Like I did something pointless that will likely encourage them to pester me about it relentlessly for months because “everyone needs friends”?

Similar here. I’ve never had many friends, but, the older I get, the more exhausting I find human interaction (I am an #aspie), I started going on vacations of 4+ weeks on an island where I only interacted at the supermarket, because I had to, decades ago. I very deliberately do not maintain any friendships (and I’m married to a very similar mind, we live apart for years and only “visit” each other every couple of weeks). Whenever someone expresses their exasperation that I could want it that I am seriously pissed off. Just imagine that being forced to interact is as bad as being forced to be alone, ffs.

I personally go with QubesOS which uses VMs to compartmentalize. It doesn’t reduce the risk of a supply chain attack itself (fedora & debian by default), but if your VMs only contain the bare minimum for a given task the risk of having a compromised package installed is lower than in a full-featured system and any compromise is also contained to that VM.

Absolutely in favour, the non-free blobs are a persistent thorn in my side. I myself have always been tempted to replace all the fedora and debian templates with alpine or OpenBSD to get smaller VMs (and without systemd), built as many things as unikernels as possible (e.g. the MirageOS firewall), and I’d love if X11 got replaced with Wayland (that one is hard, the X11 modifications are kind of the core of what Qubes provides).

Yes and no. Buying a RiscV CPU has the same issues as buying an arm or x86_64, and building one from discrete components (which is absolutelt feasible, there’s multiple people that have done it) still means you might recreate some subtle and deliberate flaw in the spec (How sure are you there is none? That is the whole question). And trusting a FLOSS BIOS over a proprietary one is just accepting a different trust level/anchor. My whole point was that ultimately you cannot perfectly trust anything you haven’t designed and built yourself (and even that depends on this reality not being a malicious simulation; I am being serious), so you’ll need to consciously decide what trade-offs, if any, you’re willing to make.

Ultimately, you need to build your own CPU (and everything else) from discrete components (assuming the universe is not a malicious simulation, of course) and bootstrap on it by writing you first assembler in machine code (You ought to come up with everything from scratch, any exisiting designs might have subtle deliberate vulnerabilities). The actual question is at which point you’re willing to risk a compromised supply chain, i.e. how far does your, quite warranted, paranoia go.

What am I supposed to do?

Learning to write a problem description that is remotely intelligible would be a start. What Distro are you on? What are you trying to accomplish? What have you tried? What error occurs (error messages or what expectations you have that are not met), etc.

Well, I don’t have kids, but I think I’d rather know they don’t care, so I can work on that instead of being annoyed the next time it inevitably happens again…

My downvote stays; That is an absolutely atrocious title for it.

Not everyone enjoys the same things and that’s ok. I’d rather rip out my own fingernails than spend any time with “ai chat” shrug

Sure, just not something I am comfortable actively recommending myself.

I cannot, in good conscience, recommend a project with a lead that is as verbally abusive and utterly unable to appreciate even highly constructive criticism as Micay, technical merits notwithstanding. I am fine when others recommend it though.

Let’s call a spade a spade: He is a raging asshole with severe clinical paranoia. I’m literally certain that if he saw this post he’d accuse me of being a shill for calyxos and to never fucking again interact with any grapheneos account. Both have happened to me before (Hence I refuse to ever interact with his troupe again, even though I use graphene and agree with the vast majority of its technical decisions; I have also stopped actively recommending it to anyone, the social media experience is simply way too attrocious).

The counting systems were always bullshit. Different people and at different times have wildly different speech tempo. What you can do is trying to find your rhythm by actually saying a word repeatedly as fast as you can without mispronouncing and counting how often you can do that in a minute; That’ll give you a fairly accurate measure you can use.

If you can find a way, so can “the bad guys™”. If you feel charitable towards MS do a “responsible disclosure” and inform them and agree to a release embargo, so they can fix it first; If you don’t, do a “full disclosure” and just publish =^_^=

/me walks onto the poop deck :-P

I personally favour Alpine Linux for its minimalism, but Devuan or Debian are fine, and more familiar choices, too. Depending on what you intend to run, especially appliance-like things, OpenBSD might be a good alternative.

Thx. No, I have yet to see anything from an LLM that I consider remotely useful. And I wouldn’t be caught dead leting one anywhere near any system integration (Just look at all of the AWS outages in the past months). I continue to remain utterly baffled whenever anyone uses them for anything (other than maybe image generation, but I’d rather pay a small artist for those); I mean, their “summaries” are just as much random garbage as their citations… They look reasonable, but that’s all they do. I think LLMs are a neat parlor trick that is going to cost us, as a species, a lot, without getting us any closer to AGI.

Also: I apologize for my wording. I had an extremely strong emotional reaction, and I shouod have stopped and thought.

I’m trying. For the record: The global-warming-increasing tech-bro-billionaire-owned LSD-tripping babble-automatons are not exactly universally applauded. Saying anything about them requires care.