I feel like we shouldn’t copy the American flag waving and blind patriotism. I believe we’re much better off with a Federation of EU States than without it, and I see Schengen as a huge accomplishment, but the EU as an institution has many problems we shouldn’t be blind to.

Sure, but that’s a different issue, not covered under ‘imagine using Android’, I’d say. Also, as you said, used sales exist. One could argue that those also make a new Pixel more desirable, but that’s out of scope for me personally.

Few things one could ever do are perfect. I also think ‘rewarding’ Apple for recent decision, or at all, isn’t sensible or deserved. I also think that one or a few hardware sales probably aren’t going to have a significant effect on a corporation that size.

There are few tech products you can buy with a clean consciousness if you look at production and recycling practices as a whole. I still think buying a pixel, in whatever way, and putting Graphene on it, in this current moment, lands you with the best compromise between privacy, security, and freedom from ads and surveillance. But that’s subjective.

Android is still free enough for Graphene and other custom roms to be based on it. Which I feel is still a better option than iOS.

I don’t usually engage with trolls, but my train is late and I’m all out of productive things to do while I wait.

I am not going to debate whether this is AI. If you want to believe it isn’t, you’re welcome to do that. As for why it’d be bad - I believe that a technology that is trained on the work of many artists, without permission or compensation, that puts control of visual - I am not going to call them artistic - outputs under the control of a few tech oligarchs, is bad, and should be boycotted and sabotaged if possible. Even open weight models are, ultimately, usually trained by large corporations, and openly available by their ‘benevolence’. If they decide their next generation model will be closed source, it will be.

I also believe that the sheer amount of both monetary, and physical, resources currently expended on generative AI and related technologies is largely wasted, in a world where we can hardly afford such waste.

Also, please substantiate why using rather clear signifiers of ai generated content to claim something is ai generated is likely to cause harm, and why, in your eyes, ‘pro-ai’ aren’t required to proof the merit of their believes.

Oh, and while we’re at it - do you happen to know whether there is a seahorse emoji?

If you don’t see it, I dunno what to tell you.

I have a windows VM for Adobe products, etc. Works fine for my usecase. If you need full GPU Acceleration (e.g. for Premiere), it gets a bit more complicated, but is doable still, as long as you have an iGPU or second GPU.