As long as it’s not Australia you’re probably safe

Boo

Where app data is stored.

~/.local

~/.config

~/.var

~/.appname

Sometimes more than one place for the same program

Pick one and stop cluttering my home directory

LLM scraping is a parasite on the internet. In the actual ecological definition of parasite: they place a burden on other unwitting organisms computer systems, making it harder for the host to survive or carry out their own necessary processes, solely for the parasite’s own benefit while giving nothing to the host in return.

I know there’s an ongoing debate (both in the courts and on social media) about whether AI should have to pay royalties to its training data under copyright law, but I think they should at the very least be paying to use infrastructure while collecting the data, even free data, given that it costs the organisation hosting said data real money and resources to be scraped, and it’s orders of magnitude more money and resources compared to serving that data to individual people.

The case can certainly be made that copying is not theft, but copying is by no means free either, especially when done at the scales LLMs do.

Why Linux Mint specifically, why not just Linux? Or if they want to pick a specific distro, why not Trisquel or another FSF-endorsed distro?

Fedora Linux has been the most stable OS in my experience, having used Windows XP to 10 and switching to Linux before 11 came out. I can leave it on for literally weeks on end and the memory never randomly fills up, nor does it get more and more glitchy/crash prone as you leave it on, both of which I have experienced on Windows.

FOSS is not American. Foss belongs to literally everyone.

Why would anyone bother writing it like that? That just seems like int main() with extra steps. Like does auto enable some compiler optimisation of the return type that I’m not aware of?

Why do they keep allocating land to wildfires if they’re so destructive? /s

Every time Rust takes forever to compile something, I picture in my mind it checking every possible edge case and buffer vulrnability I didn’t check and suddenly I’m a lot more okay with how long it takes.

Reminder that Linux’s decision to write an entire kernel in C and not a mix of C and assembly was just as controversial back then as Rust vs C is now. The pro-assembly programmers used many similar arguments as the anti-Rust programmers (it’s bloated, it’s too high level for the kernel, it has a complicated compiler, it’s not mature enough, if you were competent enough in assembly you wouldn’t need to use C, if assembly is too difficult for you then you shouldn’t even be developing a kernel, etc). Now Linux is hailed as one of the pioneer software projects that led the switch from assembly to C for kernel level code.

If even senior C developers can and regularly do write critical memory vulnerabilities that can give attackers remote code execution as root, then I’d say it’s indeed already broken.

“We don’t need TCAS on commercial airliners because any colisions are the pilot/controller’s fault”

Except that’s literally the reality with computers. Everything evolves and things go obsolete. I’m sure the COBOL and Fortran programmers were pissed when the kids started using C too.

IMO every distro should have a rolling release option. Kind of like how OpenSUSE has the normal version and Tumbleweed. You have normal version for when you need the OS to work (you’re new to Linux, it’s your main personal/work computer, it’s a server, etc) and then you have the rolling release option for when you’re willing to give up stability for the newest versions of everything as soon as possible.

Sorry to say it (and as much as i like C) but C is already on the path to inevitable obsolescence. Everyone is learning Rust now and fewer people are learning C. Maybe not soon, but definitely eventually. Linux can join C on this path to obsolescence or it can pivot to a language that still has a clear future.

Rust will go obsolete a some point too when the next next generation of languages come out. And software projects using Rust will have to switch languages again so stay relevant.

Don’t forget that languages like COBOL was once state of the art but was replaced by… C.

That’s just the computer circle of life.

source sonic.sh

US doing exactly what they accuse Communist China of doing exhibit 420

Why do that when you can just score a deal with the government to give them whatever information they want for sweet perks like foreign competitors getting banned?

sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/[sdx] bs=4096K status=progress

Or for multiple passes:

sudo shred -fzv /dev/[sdx]

Change [sdx] to the drive you want to wipe, make sure you double check it’s the right one.