Random Dent

Also there’s AM in case that one doesn’t work out.

I’m the same with systemd. I’m aware it gets a lot of hate from people but I dunno, seems fine to me. It’s never given me any trouble that I can think of.

Yeah that’s fair. And mine were pretty small scripts so easy enough to check, and I keep proper backups and whatnot so no big deal. But like I say I wouldn’t use it for anything big or important.

Yeah pretty much! TBH for the first one there are already things online that can do that, I just wanted to test how the AI would do so I gave it a simple thing, it worked well and so I kept using it. The second one I wasn’t sure about because it’s a bit copyright-y, but yeah like you say it was just quicker. I wouldn’t use the AI for anything super important, but I figured it’d do for a quick little script that only needs to do one specific thing just for me.

Not OP but I made a little menu thing for launching VMs and a script for grabbing trailers for downloaded movies that reads the name of the folder, finds the trailer and uses yt-dlp to grab it, puts it in the folder and renames it.

I’m genuinely considering putting some cash aside in case the AI bubble does pop so I can load up on cheap PC parts if they start dumping them lol

Yeah whenever I set up a computer with dual boot it’s always Windows first, then Linux. Windows assumes it’s the only OS that exists so if there’s something else there it just ignores it and writes over the boot thingy. Linux actually bothers to look for anything else that’s installed and works around it.

Yeah keep the law around in case you need to weaponize it against an individual, but ignore it for corporations. The modern solution!

I tend to just operate on the principle of: I know my setup probably wouldn’t hold up for a second if some sort of organized three-letter government body decided to focus on me, but my threat model is more the kind of general internet-sweeping surveillance fuckery that goes on. I’m not doing anything especially dodgy on the internet and I think messing around with privacy stuff is fun, so my security level is faintly absurd for what it is. I’m sure someone could crack it if they were determined enough, but I assume the amount of effort required relative to what you’d find would just make it pointless anyway.

I think, AI quality aside, it’s mostly a matter of timing - IMO the AI bubble is obviously going to pop, NVIDIA’s market cap is now 16% of the entire US GDP and OpenAI is trying to IPO at a trillion dollars, which seem like ludicrous numbers to me. But I learned from the last few years that you can also never really underestimate society’s ability to just say fuck it and kick the can even further down the road.

And of course, SOMETHING is going to have to be the final straw that brings it all down, and it could very well be this. But I also didn’t think we’d get this far - the 2008 crisis didn’t do it, COVID somehow didn’t do it, but these things are are also all compounding as we don’t deal with them properly. And if AI is going to be the last straw, how long can we put it off for? Could it pop next year or can we still hold it off for another decade with even more ludicrous number-fuckery? I think that’s where the trick is going to be.

TBH this is just how petitions in the UK work: enough people sign it, it goes to parliament, they say a bunch of stuff about it that often sounds reasonable enough, then they do nothing about it. It’s just a way to give the public the illusion that they’re being listened to without having to actually do anything. It was the same with the digital ID petition, which I still signed but with 100% expectation that it wouldn’t actually achieve anything.

You can also offline the whole of Project Gutenberg with Kiwix, it’s about 70GB IIRC.

I just don’t see the point of them when there are flatpaks. I’m not super knowledgeable on Snaps so maybe there’s some huge benefit I don’t know about, but they always just seemed like a worse version of flatpak to me.

As an old-timey Linux user, I eventually stopped using Ubuntu because they have a habit of kind of fixating on whatever they think is the new cool thing, and going all-in on it while other important things stagnate, then they get it to the point where it’s almost really good, then ditch it and go chasing after the next shiny thing.

Off the top of my head there was the Unity desktop, Mir, This thing where they wanted an OS that would run on both desktops and phones interchangeably, and now it’s Snaps. I don’t think Ubuntu is a bad distro, but I also don’t think it’s the best distro for newcomers necessarily because of it’s habit of suddenly lurching off in a new direction every few years. But that’s just me of course, if it works for you then go for it!

Oh weird, I use it with a touchpad on my laptop (Lenovo Ideapad if that makes any difference) and it’s always been fine for me.

I genuinely use Floorp as my main daily browser lol

I like the M Plus Code Font personally.