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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Plot twist, he does get exemption to dig it up, causing mass damage all around. He finds it. The board is completely busted, but it seems the platters are fine, so he pays some very expensive data recovery team to access the data. They manage to do it! Now he got all the files from the drive, in a safe place. He just have to find where the wallet is stored. Easy enough, he lucked out using a common software for it, so it’s well documented, and he retrieve the files. It costs an inordinate amount of money to get the rights to the landfill, to “convince” local authorities to allow the digging, to actually do the digging, to put the drive in a recoverable state, but finally, his wallet is in his hands! He inputs his password… which doesn’t work.

    That would be hilarious.

    (note: this is a fantasy scenario. I never bothered actually reading these articles, as it sounds like a stupid story, so there may be approximations there)


  • You can’t really disable it anyway.

    Hardening is mostly prevent root login from outside in case every other layer of authentication and access control broke, do not allow regular user to su/sudo into it for free, and have a tight grip on anything that’s executable and have a setuid bit set. I did not install a system from scratch in a long time but I believe this would be the default on most things that are not geared toward end-user devices, too.


  • The microsoft forums are the one place that could be fully automatized. You post a problem about anything, really anything. Can’t change wallpaper? Can’t login? Screen flashing? Files disappearing? Constant loud pitched noise? It’s all the same. The answer, whatever your issue, is sfc /scannow, “Restoration point” and “Reinstall”.

    And arguably, that last step will most likely make the issue go away, at the price of not having a fucking clue as to what was wrong, losing a lot of time afterward, and having a fair chance of re-doing the same things, causing the issue to show up again. Great stuff.



  • Stick with something popular. People like to argue about distros, but beyond their package manager and some settings, it’s the same thing under the hood (not saying these difference are nothing, but still). For a beginner, or really for anyone just looking to use their system instead of tinkering with it endlessly, a popular, well supported distribution will do the job.

    Ubuntu fits that bill, although they made some very weird decisions recently, so I’d suggest starting with Mint if you’re new to this. Most everything should work out of the box if you have common hardware, and there’s a decent community around in case something goes wrong.

    I’d also advise jumping to anything too new, flashy, or promising stuff that should really, really not be distribution dependant. My position on things is that if there’s a common tool that’s available everywhere to do something, and some distributions decides to make “their own” which does the same thing but is very specific, that’s just wasting time. Hence the disdain for raw ubuntu, among other.





  • it suffers from the same enshittification problems that have killed Twitter, Reddit, BoingBoing, Digg, Slashdot

    I’ll easily agree that these platforms are bad, but saying anything “killed” them is very, VERY generous. Reddit and slashdot are very much still a thing, and they don’t look like they’re slowing down, despite the supposedly insurmountable issues. Keep in mind that the goal of a “social network” (for lack of a better word) is having an audience. Reddit literally shat on its user base, AND on the people that kept the site usable, and communities are still thriving there.



  • People go to the platform that’s easy, attractive and works, instead of the very beautiful, finely crafted, exquisite solution that requires days of reading followed by fiddling every other day to barely get the same immediate result, assorted with hidden surprises like hidden moderation and silent failure situation that leads to fragmentation of the whole network. What a surprise.

    Also, “don’t get pedantic with me” does not sit well with the current goals of bluesky. Sure, right now, they focused on making something that works and is usable by everyone. Whoop fucking doo, that’s exactly what mastodon/lemmy/most activitypub services skipped. And that’s why the general public look at them with contempt. I can’t see the future (maybe you can, lucky you), but for now, bluesky works, and the plan they’re still following up to now is aimed toward a decentralized solution.









  • No, not that either. Unless you consider “use LLM to summarize the changes/errors/inaccuracies, then have a human read the whole thing again” an improvement over “just have a human read the whole thing”.

    Because LLM will do all these things:

    • point you toward issues
    • point you toward non-issues
    • not point you toward issues
    • change stuff even when “instructed” not to

    If there is one thing you don’t want to throw an LLM at without full, unbiased review, it’s documents where the wording is legally binding. And if you have to do a full, unbiased review to begin with, where you can’t even trust your tool to have highlighted all the important parts, you may as well not bother with the tool.


  • If you consider debugging broken LLM-generated code to be a skill… sure, go for it. But, since generated code is able to use tons of unknown side effects and other seemingly (for humans) random stuff to achieve its goal, I’d rather take the other approach, where it takes a human half an hour to write the code that some LLM could generate in seconds, and not have to learn how to parse random mumbo jumbo from a machine, while getting a working result.

    Writing code is far from being the longest part of the job; and you gingerly decided that making the tedious part even more tedious is a great idea to shorten the already short part of it…