ragequitta

You definitely get a warning. But also there's an auto-update feature so you can set it an forget it so long as your device connects to the internet once every x months.

While I agree this is potentially an issue, most people with most devices won't be away from the internet for years. If you want it to be apocalypse proof for when the internet goes down you should probably get a paper map.

Google maps offers this functionality. I've had my local map and maps of any place I regularly go to downloaded for many years.

There is very much plenty of fairly reliable evidence that masks work. And the better the compliance the better they work. In nurse studies you get much better results than in population studies, for instance. Now that I'm looking I'm hard pressed to find any studies that go against this conclusion.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2776536

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7191274/

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jocn.15401

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577

I fully agree with using Qubes, but I also think for most people in most cases that's akin to putting a bank vault door on the front of your house. I guess the question I would ask is: gun to your head you have a choice between running a random Setup.exe in Windows, a .sh/.deb/.rpm in linux, or a Flatpak. Which one are you choosing? 10/10 times I'm choosing the Flatpak myself. It might not be perfect, but it does seem better than most alternatives everyone uses all day every day.

I guess I just don't buy it completely. Given that I myself have had a hard time giving permission to Flatpak to access even an unimportant network drive (Flatseal is a godsend for giving/denying permissions in any way you please) while the same app on windows will happily write anything to C:\Windows\System32 , I feel like we're talking about entirely different beasts. But perhaps I'm naive. I also feel like there would be a very large vested interest in making people feel more unsafe in linux than they do in Windows/MacOS for obvious reasons.

And given that the version of Fedora I use is immutable and even I have a hard time messing with it to the point of pain/exploit with full access to the system (and I've tried for fun in VMs) I feel like a trusted flatpak app I download from a trusted source is going to have a damn near impossible time doing much of anything. While I feel like a simple website hack that serves me a bad .exe could/would cripple every single file it can find on my network on a Windows machine.

Maybe someone with more knowledge than me can explain - flatpaks seem way more secure than anything you would ever install in Windows by a long shot. It's also fairly trivial for me (and I'm by no means a hardcore user) to use a completely immutable version of linux such as Silverblue. The other complaints in these links also seem suspect. If the Linux kernel is insecure due to it being monolithic doesn't that make ChromeOS just as insecure? What about android? What about the "96.3% of the top one million web servers [that] are running Linux"?

Also there's something to be said for security through obscurity. My bet is I could go through my entire junk mail folder opening all attachments on Linux without a problem, but it'd take me less than 10 on windows to be fully owned. If you're careful on Linux aren't you far, far safer than if you're careful on Windows?

But wouldn't you agree reading about this topic now, with the counter-argument of the post-1960 consensus (though I have a hard time thinking most things debatable like this are ever strictly consensus), and the follow-up DNA evidence, is far more informative and convincing than what you would read in 1920? It seems that the people guessing from 1920 might've had about as much chance of being right as the people guessing in 1960 with neither having the relevant evidence to back their claim.

You really can't see the reason behind this? People are suing for libel / slander / copyright infringement / everything else under the sun. If you don't put guardrails up, and it hallucinates bogus medical advice, so many people would just blindly accept it. Remember when 4chan told everyone they could upgrade their iphone to be waterproof? The general public and an LLM that tells you the best way to commit crime or not overdose on fentanyl just do not mix.

I think the pull for most of us who use chatgpt is that google lies far, far more often than chatgpt ever will. Or is just otherwise inconclusive / does not give the relevant information you're looking for. The amount of SEO clickbait or quora/stack overflow answers that are either just incorrect or highly opinionated makes google very difficult to use for many things. As someone new to/learning Fedora it gives me the right answer 95% of the time, google gives me the right answer in the top 5 links far less.

>It doesn't parse, it doesn't explain, it does not grok. It guesses at best and the blood sucking robot-horse is not telling the truth.

In my experience with coding (I've only done javascript and python myself) you have to tell it to explain and grok. It takes on the role you give it. Even just saying something like "you are a professional unreal developer specializing in C++, I am your apprentice writing code to (x). I want you to parse the following code in chunks, and tell me what might be wrong with it" before typing your prompt can help the output immensely. It starts to parse things because it's taken on the role of a teacher.

People love to hate on the idea of "prompt engineering" but it really is important how you prime the thing before asking it a question. The other thing I do is feed it the code slowly, and in logical steps. Feeding it 20 lines of code with a particular purpose / question you'll get a much better answer than feeding 200 lines of code with "what's wrong here?" You still need to know 90% of what's going on, and it becomes very good at helping out with that 10% you're missing. But for all I know it is just really bad at C++, that wouldn't surprise me. The things I'm using it for are definitely more simple.

I don't tend to keep the chat logs, as the amount of them gets unwieldy very quickly. But examples of things I've done with it that are useful:

I wanted to create a web app, something I haven't done in a very long time. Just a simple throwaway back-of-the napkin app for personal use. I described what I wanted it to do, and asked what might be a good frontend/backend. It listed a few, I narrowed it down even more. Ended up deciding on flask/quasar.

After helping me setup VS Code with the proper extensions for fancy editing, and guiding me through the basic quasar/flask setup, it then was able to help me immensely creating a basic login page for the app. Then it easily integrated openAI api into it with all the proper quasar sliders for tokens/temperature/etc. Then it created a pretty good CSS template for the app as well, and a color scheme that I was able to describe as "something on adobe color that is professional and x and x (friendly, warm, whatever you want to put in)". Everything worked flawlessly with very little fuss, and I'd never used flask or quasar before in my life. You can also delve VERY deep into how to make the app more secure, as I did for fun one evening even though it's not going to be internet facing.

Another thing I did was go over some pfSense documentation with it. I had some clarifying questions about HAProxy, as well as setting up Acme Certificates with my specific DNS provider. It was extremely helpful with both. It also taught me about nitty gritty settings in the Unbound DNS resolver in a way that's much more informative than the documentation, and helped me set up some internal domains for pihole, xen orchestra, etc with certificates. Also helped me separate out my networks (IoT, Guest network, etc), and taught me about Avahi to access my hue lights through mDNS.These are things I always wanted to do, I just never felt like going down a google rabbit hole getting mostly the wrong answers.

Last example I'll give is it was able to help me set up docker-compose plex within portainer that then uses my nvidia GPU for acceleration. The only thing I had to change from the instructions it gave was to get updated nvidia driver #s and I grabbed the latest docker-compose file. I'd never used portainer in my life before, nor do I have experience with nvidia drivers within linux, and I feel like learning it was many times faster being able to ask a chatbot question vs trying to google everything. Granted I still had to RTFM for the basics, as everyone should always do.

I think perhaps my use cases are a bit more "basic" than many HN users. Like I said I'm not asking it to do problems most humans wouldn't be able to do, as I know it isn't quite there yet. But for things like XCP-ng, portainer, linux scripts, learning software you've never used before, or even just framing a problem I'm having in steps I hadn't thought of it's been invaluable to me. For me it's like documentation you can ask clarifying questions to. And almost none of the things I've asked it would work at all if it were wrong, I would know immediately.

It really is astonishing how much you can get done this way. I've been setting up a home lab for myself, and the answers Gpt4 gives are miles ahead of the stack overflow results or documentation of the apps or whatever else. Rarely (very rarely) it will give me a wrong answer, but then I paste in the error message or describe the problem I had and it almost always comes up with the correct answer 2nd try. Final step is asking where I might learn more because it's not working, and gpt always gives me a better link than google.

I'm convinced the people who say it's nothing but a BS machine have never tried to use it step by step for a project. Or they tried to use it for a project most humans couldn't do, and got upset when it was only 95% perfect.

If posting on twitter is your idea of how to get things done in politics (as many people believe) then it not being on twitter is a boon for us all. Actual civic engagement is what's needed, not posturing for your party (it's a lot like the sports you mentioned, root for your own team) via small text blurbs.

What you're talking about is a kind of willpower, which funnily enough has a biological basis also. Genetics seems to play a role, as do many medications. The marshmallow test seems to show willpower largely stays the same over 4 decades. Ozempic also seems to show you can artificially induce it. It's not mind over matter, it's having a mind primed to do it in the first place. It won't be as easily taught to someone who grabs the marshmallow instantly as a preschooler. We also seem to be able to induce it these days with ozempic, which is fascinating.

I very rarely use google anymore, as it's a worse bullshit machine. I just ask chatgpt and tell it to give me sources. I also never use cookbooks anymore, as it's much more interesting to have a chat about what I can make with the ingredients in my fridge. It's also absolutely fantastic at making meal plans (tell it restrictions like lactose, protein you want per day, calories per day, and any other preferences you have) and workout plans (tell it the equipment you have in your house and your goals). If you're wanting it to code the next big thing by itself it probably won't do it properly, but for everyday things it's a very useful assistant. More useful than anything else out there by far.

IMO what invalidates the rest of the piece is that it's currently trending in multiple places. Apparently "they" couldn't get to this article?

The problem is what qualifies you as a flat trasher in their minds? Having a 6 pack of beer in the background of a picture? Maybe they take exception to people who smoke weed. Maybe they think if you're gay you're more rowdy.

I had no idea about microg. That's very useful.

Look for feedback hub in your start menu.

Strange I was able to right click -> uninstall the skype store app from the start menu no problem.

Wouldn't you be able to say the same about literally any OS that doesn't have a completely walled garden? I'm positive I can find software on linux that bundles the askjeeves software as well. And probably MacOS. You blame the software developer for that and never use their product, you don't blame the OS.

Stadia Pro for $10 a month gets you a selection of games I believe. But it really is in it's infancy, and not very good. We'll just have to see if google throttles it before it can mature like most other things they do.

I'd wager the whole 'google has all your health records' scare right now increases the number a bit right now.

I'm torn. Xbox game pass for PC is one of the greatest things to happen to gaming. Ps now let me play red dead 1 before #2 came out. EA access is great if you just want to play battlefield or Fifa for a month (those games don't typically last longer than that for me). But I also love my 500+ steam games. If these services keep getting better they'll definitely take over, though. Outer Worlds on Xbox pass comes to mind. You can beat that in a month for $1 right now and never think about paying retail price.

I'm trying to think of a UI difference in chrome or safari that is meaningful, can't come up with one. Can you elaborate?

Mental health is health care too.

I'm curious as to if there's a brigade for saying this, as it seems to be in everywhere. Aren't self driving cars on the road right now? Can't I grab one in las vegas this very instant?

https://www.popsci.com/self-driving-cars-cities-usa

I'll bite because I find this point of view fascinating. So you have 100 candidates of whom you know the name, date of birth, and gender as well as their first language. But unfortunately someone messed up and these 100 candidates have 0 qualifications listed. Under threat of being fired you have to pick the 10 best qualified for the job by the end of the day. How do you choose the candidates? You like the name John and people over the age of 42? Do you see now how none of it is really relevant?

I agree with the sentiment that "everything is bad". Computers are still in their birthing stage and full of problems. But Windows 10 feels like an improvement over any previous version of Windows at least. Which is really all we can ask for. A little too transitional/work in progress for some, I can see that (2 control panels? madness!), but otherwise pretty smooth.

But maybe it's also because I left computer support type roles and I haven't seen the nightmares like I did with XP/2000/Vista/7. But as an end user/casual security and IT watcher I can't complain too much (yet).

And as an anecdote the only problem I've had updating was the one large change to the audio stack they did (and needed to do-it's so much better). The huge issue that arose was I needed to unmute my headphones. Other than that I seriously have not noticed any update other than maybe seeing the % when I boot up in the morning. I keep track of when the big ones come so I can run O&O after those, but I really haven't even skipped a beat due to an update.