Tech Bros make a panopticon and call it a novel approach

Unfortunately it requires vulkan (it says 1.3, but because vulkan is based on extensions so it probably doesn’t require the full 1.3). So if you have the Intel GMA 950 that’s in the motherboard for your Pentium 4 HT is not supported. But I’m confident that an AMD HD 6000 from 2010 with the Mesa driver “terakan” is enough to run it. And theoretically one could implement vulkan even for an HD 2000 from 2007, but it’s an unreasonable effort.

If they made an opengl backend, you would be golden, as the Mesa driver i915 implements opengl 2.1 for the GMA 950, and it’s definitely enough to run an editor

P.s.: and I sure did not spend the last 30 minutes looking up vulkan hardware

You forgot the part where TeX was created by a CS professor because he didn’t like how his editor printed the formulas in his book

Well, if you are not gonna use Nvidia’s extra stuff, buy an AMD, by all means.

But what you say is disingenuous. “AI and other software” is not entirely unrelated to gaming. Things like hairworks, physx, and most gameworks in general run on CUDA. And for AI (which I don’t care about that much) there is DLSS, and they are working on AI enhanced rendering.

Most games don’t use those technologies, but some do, and you will miss out on those.

I’m literally using a full AMD PC right now. I don’t like Nvidia as much as the next person. I think they use terrible monopolistic practices, and if the competition were on par I would not buy Nvidia. But they aren’t.

On Windows, Nvidia without thinking twice. On Linux, depends, on rDNA 4 and the next release of Nvidia drivers, but probably still Nvidia.

Unfortunately, despite how much I would rather buy from someone else, AMD’s products are just inferior, especially software.

Examples of AMD being worse:

• AMD’s implementation of opengl is a joke, the open source implementation used on Linux is several times faster and made for free by volunteers, without internal knowledge
• AMD will never run physx, which is every day less relevant, but if AMD from the past had proposed an alternative we would have a standardized physics extension in DirectX by now, like with dlss
• AMD’s ray accelerators are “incomplete” compared to Nvidia RT cores, which is why ray tracing is better on Nvidia, and which is why with rDNA 4 they are changing how they work
• GCN was terrible and very different from Nvidia’s architecture, it was hard to optimize for both. rDNA is more similar, but now AMD has a plethora of old junk to maintain compatible with rDNA
• Nvidia has been constantly investing in new software technologies (nowadays it’s mainly AI), AMD didn’t and now it’s always playing catch up

AMD also has its wins, for example:

• They often make their stuff open source, mainly because it’s convenient for its underdog position
• Has a pretty good software stack on Linux (much better than on windows) partly because it’s not entirely done by them
• Nvidia has been a bad faith actor for many years on the Linux space, even if it’s in its redemption arc
• Modern GPU seems to be catching up in compute performance
• AMD is less greedy with VRAM, mainly because they are less at risk of competing with their own enterprise lineup
• Current Nvidia’s prices are stupid

I would still prefer Nvidia right now, but maybe it’s gonna change with the next releases.

P.s. I have used a GTX 1060, an RX 480, and a Vega 56

Aren’t GPUs better at mining?

If it’s the flatpak version, try the package manager one. The one on flathub didn’t integrate very well and only really worked for steam games.

This research challenges the standard argument that the mere existence of a product implies positive welfare for its users.

I know this probably means something I don’t understand, but it feels so stupid… Like, what about asbestos?

The idea is that having “many eyes” on the code, the vulnerabilities should be found and solved more readily. BUT… of course this is true only for big projects which actually do have many contributors.

Viceversa, while skilled (or high budget) attackers can still find vulnerabilities in proprietary software (think of how people still crack consoles and games), good-intentioned people cannot contribute to weed out these vulnerabilities.

But most important of all, it’s trust. There is no way to be sure that a proprietary piece of software is actually as secure or respectful of privacy as it claims to be. Whatsapp claims to have end to end encryption, but you can’t tell if it’s truly secure or if it has a backdoor or some other spyware in it. For OSS instead you can always read the code yourself, or trust the many eyes that did.

Some months ago it came out that as soon as windows 11 is boot up for the first time, it starts contacting services like Amazon and steam (allowing for tracking) before even asking for license and privacy agreement. The same thing could not happen in Linux because the code is open.

Also, by using proprietary software from big corporations you give them power over your infrastructure and your work, and possibly on other people interacting with you. Which is definitely not poggers.