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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • laziness about having to go through and reinstall everything on a clean install

    Package managers make this a breeze to the point that people upload their personal script to github so they can run one command to get all of their software and theming on a new PC lol.

    No need to even go that far, just pop open the app “store” (everything is free lol) and just click away at everything you want. Can probably get most of your stuff in 10 minutes tops.

    What even are the significant differences with different distros?

    It boils down to how effective the user experience & preference is and what the backend is built on (which usually affects user experience & preference lol).

    Mint is highly recommended because it cleans up a ton of the random stuff from Ubuntu upstream and maintains a clean and low cost (cpu/ram usage) desktop environment that’s very easy to use. It’s highly recommended for anyone who is new or inexperienced with linux or OSs in general and just wants to get on with life. The single downside is that its packages are not the latest and greatest, so its great for everything except gaming where you want the new stuff like drivers, proton upgrades, new features, etc.

    Fedora is what Ubuntu was 15 years ago, which is best all around user experience. It chooses very sensible but cutting edge packages which gives you excellent performance benefits of new tech like BTRFS/XFS without losing out on stability. It’s also the distro Linus himself uses because he finds it easy to just install and again, get on with life lol. Fedora also has excellent user docs and forums which is great if you need help with something. Only downside is I think you have to flick a switch (or run a command) to enable all video codecs because they don’t ship it on their main package repository since H264 & HEVC have weird licensing issues.

    Bazzite is a downstream of Fedora Silverblue, which is an atomic distro that makes it really hard to screw something up by using a read only root and rollback-able updates, similar to Android and SteamOS. It was specifically designed to make gaming on handhelds an easy out of box experience so you don’t have to manually set up stuff like touchscreen keyboards or power settings on non PC hardware. You can run it on PC if you’d like the benefit of the rollback image system which can unbork your machine super easy, though it already is quite hard to bork because the root filesystem is read only, so apps are installed in a similar way as Android apps (Flatpak).


    Learning Linux is actually quite intuitive (thankfully), and everything from the GUI perspective is mostly the same, if not an outright improvement in several areas. I would highly recommend playing with the live install of whichever distro you pick along with the desktop environment to get a feel for how it looks before you commit to an install.

    Desktop Environments are also not tied to distros. You can basically choose any DE on any distro (like Mint’s Cinnamon on Fedora), but the two biggest ones are GNOME (Mac like) and KDE (Windows like). I think KDE is way better than GNOME, but you can play with both & more to see which one you prefer.

    Your main issue to figure out when permanently switching is if there is any software or process that you rely on in Windows that would be different in Linux. For me it was switching from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice (there are also more, like OnlyOffice), which was completely painless since it was like 95% the same and could open up docx just fine.

    The other possible ones could be:

    • Adobe stuff (some stuff like PS works, but it’s a bit involved to setup the first time)
    • Games that use kernel level anticheat (big nono in linux because it breaks security)

    The second one is really what’s keeping a lot of people from making a permanent change which I’m hoping Valve can change with the upcoming Steam Machine because even for Windows, its like running a rootkit that really should not have that level of access to your PC.

    I don’t play any games that utilize it, but you might and it won’t work on linux until the publisher decides to let it: https://areweanticheatyet.com/. The comments are usually outdated back from when the game first released, so as long is it’s green or blue, it should run out of box.

    Some publishers (Epic Games mostly) are also just dicks that don’t use kernel level in some games but still choose not to enable linux support when compiling their game, despite all the major anitcheat vendors supporting linux and even mac.

    The good news is that for everything else, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll actually see an increase in performance from Windows. The biggest one for me was World of Warships which went from 2 minutes load times down to just 30 seconds on a hard drive, and about 15-20%+ FPS even when on an SSD.








  • If it weren’t for the massive silicon supply lockdown, I feel like we could easily see local models making it into consumer tech in the coming years and effectively replace all those casual users since you no longer have to pay a subscription to do regular/low effort tasks on whatever device you own. A lot of it has gotten really good, especially with lots of quantization techniques getting superseded by new ones each year.

    Actually I guess it could probably go the same way as cable and streaming. Eventually they’ll keep amping up the ante with the billing (because they always do), and people will just get turned off into a bunch of “cheaper” 3rd parties that have lower costs with some niche tricks, which will fragment the userbase too much.

    Also I haven’t looked into it, but do they advertise those $50 users separately from enterprise? I don’t really know anyone outside of “power” users that aren’t just using the $20 a month basic plans that give you enough tokens to get by (for now).

    I feel like they’re inflating their numbers from enterprise estimates because that’s where they can bait with cheap API prices and then hook with vendor lock in.



  • Got smacked with the pull request incident banner yesterday and now I’m actually considering to just move all my random personal repos to GitLab lol.

    I’ve been putting off spinning up Forgejo at home because I really need to clean up my homelab design (really abusing quadlets to the point where it would be easier to just do K8s), and I already know I’m gonna immediately waste all my time setting up a dumb CI/CD pipeline that looks really cool but just makes a big mess every time I commit a mistake because I am not in the mood of setting up a monkeychain of pre-commit hooks at home lmao.


  • The thing that kicked off 2007 was that CDOs ended being largely made up of crappy mortgage bonds which caused their massive trillions in debt “value” to dissappear when the underlying bonds failed which was tied to people not paying their mortgage on crappy adjustable mortgage loans.

    After getting bailed out with a shit ton of tax money, the banks agreed not to repeat the same mistake by ensuring their trillions of debt trading doesn’t depend on a single point of failure, so they’ve diversified it across multiple markets (like how a CDO was otherwise supposed to work)

    This type of warning shows up every now and then because the vulnerability is still there (since nothing really changed), but its much harder to knock it down without causing some type of collapse in multiple areas first.

    Right now, I think its estimated that private credit makes up about 40% of their investments into the AI boom, which is 1 trillion dollars exact. That’s proportionally less than what CDOs were with mortgage bonds, but it’s still entirely possible that a couple of hits in some businesses sectors could collapse the system.

    Iran actually succeeded in affecting multiple supply chains due to their strait closure, including AI, so if they continue on that path it might actually happen.



  • Tor is the only one that has that type of association because it’s the biggest, so it always gets mentioned in the media.

    Most people don’t even know that there are other darknets like i2p.

    On top of that, current Tor actually has pretty good latency and connection speeds when not on a bridge. Last time I tried it out, I was getting 80Mbps up/down. Several users here even regularly or exclusively access lemmy with Tor.

    I think i2p should actually make an effort to promote higher base bandwidth sharing out of box because it scales easily since its completely decentralized and everyone is a node, unlike Tor. It could easily become more user friendly if nodes weren’t starting off at like 128kbps speeds.

    Plus like the other reply mentioned, you have to go out of your way to find the criminal stuff on darknets. Most users would probably be accessing clearnet stuff anyway, and .onion addresses on clearnet sites that have dedicated onion addresses like duckduckgo or some social media platforms.






  • They bought into the colonial system from their very existence. Most of the GCC started out as British backed insurgents against the Ottman empire.

    Once they kicked the Ottomans out, they all established hard monarchies to solidify political power, and outsourced their security to the British, who took immediate advantage of the massive oil reserves discovered in the region.

    Post WWII, after the British empire collapsed, they transitioned to the US under the same deal.

    They make trillions of dollars through oil sold only in USD, which they reinvest into the US economy. The US gets to dictate their foreign policy and use them however they please in exchange.

    The benefactors are exclusively the royal families and their friends, which is why KSA and UAE are notorious for human trafficking and exploited foreign labor because they spend none of that money on actually developing their nation’s societies.

    They had multiple opportunities not to enter such an exploitable system, but they chose not to, with the grand exception being Iran, which was the only successful overthrow of a US/UK imposed government.



  • I don’t want to shame the user, but there was a recent discussion thread on npmplus where someone was using a compose file generated by an LLM and was confused why the hallucinated env variables weren’t working.

    The kicker is that npmplus literally gives you a comprehensive and complete compose file with every optional setting commented out with a brief description, so you can just copy and edit to your desire.

    Which of course the LLM decided to ignore anyway and come up with its own config options lol.

    On a somewhat related note, I feel like bug bounties these days have become sort of under subsidized for well developed applications. All the medium and lower findings payouts are pretty fair, but lots of the high/critical bounties seem a lot less than what I would expect, especially compared to some of the huge prize pools I’ve seen at some conventions (upwards of 50k USD).

    I have no idea how much they fetch on the black market, but it seems weird to me that something like an RCE receives less than 10k, which could easily be utilized by some APT to net millions in a more sophisticated ransomware attack.