...you are in a technology community? They're barely defending anything either, just a reasonable take about people saying the same thing about earlier technologies.
The people the paper talks about are the masses who think LLMs are "intelligent", then outsource their frontal lobe to Silicon Valley datacenters because it's seemingly easier. People who see LLMs as tools are much less (if at all) affected by this, if anything it's a trap for people who already have lower critical thinking skills in the first place and want GPUs to think for them.
Microsoft reported the same findings earlier this year, spooky to see a more academic institution report the same results. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf Abstract for those too lazy to click:
The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) in knowledge workflows raises questions about its impact on critical thinking skills and practices. We survey 319 knowledge workers to investigate 1) when and how they perceive the enaction of critical thinking when using GenAI, and 2) when and why GenAI affects their effort to do so. Participants shared 936 first-hand examples of using GenAI in work tasks. Quantitatively, when considering both task- and user-specific factors, a user’s task-specific self-confidence and confidence in GenAI are predictive of whether critical thinking is enacted and the effort of doing so in GenAI-assisted tasks. Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking. Qualitatively, GenAI shifts the nature of critical thinking toward information verification, response integration, and task stewardship. Our insights reveal new design challenges and opportunities for developing GenAI tools for knowledge work.
Too little, too late.
Good point.
In the case of GNOME they take their whole toolkit with them. Obviously you can switch DEs but it's still sad and annoying to see. From 5 years ago but still holds up: https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/horrible-gtk3-gnome-ui-design-is-leaking-into-ubuntu-mate-applications-in-20-04/22028/58.
Obviously not blatant money/data harvesting like with big tech companies, but corporate strong-arming has been done on Linux (systemD) and can be done again. Granted it's much harder on Linux (in the case of my SystemD example there are distros like Void or Artix) but there is still a risk imo.
Take with a grain of salt because the steam hardware survey has historically had sample size issues.
Very nice to see, only worry is that Linux will get enshittified (primarily by the GNOME people).
Raspberry Pis these days are overpriced, a cheaper mini PC/old Optiplex will do fine.
It would be faster, but note that eMMC is the worst kind of solid state drive out there and you should replace it as soon as possible, or at least don't store anything critical on it.