I think you’re mistaken there.

Wine is a vanilla Linux executable that runs as the user who launched it. The Windows program it runs thus also runs under that user. That’s possible because Wine doesn’t do anything system-wide (like intercepting calls or anything), it already gave the process its own version of i.e. LoadLibrary() (the Windows API function to load a DLL) and can happily remap any loaded DLL to Wine’s reimplementation of said DLL as needed.

Here are, for example, the processes created when I run Paint Shop Pro on my system (the leftmost column indicates the user each process is running as):

Also, some advice from WineHQ:

After reading, the gist of it seems to be:

• Vanilla far-right indoctrinated dumbo (his vision: “Reds” welcome, “Blues” not, “Anti-Blue Propaganda” on public view screens)
• Wants exploitative capitalism on steroids with companies controlling everyone’s lives completely
• Claims current capitalism is only bad because it’s “woke capitalism” which he claims the “ruling class” is pushing
• Wants tech bros to butter up police and give security staff jobs to their children as a favor, i.e. intentional social classism

.

In short, just another out of touch entrepreneur who sells snake oil cures to people suffering in the current system, so that they may invite in the boot that stomps them down for good.

I love that example. Microsoft’s Copilot (based on GTP-4) immediately doesn’t disappoint:

It’s annoying that for many things, like basic programming tasks, it manages to generate reasonable output that is good enough to goat people into trusting it, yet hallucinates very obviously wrong stuff or follows completely insane approaches on anything off the beaten path. Every other day, I have to spend an hour to justify to a coworker why I wrote code this way when the AI has given him another “great” suggestion, like opening a hidden window with an UI control to query a database instead of going through our ORM.

I assume that Twitter still has tons of managers and team leads that allowed this and have their own part of the responsibility. However, Musk is known to be a choleric with a mercurial temper, someone who makes grand public announcements and then pushes his companies to release stuff that isn’t nearly ready for production. Often it’s “do or get fired”.

So… an unshackled AI generating official posts, no human hired to curate the front page, headlines controlled through up-voting by trolls and foreign influence campaigns, all running unchecked in the name of “free speech” – that’s very much on brand for a Musk-run business, I’d say.

Vox is a reputable and very thorough news source, though, usually worth the read.

This two-pager, for example, highlights false Twitter journalists popping in Baltimore to politically spin the recent bridge collapse.

Considering the teams tasked with containing political opinion manipulation campaigns were the first to go, I think that is exactly what the acquisition boils down to. A license to manipulate and meddle in public discussion for anyone rich or powerful enough (and of a political disposition agreeable to Musk’s increasingly GOP/Russia-indoctrinated mind).

It’s a “public town square” where the major approvingly smiles as groups of paid shills and remote-controlled opinion pushers insert themselves into discussions and roughen up people they notice going against the opinions they push.

For my taste, framing CCC as a “Washington/Brussels” project is a far too close to what Russian smearbots do (link everything unpopular back to their current hate objects, i.e. foster resentment against the EU, liberals, etc.).

It looks very much like the CCC is an international organization funded and controlled by the far right.

Their website states:

Which countries is CCC active in?

The CCC works currently with tens of thousands of consumers and partner organizations in North America, Europe, South America, South Africa, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and many more.

Their colorful funding history:

Big Tobacco and right-wing US billionaires funding anti-regulation hardliners in the EU

A perfect demonstration of how Russian indoctrination works right here.

Original reporting: A major disinfo attack against Europe being prepared by Russia is uncovered through diligent investigation and published and reported on.

The response:

• 1. divert to farmer’s dissatisfaction with several policies
• 2. cast disinfo reports as underhanded attempts (by politician Russia wants gone) to arrogantly brush off farmer’s concerns (which the report never even related to)
• 3. claim Macron is selling out to EU (here, have a serving of anti-EU sentiment, too)
• 4. vaccinate reader against the disinfo being countered (“everyone who tells you otherwise belittles you and hates you, join us in our righteous anger”)

Emotional framing:

Nationalists, agricultural owner-operators, and farmers exposed to rising interest rates

“truckloads of exported Ukranian agricultural salvage” vs. “fresh French produce”

we’re getting an earful about how all these local yokels are hoodwinked by anti-EU Russian Propaganda

Macron for selling out the agg sector to financial interests in Brussels

“If you’re not in favor of (insert supposed evil acts described in lurid way), then you’re a secret spy for Putin and a traitor.”

Result: The reader comes out the other end an angry person, outraged about the plight of farmers, outraged again at disinfo reports supposedly serving to silence them, outraged once more at a France politician selling them out to the EU, EU painted as high-and-mighty villain, automatic anger against anyone who tells them a different viewpoint ready to trigger.

I’m expecting a really nasty autumn this year. A big chunk of Russia’s campaign against Europe is held up by Ukraine and they badly need a stooge US president again.

Musk also opened Twitter’s doors wide for state-sponsored manipulation and agitation campaigns. All protections are offline and the teams are gone, under the guise of free speech.

Considering that…

• The Republicans encouraged him multiple times to buy it
• He quickly stopped blocking (mainly Russian) state-sponsored social manipulation campaigns
• He allowed right wing agitators back on the platform
• He almost immediately banned droves of journalists that weren’t blindly Pro-Russia and Pro-GOP.
• He censored / banned all kinds of activists that pushed back against authoritarian (Russia-backed) regimes in other countries

…I have a hunch that he also served the interests of certain political actors with the acquisition. Public town square my lower backside.

I agree that a lot of human behavior (on the micro as well as macro level) is just following learned patterns. On the other hand, I also think we’re far ahead - for now - in that we (can) have a meta context - a goal and an awareness of our own intent.

For example, when we solve a math problem, we don’t just let intuitive patterns run and blurt out numbers, we know that this is a rigid, deterministic discipline that needs to be followed. We observe and guide our own thought processes.

That requires at least a recurrent network and at higher levels, some form of self awareness. And any LLM is, when it runs (rather than being trained), completely static, feed-forward (it gets some 2000 words (or 32000+ as of GPT-4 Turbo) fed to its input synapses, each neuron layer gets to fire once and then the final neuron layer contains the likelihoods for each possible next word.)

Indeed.

Perhaps I can sell them my new “ADE-651 Mark II” with advanced AI analysis? (Search “ADE-651” if you lack context and want to have a laugh).

Is this a case of “here, LLM trained on millions of lines of text from cold war novels, fictional alien invasions, nuclear apocalypses and the like, please assume there is a tense diplomatic situation and write the next actions taken by either party” ?

But it’s good that the researchers made explicit what should be clear: these LLMs aren’t thinking/reasoning “AI” that is being consulted, they just serve up a remix of likely sentences that might reasonably follow the gist of the provided prior text (“context”). A corrupted hive mind of fiction authors and actions that served their ends of telling a story.

That being said, I could imagine /some/ use if an LLM was trained/retrained on exclusively verified information describing real actions and outcomes in 20th century military history. It could serve as brainstorming aid, to point out possible actions or possible responses of the opponent which decision makers might not have thought of.

Bill Clinton, chief executive of U.S. Government, a division of MCI-WorldCom, praised Monday’s merger as “an excellent move.”

I’ll be… they even predicted the “sovereign citizen” movement!

Leave for nothing if UBI is high enough. Otherwise, couch-surf. Temporarily move to a shared house. Or just have a few months extra to hunt for a job without getting evicted.

I think we just have to disagree on whether a vast cloud of progressive ideas or total focus on one or two realistic ideas is better.

My belief is that it helps. That opposition is good. Let them waste all their ammo, let them help spread the message, let them get the impression that there are so many progressive demands that it shifts the general tone. Some ideas or aspects of ideas will stick, even with the opposition.

And while they’re fighting hippie space pirates, we’ll pass an automatic minimum wage adjustment. Progressives have been on the defense far too long. I want a new 1968 :)

It’s just an example for a wild idea that might inspire people. But… Wikipedia “Community Gardening”

It’s a pretty popular concept in the UK. Takes less space than parks, is a great place to meet like-minded people, reduce food costs and the community aspect means you can even go on vacation since its a group of people caring for the plants.

Agreed, companies will try to game any such regulations (just like tax laws, labor laws and such, those just had a lot of time to mature). The “free-time-for-gardening” program, too, would make city dwellers without access to community gardens balk and maybe fake gardens with rubber plants would become a thing to claim that gardening time without gardening :)

Regarding UBI, the counter argument is that if companies like Walmart paid scraps for hard work, it would allow people to simply leave. Same for cleaning sewers or emptying trash bins. It could be an instrument that adjusts economic rewards away from “how much revenue does the worker generate” towards “how bearable is the work.”

Should we really be exploring experimental economic policies when we can’t even implement the economic policies that have been proven to work?

How about we focus on tax the rich, raise minimum wage. Once those are implemented then we can brainstorm other ideas.

I believe we should do both. This “waiting for the right moment” or “focus on one thing only” can be a fallacy, imho, that leads to well polished counters from reactionaries and less motivation in supporters.

• I think having more space hippie ideas will inspire many more people than boring minimum wage or tax increase fights, so it may well recruit more people and thus bring more pressure towards better labor.
• I also think it would help overwhelm counter-messaging. Imagine think tanks would have to counter a hundred wild ideas rather and being able to fine tune messaging against the small number of what we have now.
• Symbiosis: if everyone has two or three inspiring wild ideas floating in their heads, it shifts views in general. And beliefs that support a sexy solar punk utopia will also be applicable to boring labor reform ideas.
• With the whole climate situation and resource scarcity (like oil and rare earths), de-growth is coming eventually. For the current system, that would likely mean an endless great depression. Brainstorming crazy ideas for a less consumerist type of economy may well be a boon.

I know this is naive, but sometimes I wish we’d be bolder in brainstorming alternative ways the economy could work.

Imagine, for example, the IRS would send a yearly, mandatory “happiness questionnaire” to all employees of a company (compare the “world happiness report”). This questionnaire then would have a major influence on how much taxes the company has to pay, so much that it’s cheaper to make employees happy and content than to squeeze them for every ounce of labor they can give.

Or an official switch to 6 hour days, except to get those 2 hours less, you have to use them for growing your own food. Shorter workdays, more time with family, more self-reliance. And a strong motivation for cities to provide more green spaces and community gardens.

Very naive ideas with lots of problems, yes, but I wish we wouldn’t have the concept of revenue generation so thoroughly encrusted in our heads as the guiding principle of all we do and dream of.

You can set up different user accounts and grant them different levels of access and functionality (i.e. disallow CPU-hogging transcodes). Users can also be restricted by MAC and hidden from the login screen unless you know the exact login name.

I have Jellyfin on my NAS and the “TV” user with which the living room TV is logged in only has permission to see certain folders of my movie library.

A quick check seems to indicate that these, too, should work as easily as I say (there’s even a tool on GitHub that gives you the same level of control as the official Windows app: https://github.com/GoXLR-on-Linux/GoXLR-Utility).

But I know sometimes it’s different in the real world. Kernel too old, chosen distro has a weird audio setup, desktop environment (Gnome/KDE) only acknowledges the presence of the device if it was already connected on boot-up, etc. etc.