Well if you use a Linux distribution, you generally get your software from some central package repository. That’s driven by maintainers who look at the software, the updates… They patch the software, make sure it runs smoothly on your system and is tied into other things… They’ll also have a look at security vulnerabilities and security in general.

Other than that, there isn’t much really “stopping” people from writing malware. We have tons of it. Fake VLC versions, copycats on the iPhone appstore… MS Windows is full of advertisements and features that send data “home”. They introduce features which border on being malware all the time… We have trojans, viruses etc. It’s all out there.

Generally, it’s a good idea to think before executing random code from the internet. Is it from a trustworthy source? Are other people using a piece of software and they’d have noticed if it deleted all files?

Usually, we have more good people than bad. And people need some motivation. It’s unlikely someone invests 10 years of their life to develop a shiny and polished office suite, just so they can run some malware somewhere. There are easier ways to accomplish that. So it generally doesn’t happen that way. It’s theoretically possible, though.

And in the old way is: Windows, Android etc are way more popular. If someone wants to do something malicious, they likely don’t target the 1-2% using a different operating system. They are going to write malware for a more popular operating system. And on the server, where Linux dominates the market, admins execute less random code. They’ll know they want MariaDB and where to get it. So it’s harder to do an attack this way.

And if I imagine being the attacker… What would be a reason to include malware in a FOSS project? Just to wreck havock and mess with people? That sounds like a 16 yo with too much time on their hands. But we have very few of those in the free software community. So that’s a bit unlikely… If someone wants a botnet, there might be easier ways to do it. And for a targeted attack, you wouldn’t hide your malware in a random project… So I generally don’t see many reasons for someone to combine malware with useful FOSS software.

:() ::& ;:

Sure. But we need to see pics, or it didn’t happen.

The abstract doesn’t mention them re-gaining their old capacity. It only says they shrink. And something about voltage. So I have my doubts. I mean it’s nice if my spicy pillow shrinks a bit. But what does that help if it continues to stay nearly dead? And an application in products would be hard to accomplish. At that temperature, all the plastic etc is going to melt. Maybe the solder as well.

I’ve always backed up my SMS to my E-Mail inbox. With something like SMS Gate or SMS Backup+. I think it’s nice to have all messages in my mail program. Of course that only does one way. To reply and get immediate notifications, I use KDEConnect (or GSConnect which is the same thing for GNOME.)

Wasn’t “error-free” one of the undecidable problems in maths / computer science? But I like how they also pay attention to semantics and didn’t choose a clickbaity title. Maybe I should read the paper, see how they did it and whether it’s more than an AI agent at the same intelligence level guessing whether it’s correct. I mean surprisingly enough, the current AI models usually do a good job generating syntactically correct code one-shot. My issues with AI coding usually start to arise once it gets a bit more complex. Then it often feels like poking at things and copy-pasting various stuff from StackOverflow without really knowing why it doesn’t deal with the real-world data or fails entirely.

I’ve also had that. And I’m not even sure whether I want to hold it against them. For some reason it’s an industry-wide effort to muddy the waters and slap open source on their products. From the largest company who chose to have “Open” in their name but oppose transparency with every fibre of their body, to Meta, the curren pioneer(?) of “open sourcing” LLMs, to the smaller underdogs who pride themselves with publishing their models that way… They’ve all homed in on the term.

And lots of the journalists and bloggers also pick up on it. I personally think, terms should be well-defined. And open-source had a well-defined meaning. I get that it’s complicated with the transformative nature of AI, copyright… But I don’t think reproducibility is a question here at all. Of course we need that, that’s core to something being open. And I don’t even understand why the OSI claims it doesn’t exist… Didn’t we have datasets available until LLaMA1 along with an extensive scientific paper that made people able to reproduce the model? And LLMs aside, we sometimes have that with other kinds of machine learning…

(And by the way, this is an old article, from end of october last year.)

Oh, wow. Should be pretty obvious that something isn’t open source, …well… unless the source is open…

See to what IP your domain points, and if that’s really the external IP of your router. Might also help to put in your IP address into the webbrowser instead of the domain, to see if port 80 / 443 really go somewhere. Another possibility, do a portscan from the internet.

Btw, how do you access Wireguard? I mean that’s also somehow able to access your network from outside…

And if we’re really talking about “open-source” and not just “open-weight”, the additional scientific papers, datasets and tooling are going to help democratize the technology and even out the playing field to a degree.

I haven’t checked, but ffmpeg is super versatile. It does a lot of stuff, even esoteric and niche things… Sometimes depends on what flags are set when compiling it, so the Linux distros don’t always include everything ffmpeg is capable of.

Some people do it. For example we have this solar-powered website: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

You’d need an energy source like a solar panel, a battery and some computing device. Like a single board computer (Raspberry Pi) you can also run webservers on smartphones, or even a microcontroller. The server part works without an internet connection. But you obviously need some way to connect to it. A wifi (router) or a computer connected via an ethernet cable.

The tech isn’t too complicated. Just install nginx if you have a raspberry pi, open a wifi and put your website on it. If you choose a phone, try Termux and a supported webserver. Both Linux and smartphones are designed to even work without an internet connection ;-)

Not really. I could use some good selfhosted search engine. I mean all the existing projects (which is just YaCy, to my knowledge) are a bit dated. Nowadays we only got metasearch engines and we’re relying on Google, Bing etc.

But I don’t need any chatbot enhancements. That’s usually something I skip when using Google or Bing because it doesn’t work well. The AI summaries tend to be wrong, and it’s bad at looking up niche information, which is something I need a search engine to be able to find. The AI just cites the most common slop, or at best the Wikipedia article. But I don’t really need any fancy software to get there… So for me, we don’t need any AI augmentation.

And I think the old way of googling was fine. Just teach people to put in the words that are likely to be in the article they want to find. That’d be something like “Rust new features 2023” or “homelab backup blog”. Sure you can strap on a chatbot and put in entire natural language questions. But I think that’s completely unnecessary. We have brains and we’re perfectly able to translate our questions into search queries with little effort… If somebody teches us what to type into the search bar, and why.

Yes. Plus the turing machine has an infinite memory tape to write and read. Something that is in scope of mathematics, but we don’t have any infinite tapes in reality. That’s why we call it a mathematical model and imaginary… and it’s a useful model. But not a real machine. Whereas an abacus can actually be built. But an Abacus or a real-world “Turing machine” with a finite tape doesn’t teach us a lot about the halting problem and the important theoretical concepts. It wouldn’t be such a useful model without those imaginary definitions.

(And I don’t really see how someone would confuse that. Knowing what models are, what we use them for, and what maths is, is kind of high-school level science education…)

It’s a long article. But I’m not sure about the claims. Will we get more efficient computers that work like a brain? I’d say that’s scifi. Will we get artificial general intelligence? Current LLMs don’t look like they’re able to fully achieve that. And how would AI continuously learn? That’s an entirely unsolved problem at the scale of LLMs. And if we ask if computer science is science… Why compare it to engineering? I found it’s much more aligned with maths at university level…

I’m not sure. I didn’t read the entire essay. It sounds to me like it isn’t really based on reality. But LLMs are certainly challenging our definition of intelligence.

Edit: And are the history lessons in the text correct? Why do they say a Turing machine is a imaginary concept (which is correct), then say ENIAC became the first one, but then maybe not? Did we invent the binary computation because of reliability issues with vacuum tubes? This is the first time I read that and I highly doubt it. The entire text just looks like a fever dream to me.

Yeah, seeking support is notoriously difficult. Everyone working in IT knows this. I feel with open-source, it’s more the projects which aren’t in a classic Free Software domain, who attract beggars. For example the atmosphere of a Github page of a Linux tool will have a completely different atmosphere than a fancy AI tool or addon to some consumer device or service. I see a lot of spam there and demanding tone. While with a lot of more niche projects, people are patient, ask good questions and in return the devs are nice. And people use the thumbsup emoji instead of pinging everyone with a comment…

I feel, though… I you’re part of an open source project which doesn’t welcome contributions and doesn’t want to discuss arbitrary user needs and wants, you should make that clear. I mean Free Software is kind of the default in some domains. If you don’t want that as a developer, just add a paragraph of text somewhere prominently, detailing how questions and requests are or aren’t welcome. I as a user can’t always tell if discussing my questions is a welcome thing and whether this software is supposed to cater for my needs. Unless the project tells me somehow. That also doesn’t help with the beggars… But it will help people like me not to waste everyone’s time.

Uh, thanks. That really doesn’t look good. Usually copyright infringement is a civil matter. And I believe we had sufficient laws to handle that in European countries. I haven’t read the cited new law, but I guess that “shortcut” just does away with everyone’s privacy. Plus it’s going to swamp the courts with cases. I’m not sure if they’re bored or anything… But either they just hand out fines without checking properly… Or, if done properly, this is just a lot of additional work for the justice system. To the benefit of the copyright industry. And either way, it’s just bad for the people.

Edit: I believe this is the mentioned government gazette. The copyright changes are in Chapter 2: https://www.e-nomothesia.gr/kat-arxaiotites/n-5179-2025.html

Do you have some source for this IP thing in the EU? I wasn’t aware of any new privacy laws.

Rnote, Skype, Teams and Televido (Live TV stream). Since they’re not in the repo or I needed sandboxing. I mean I don’t need any help or anything. That laptop has enough storage and a beginner distro on it.

Interesting. I have 4 tools installed as Flatpaks and that makes 4.4 GB

I’d go with the Full Disk Encryption. You can be sure everything is encrypted that way. Any additional complexity adds ways to mess up and compromise security. Entering the password is a bit cumbersome. But that’s part of the deal. I just carry my computer keyboard to my NAS and enter the password each time I need to reboot. Which doesn’t happen that often. There also used to be some tutorial somewhere on how to put a Dropbear SSH server into the initrd so you can enter the password over network.

Uh, a Reddit link 😅 I think you have more than one Stockholm syndrome…