thanks to Sponsorblock my experience is fairly alright… But personally - I’m split on this question. We had quite the amount of entertainment before monetization but I think a large amount of quality content also arrived after that, and because of it. Those people would be working some office job today if it wasn’t to Youtube. And I (and the world) would miss out… On the other hand we got MrBeast, a lot of fake cooking videos…

One thing I did is connect to the smart home (Home Assistant) and the NAS running at home. Some internet service providers don’t provide proper IPv4 addresses any more so IPv6 is the most convenient way to connect. This doesn’t require a VPN provider, though.

As far as I know it uses the B.A.T.M.A.N. mesh protocol. On a channel within the regular 2.4GHz wifi spectrum. So no license needed unless it collides with laws for point-to-point beams. All people communicating to each other obviously need to agree on a channel. It comes with some hierarchy where I’m at. There are local chapters who make up some config and who also operate nodes and exit nodes into the internet. These are necessary because Germany has stupid laws.

There’s Freifunk as well!

They’re fairly transparent with everything. You could call it open-source. And it’s supposed to be the first large model which complies with the EU AI regulations. They try to make an effort not to include too much material from people who objected to AI use, and there is a way to opt out. They did not deliberately pirate books like Meta did. But with that said, it’s still AI. Training needs a lot of water and energy. Though I think this Alps supercomputing center tries to be carbon-neutral and use Swiss hydropower. Whatever that means in practice. Opt-out is probably the best thing we can do but it’s not exactly consent from the authors of the training material. And I don’t think there is a way to compensate them. And AI can of course be problematic once used, so that depends on what people do with it.

I’d call it more ethical (than other models). But I don’t see how it’d be strictly ethical in absolute terms. Looks to me like an effort to improve, maybe substantially on what other people did. But there’s still a lot of problematic aspects of AI which scientists and society hasn’t addressed yet.