We didn’t call them AI because they weren’t (and aren’t) intelligent, but marketing companies eventually realized there were trillions of dollars to be made convincing people they were intelligent and created models explicitly designed to convince people of things like the idea that they are intelligent and can have genuine conversations like a real human and create real art like a real human and totally aren’t just empty-headedly mimicking thousands of years of human conversation and art, and immediately used them to convince people that the models themselves were intelligent (and many other things besides). Given that marketing and advertising literally exist to convince people of various things and have become exceedingly good at it, it’s really a brilliant business move and seems to be working great for them.

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That’s the fun part, you can’t. A lot depends on the details here. You’re looking for a one-size-fits-all answer to a very not-one-size situation.

In 99% of cases a major crime like a kidnapping that I know I didn’t have anything to do with should be reported immediately, and “speaking to the police” only ceases when I become aware they have decided to suspect my involvement. In the other 1% of cases, I have understood how bad it looks and I’m talking immediately to the best lawyer I can find and letting them do all the talking from the beginning.

It’s not a lack of empathy as much as a kind of educated empathy. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. We historically have a notorious and awful track record of nation building, and I think a lot of people believe this boils down to the fact that it’s very difficult to impose a national identity on people from outside, even with direct, physical intervention. We have tried to get around this at times by only supporting what we believe are legitimate independence movements which clearly already possess a strong national identity. Unfortunately even those tend to devolve into ethnic cleansing campaigns and dictatorship as soon as we leave. And if we don’t leave, then we have to stay there forever and we have to keep interfering every time things threaten to go off the rails and then it becomes paternalistic colonialism.

Keep in mind too that a lot of people living under oppressive regimes are genuinely damaged people and there is nothing but time that can heal those wounds. They are traumatized, they are angry, they have lost loved ones, they have been subjected to horrors we can only imagine and clinically document, without feeling the fear and emotional scars those things inflicted on millions of people. If you suddenly give them back power again, even small amounts of power, it is in human nature for many to seek revenge for what they’ve gone through (and not always against the right people). They’ve learned how to operate within the context of a deeply flawed and dangerous regime, and it is natural to adopt some of the same tools and practices. As resilient as the human spirit is it still is difficult to teach new ways.

At some point, people have got to learn to stand on their own two feet and find a way to build an equal, fair and just nation for all of themselves, by all the people and for all the people. While we certainly can do a better job of supporting this, we can’t do it for them and our attempts to do so have typically ranged from highly questionable to disastrous and extremely counterproductive. We fought for our own freedom, and it is not out of selfishness that we tell them they must fight for their own too. It’s not that we enjoy the fighting, it’s that as awful as it is, it appears necessary to get that hostility out into the open and understood to be as awful as it is, for a successful outcome to be possible.

On the other hand, even that hasn’t helped in Israel/Palestine where it seems like we’ve tried almost everything and failed. The fact is, nobody has the answers. We don’t know the way to fix this. We are always trying, even when it doesn’t seem like it, but we have to be abundantly cautious that we’re not making it worse, because we often are. For that matter, we have our own problems, and we haven’t figured those out either. Just because we’re doing much better than the worst countries in the world or even much better than average doesn’t mean we’ve got it all figured out or even that we’re doing anything right at all.

The short answer: For a router, either find an off-the-shelf Wifi router that is supported by OpenWRT (very nice and very easy), or (and this is my personal preference) build your own firewall mini PC which will be much more complex and powerful to the point of complete overkill but also fully controllable right down to the network stack (and what’s the point of a homelab if not fiddling around with such things?).

You can run OpenWRT directly on full AMD64 PC if you want, or even just a Raspberry Pi (some people appear to have had good luck with the 4B and 5, though I don’t know the specifics of that approach) The famous PfSense would be another option, based on BSD. I used to use that, but I really wanted something directly Linux-based.

Which brings us to the fact that you can also even use a standard Linux distro like Debian and install all the tools you want on top of that and set up all the firewall yourself from scratch. That is actually what I do, using Linux kernel’s nftables for NAT Masquerading/IP forwarding and managing it currently with foomuuri which is essentially just a very lightweight nftables configuration manager. It doesn’t do anything you can’t do directly with nftables, but even though it’s perfect for me but I’m not sure I would recommend it in general. They have some very simple examples, but the documentation is pretty sparse, you need to either understand nftables under the hood or infer what you can by reading between the lines of the few examples you can find. A more mature and traditional Linux firewall like firewalld might be preferable if you want. Either way, this is definitely a much more complex route though, and fighting with firewall rules to get things to work is not everybody’s idea of “fun”. It is powerful though, and infinitely flexible. If you want it to “just work” without hassle, stick to the single-purpose devices and use OpenWRT as the OS designed to do this. It’s way simpler.

If you do decide do go the DIY firewall route though, all you really need for a firewall PC is at least a second NIC (some motherboards have two wired NIC onboard already, you can use one for WAN and the other + WiFi for LAN) or you can a PCIe network card that has multiple ports. I wouldn’t really recommend using one of your existing Mini PCs for this, as it’s really not a good idea to share the firewall/network appliance functionality shared with other services, both for security and for configuration complexity reasons. The firewall really works best and is easiest to configure when it is truly just a gateway for the network, putting traffic from one side out the other side, plus whatever fundamental network/firewall services you need to accomplish that. When you start also trying to selectively route some of that traffic to actual services on the firewall itself, it gets really complex and ugly really fast, and even if you can get it working which is often very nontrivial, it’s also very fragile and it’s easy to blow open holes in your security this way.

I’ve actually now got a pair of mini-PC firewalls, both set up using foomuuri, uCARP and Kea to do failover with each other so if one goes offline the other takes over its IP and starts routing traffic until it comes back. It’s not perfect or completely bulletproof but it’s pretty good for an amateur! In a pinch (when my previous, non-redundant firewall died) I’ve also used an GL.iNet travel router as my network’s primary router temporarily and their routers support an expansion board with 5G/SIM support so that could be an option too. I have to say it worked perfectly and was actually pretty nice, my only hesitation is that the travel router (at least the one I have, Beryl AX) seems to run a bit hot and I’m not sure it’s really intended for 24/7/365 operation (plus I need it for when I travel). They do make home routers too though, so maybe worth looking into, they’re really nice hardware running their own fork of OpenWRT out of the box.

They don’t really understand anything because they don’t really think. They just repeat what they’re told while convincing themselves its an independent thought that appeared in their head as if by magic. These are the people outsourcing most of their thinking these days to ChatGPT, because it’s not something they’ve ever really valued or been interested in doing themselves. Life’s a lot easier when you don’t have to think about much. They’re “doers” not “thinkers”. And frankly, it shows. We see an awful lot of stuff getting done right now, and very little thinking.

It’s much different because you can fire your salespeople for failing to consult with the engineering team, promising shit that is impossible, going to damage your brand and reputation, and provide little-to-no return on investment.

The biggest difference is that you can’t fire ChatGPT (as much as I desperately wish we could)

If you are burning yourself often enough that it’s impacting your water bill, you’re worrying about the wrong thing.

You will likely have to use a temporary alternative until the name is removed so you can reclaim it. No idea how long that takes, it might not even happen automatically at all. It seems like there is a forum thread for it

Aha I see you did the text-based install then? I’ve never done that myself but I just tried it now and it worked fine for me with the default password it mentions. Make sure caps lock is off. You will not be able to see the password when you type it, so be extra careful you are typing it correctly.

Most of the same cautions about internet access still apply, if your networking is active on this VM there’s a non-zero chance you can get hacked right away when you’re in default passwords/initial setup mode. If you continue to have trouble getting in, you should reinstall it once again onto a fresh VM with network mode set to NAT if possible, or even disabled completely, and see if it works in that configuration. It really is critical to get the password set up before opening up the internet.

Not sure what you mean by “what was provided”… who is providing a username and password for your yunohost?

You are supposed to create your own username and password during the “Begin” setup process after it first installs. “root” and “yunohost” are very insecure and if you use passwords that are copy/pasted from somewhere else on a machine connected to the internet it will be hacked, potentially almost immediately. People have bots that literally just try to connect using these common default passwords all day every day to every site on the internet. I have literally had machines with such crappy passwords hacked within minutes of spinning them up. The same thing can happen even when you are first doing the setup process. If somebody else can get in, they can (most likely with a bot) do the setup process themselves and set up their OWN username/password, and now it will ask you for that password that THEY set, which you have no way of knowing. The instance belongs to the first person to claim it, and if that’s not you, you have to wipe it and start over.

Your yunohost VM interface should not be exposed to the internet during setup. Even briefly, or someone else can immediately compromise it like this. The only way to ensure you are the first person to access it is to make sure you are the ONLY person who can access it, until it is properly set up and secured. Bots are WAY faster than you can be.

Use localhost console, VM port forwarding or some other secure method of making sure nobody but your own host computer can access the IP of the server where you are setting things up, until it has a strong, secure password (not “yunohost”) and make sure you have all its security features configured and working before you even think about making it accessible to the internet.

From my understanding (and experience) dating apps/online dating in general is dead, fucked up beyond repair by capitalism, toxic incels, predators, scammers, crooks and most recently AI. No technology can possibly survive such an onslaught and most of them wouldn’t profit from doing so. They have a financial incentive to attract repeat customers.

In person meeting and dating should be the obvious alternative, but apparently nobody goes out socializing anymore since COVID and nobody can afford hobbies because of the economy and chronic social malaise and terminal online doomscrolling has broken people’s ability to form human connection anyway so I think civilization is probably just ending after these last few generations, frankly.

If there is a useful option I’d love to know what it is too.

In absolutely no particular order:

https://www.youtube.com/@VBirchwood - historical fashion/lifestyle
https://www.youtube.com/@EmmaThorneVideos - a self-described “silly little guy” (hint: not a guy) politely mocking religion and other stuff that deserves mockery
https://www.youtube.com/@darbinorvar - woodworking and maker stuff
https://www.youtube.com/@AtRachelGilmore - Canadian independent journalist
https://www.youtube.com/@AnnaRudolfChess - originally chess (she’s an international master and chess commentator) and video games but after a long mental health hiatus, lately more mental health discussions and variety
https://www.youtube.com/@LauraFarms - farming, obviously
https://www.youtube.com/@SpaceMog - astronomy, astrophysics, space
https://www.youtube.com/@karilawler - retro computers/video games and programming
https://www.youtube.com/@acottonsock - Playing The Sims with sometimes inappropriate commentary
https://www.youtube.com/@EngineeringwithRosie - engineering explainers with an emphasis on renewable energy
https://www.youtube.com/@BeckyStern - electronics maker stuff
https://www.youtube.com/@aprilclucks - incredibly deadpan sarcastic Australian life advice and mockery of everything and herself too usually, in a style appropriate for the 4chan crowd

Just because they look rusty and old doesn’t mean they’re junk, but even if they are, there will be no urgency to dispose of them. Most people who aren’t minimalists don’t dispose of things except for aesthetic reasons, unless they’re out of room. Many rural people have a relatively narrow scope for aesthetics that doesn’t include what you might call the front yard, and being rural, it’s really hard to run out of room. Therefore, there is no urgency to dispose of stuff that has become “junk”, and when you do, you will probably do it all at once, as a project, once you start feeling like you’re running out of room, which takes quite awhile, so you’re very likely to see the development of the junk pile in its intermediate stages.

I think that’s just called capitalism.

For an actual answer, I’d turn to the idiom of dangling a carrot which evokes the idea of an animal chasing a carrot being held out in front of it on a stick by its own rider, unable to reach the carrot since it moves forward as they do, but it swings momentarily towards them creating the illusion of progress, so they continue chasing it forward anyway.

Edit: not to be confused with the very similar sounding idiom of “carrot and stick” in which the stick implies punishment.

But if someone can’t be bothered to even use a throaway protonmail address to file a bug report or feature request? Quite frankly, what they have to say wouldn’t have been worth our limited time anyway.

You don’t know that, because you’ve never once heard what someone didn’t say. Their time is limited too.

Yeah people thinking the Democratic Party is going to save them are delusional IMO. They are part of it and many of them have been working towards the same goal. They are a false opposition at best. Not all of them, some of them are legit, like Bernie, and look how he has been treated by the Dem establishment. Any real resistance is marginalized.

They are freely expressing their fear of dangerous western ideas which must be censored to protect the motherland /s

We don’t absolutely know what the future holds for our own planet much less the universe, so it’s impossible to answer this with any conviction, but based on my current understanding or the general scientific consensus, and the fact that the universe is expanding and that expansion is accelerating, no, by placing them at the edge of the observable universe and the effects of relativity, their hypothetical signals will never reach Earth and almost certainly not the Earth that we know of that’s orbiting Sol and full of humans patiently observing the universe for signs of their lost ancestors.

But we don’t know with any certainty that the universe’s expansion or acceleration is going to continue indefinitely, we don’t even fully understand why it is happening. So maybe their signals will eventually reach us. Maybe the universe will start contracting eventually and in a few trillion years they’ll swing right by Earth on their own, waving as they go by as we mutually go careening down towards the big crunch. Besides, if the universe is infinite, and is going to last an infinite amount of time, well “infinity” is a very long time and you can’t rule out the fact that another wormhole could open and bring them (or their signals) home at some point now that you’ve proven such a wormhole can exist. So when you put all the things we do know and the things we don’t know together, I’d give them about 50/50 chances, with a margin of error of plus or minus 50%.

Ah, I see I’ve found a fellow member of la révolution. I applaud your scientific curiosity.