you can reasonably state that Trump and his regime are extremely corrupt and are unlikely to have any good faith interest in targeting American technology oligarchs via anti-trust

NOW you can.

In 2024, you couldn’t, because his previous admin, as bullshit-filled, corrupt and dishonest as it was, DID do some good things (mostly in a bad way - if it was all good, it was usually by accident). The anti-trust stuff was some of those good things.

And don’t get me wrong - I know full well that Trump never intended any of that stuff to benefit the “Average Joe”. I’m willing to bet my life’s savings that he and his admin did it to show “who’s the boss” to all the “tech bros” (who were famously anti-Trump at the time). I guess you could say it worked, considering how they all sided with him now.

But, again, we NOW know what the true intentions were. In 2024, looking at the first term, you COULD honestly say that Trump did some good in a fight against Big Tech.

And, again, all Yen said was that appointing someone known for being anti-Big Tech into such a high position in the DOJ was a good move, and stated the obvious (at the time) fact, that Dems were very much siding with Big Tech, which did not benefit the average citizen.

Yen clearly disrespect his customers by engaging in faux-anti-trust polemics

From a purely tribal (“us vs them”, “Republicans vs Democrats”) perspective (“anything they do is wrong and evil, anything we do is correct and good”) - yes, you’re right. From a more saner perspective of just looking at facts of life (anti-trust work, the appointment to the DOJ, Dems’ stance on Big Tech), I don’t see any disrespect at all.

context was provided in a relatively neutral way

Was it, though?

What started it I think is this twitter post praising trump

That’s a pretty non-neutral way to present things, considering nothing like that happened in said tweet.

If you ignore all the fast and loose they play with privacy, sure

I’m not ignoring it, I just never heard about it. Got some articles/examples?

It’s not an aggressive push if you ignore the part where they repeatedly use the foot in the door technique where they first promise they won’t do something, and then later do it anyways.

Can’t comment because I haven’t seen the original announcement. Are you sure it wasn’t to the tune of “it will be available for Business” and then people extrapolated that to mean “it will never, ever, ever-ever even remotely touch the ‘civilian’ accounts”?

They claim it is optional but they just shove a pop-up in your face about AI

Ah, yes, recommending new features, the Hitler of XXI c’s IT.

Come on now…

while misleading you about how it works

Please elaborate.

it predictably leads to many users thinking it’s off but being surprised when they find it turned on without them realizing it it’s not much consolation

I mean… Yeah, they added the button instead of having the user toggle a switch for the button to appear. But, as I’m reading it, it’s not the feature that is “on” or “off” in the sense that you seem to see it. It’s not “‘on’, therefore it’s doing something behind the scenes”. It’s “on” as in: “the button is visible, and if you click it, you can start interacting with it, but it does nothing unless you tell it to do something”. I may be wrong, of course, but I wouldn’t discount the entire company on the basis of a Reddit comment.

How do you figure that works? The server somehow corrects your spelling mistakes without reading the email containing the spelling mistake?

If you ask Scribe to correct spelling mistakes, then the prompt contains the email you asked it to correct, that seems fairly obvious. It doesn’t, however, “read your mailbox”, because it can’t.

He says Trump supports the little guy

1. Not “Trump” but “Republicans”, via the “tables have turned”.

2. Considering the actions of the Democrats at the time (viciously pro-Big Tech just on the basis of “let’s criticise everything Trump admin does”), and the actions of the Republicans at the time (last administration started a lot of the anti-trust moves against Big Tech), he’s right.

and prefers him to democrats

OK, quote that part of the tweet. I posted its entire content in another comment in this thread.

he says are the party of big business.

He’s right. They vehemently criticised all the anti-Big Tech actions from the Trump admin during his previous term.

I’m sorry you want to support people who support fascists.

I’m sorry your fundamentalism blinds to simple English.

Umm… Yes? What’s that got to do with anything?

aggressively pushed an AI service that, you guessed it, tries to read all the emails you write (…) (this article only covers the early portion of the debacle)

Did you actually read it, though?

1. They claim to respect privacy and - to date - have done nothing to suggest that they don’t.

2. It’s running on European-run Mistral.ai, which is subject to all the standard GDPR rules.

3. IT’S OPTIONAL (there goes the “aggressive push” bit)

4. NOTHING EXCEPT FOR THE PROMPT IS SENT TO MISTRAL (there goes the “reads all emails” bit)

I get it. People see “AI” and immediately panic. But it doesn’t seem like the panic HERE makes any sense at all.

quitting mastodon “because it’s too expensive to maintain”

I’d say having to either pay a guy to maintain the account or pay for software that allows cross-posting to both Twitter and Mastodon (with both having different limitations) gets expensive if you realise that they were getting minuscule engagement on Mastodon. It’s a shit move, but I get where they’re coming from. Same reason why Garuda Linux has a subreddit, but not a Lemmy Community.

but they’ve made a lot of other highly questionable decisions in a relatively short timespan

Nothing you’ve shown me so far is anywhere near the point where I’d be suspicious of them.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying they’re the end-all-be-all of privacy oriented services. There’s a bunch of stuff they do wrong (especially with how they farm engagement on their TT account), but as far as privacy and security themselves? I’ve yet to see an issue.

Yeah, if you cut up his Tweet into single sentences and then read each one completely outside of any context, then you could argue that Andy Yen got brainwashed into being MAGA.

But that’s not how language works.

HERE’S the full Tweet. For your convenience, I’ll quote it in full:

Great pick by @realDonaldTrump. 10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned. People forget that the current antitrust actions against Big Tech were started under the first Trump admin.

Nothing he wrote here are lies. The antitrust actions against Big Tech were started by Trump’s administration. The whole thing about banning Tik-Tok was their idea.

Appointing someone who’s known to be “anti-Big Tech” to the second highest position in the Antitrust Division at the DOJ objectively sounds great and is a good move.

So, with the Dems fighting to stop Trump admin’s moves against Big Tech, the tables were turned at the point in time the Tweet was written - in 2024, before the inauguration and the swearing-in of Trump!

I’m assuming that if you asked Yen today what he thinks about Trump and his administration, he’d have a vastly different opinion. But calling him a “Trump supporter” based off of that tweet is just… either ignorance, or some silly form of fundamentalism.

The whole “scandal” is bullshit.

Look at the linked tweet, mate. Trump appointed Gil Slater as Assistant Attorney General or the Antitrust Division.

Slater was known for being anti-Big Tech.

Yen is famously anti-Big Tech.

He calls the appointment a good choice.

That’s it. He doesn’t say “Trump is great”, he doesn’t say ANYTHING about Trump himself, he just comments that “appointing this person (who we know is anti-Big Tech) to a high position in the Antitrust Division is a good choice”.

But since we live in the world where saying “Trump, maybe, potentially, accidentally did something good” means you’re in a cult because you didn’t call to hang him for everything he does, we are where we are.

Alright, have you actually read his tweet?

I know you just linked it, but have you actually read it, the context, and given it some thought?

proton CEO starting spewing politcal BS

Context, please?

Hmm… There’s a connector from the card to 3-pin connector on the motherboard, but the description in the manual suggests that it only allows me to control RGB through it. As in: if I don’t connect it, they’ll just be on in whatever default state they’re in and that’s that.

I’ll look into this, thanks!

Oh, nice! Thanks for the info!

In general, I’d suggest being a bit more curious and playing around with stuff

Man, I’m 40, my 9-5 job is being curious, testing and retesting stuff. When I’m home, I just want to play some games…

Like you said you didn’t understand the options for OpenRGB and it sounds like you didn’t try installing it at all to eliminate it as an option before posting

Yeah. I’ve learned (through curiosity and testing, btw) that it’s super easy to break stuff in Linux, so I was a bit weary of installing third party software that does “something” to control the LEDs on a graphics card.

I did test it out yesterday, though. Sadly, does not recognise the GPU. It did recognise my mouse, though, which is neat.

It’s not like an app like OpenRGB is going to break your GPU or anything.

That’s the thing - I’m in a state where stuff works and is fine. That came after five reinstalls and three distros. Linux is not Windows - it’s fairly easy to do some unrecoverable* damage if you don’t know what you’re doing.

* yes, I know, technically everything is recoverable, but that requires knowledge and time, neither of which I have for this kind of stuff.

I would rather disable it on the OS level because I’m slightly paranoid that the dGPU dies at some point and then I can’t even access UEFI, because the iGPU is disabled.

Ooh, nice one! I’ll need to have a look for some detailed manuals/design diagrams of the Sapphire Pure, see if it’s mentioned.

Huh, a Windows VM might be a brilliant solution to this.

And now I’m wondering - could I maybe use something like Bottles or Wine to install the Windows software that handles Sapphire LEDs? Or would these apps not see the dGPU when virtualised like that?

someone suggested disconnecting the LEDs themselves, which is not something I’m willing to do with my 2-day old card

Sapphire Pure RX 9070 XT.

Sapphire Pure RX 9070 XT.

Ah, good to hear there’s hope! Thanks for that!