• 5 Posts
  • 52 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • I put pop!_os on my surface pro 8 in an hour a week ago, having used only windows or macos for the past decade. No issues. They’ve upstreamed enough stuff to the linux kernel that everything except camera worked even without the surface_linux kernel. Steam runs just fine on it, as do all the games I’ve tried so far (obviously hardware is trash for gaming, but hey, if it was playable on windows, it’ll probably be smoother on linux at this point). If linux works on a microsoft surface, there’s no way that it won’t work on whatever machine you happen to have.

    Back up your files, pick a distro, unlock your bootloader, and just go for it. Only requirement is to know how to… Run commands in a terminal.

    No regrets.





  • It’s a good rule of thumb that if you do not pay, as the result of some sort of contract, for the service of security, and you do not own the software or hosting within which you expect something to be secure, then you don’t actually have any security.

    The browser could be storing your data in plain text, and making it available to other software or malware on your system (or even on websites you visit, or to scripts which run in ads on websites you visit); the browser could be making it available to their internal tools or external “partners”; the browser could be storing it in the cloud and be subject to a breach for which you will never receive a cent; the browser could be doing everything “right” right now, but change their terms next week and your convenience will turn into a liability.

    Host it yourself, as you do with bitwarden, and manage your own security, or pay a company to host it who makes it their business and is therefore legally liable if they screw up.

    Crane’s law.


  • If you are skilled at task or knowledgeable in a field, you are better able to provide a nuanced prompt that will be more likely to give a reasonable result, and you can also judge that result appropriately. It becomes an AI-assisted task, rather than an AI-accomplished one. Then you trade your brainpower and time that you would have spent doing that task for a bit of free time and a scorched planet to live on.

    That said, once you realize how often a “good” prompt in a field you are knowledgeable in still yields shit results, it becomes pretty clear that the mediocre prompts you’ll write for tasks you don’t know how to do are probably going to give back slop (so your instinct is spot on). I think AI evangelist users are succumbing to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.




  • You’re resorting to personal attacks without knowing who I am, what I do, what I do or don’t have on the wall behind me. You apply a blanket label on all people who you class a certain way, and when I disagree with your label and its implications, and recommend nuance, you class me further.

    It sounds like you think very highly of yourself, or lowly of everyone else, or both.

    What makes your opinions here worthwhile?






  • In his show Taskmaster he is well known for both writing tasks and making jokes through intentionally obtuse language and uncommon phrasing. Frequently the “obvious” interpretation of a task turns out to be non-obvious, or the answer to a riddle is this kind of nondeterministic situation that trips up the contestants and makes for better funny.

    Which is to say, the author of the headline is a troll, and did it internationally to bait this very kind of conversation. You won’t know which way they sliced the giraffe unless you read the entire thing! Of course, after you do, you still won’t know.