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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Edit: that wall of text really got away from me sorry. Tried so hard to not be misunderstood 😅

    I really don’t wanna defend Linus here buuuut…

    I can see someone who’s switching over from Windows making the same mistake, especially if they’re good with Windows but new to Linux. You get so conditioned constantly telling Windows to take off the fucking training wheels and ignoring all its bullshit warnings that I can see you making the same assumptions on your first(ish) time using Linux. Plus you don’t expect something as benign as installing Steam to destroy your desktop manager.

    His biggest criticism if I remember correctly was also that widespread adoption won’t be feasible until <whatever distro> is idiot proof and I agree. Ease of use is there these days but the things that make Linux so powerful can also be the things your average Windows user (deletes desktop shortcuts by accident and panics thinking they uninstalled their apps level of technical) can use to break their install, especially if they blindly follow one of the many (sometimes out of date) tutorials out there that tell you to run some random commands in the terminal.

    With that said, it’s still his mistake. He should’ve read the damn instructions, and owned up to it more. He’s technical enough to know you can’t go in assuming you know how to use something you’re new to.

    Obligatory I fucking love Linux and hope it becomes the default someday not just because fuck Windows and fuck Microsoft, but because it’s genuinely amazing in its own right.



  • I’m down to listen to their response myself but as someone who tried really hard to explain away their last dumb controversy only to be proven wrong multiple times, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just pure negligence. Actions speak louder than words and their actions have shown they’re a flawed company like any other despite what their conversations on WAN show would have you believe.

    Fuck Honey/PayPal first and foremost, don’t get me wrong. But unless there were legal issues around it, we also can’t ignore it if the biggest tech YouTube channel found out about one of the biggest sponsors on YouTube being a scam, stopped working with them for that reason, but said absolutely nothing to anyone else.








  • The issue is that “AI” has become a marketing buzz word instead of anything meaningful. When someone says “AI” these days, what they’re actually referring to is “machine learning”. Like in LLMs for example: what’s actually happening (at a very basic level, and please correct me if I’m wrong, people) is that given one or more words/tokens, it tries to calculate the most probable next word/token based on its model (trained on ridiculously large numbers of bodies of text written by humans). It does this well enough and at a large enough scale that the output is cohesive, comprehensive, and useful.

    While the results are undeniably impressive, this is not intelligence in the traditional sense; there is no reasoning or comprehension, and definitely no consciousness, or awareness here. To grossly oversimplify, LLMs are really really good word calculators and can be very useful. But leave it to tech bros to make them sound like the second coming and shove them where they don’t belong just to get more VC money.


  • Lots of countries just don’t care about you downloading pirated content though, they just punish distribution.

    I don’t really have that problem but for the places that do punish downloading, I hear VPNs can be helpful to mask your traffic and that ISPs don’t really care enough to pursue as long as you’re not blatant about it and have plausible deniability (“no, I just downloaded a linux ISO that happened to be exactly the size of a whole season of <insert show>, total coincidence”)

    Obviously not legal advice though.






  • This!

    APK signatures exist and they’re enough for making sure the file you got isn’t modified. Warning people when they use apks for stuff like banking, I get, but if they wanna take the risk, it’s on them.

    Blocking root makes no sense because I’d argue that if the person knows enough to root their phone and got past all those bricked phone/thermonuclear war warnings, the onus is on them to not get their keychain compromised by giving root to some random app. Again, a warning is fine.

    Aside from that, people need to understand: THE CLIENT IS NEVER SECURE. NO EXCEPTIONS.

    Any self respecting secure API is made under the assumption that all the calls are coming from some malicious state actor using curl until proven beyond doubt that it’s an actual user.