PupBiru

kinda the same reason people suggest something like linux mint over slackware, gentoo, arch, etc… mint is easy to install and is preconfigured to be an easy to use user desktop environment. you can configure any other option to be have like that, but they tend to be a bit more “DIY”, which is great if you know what you’re doing!

dedicated NAS OSes will have good software out of the box that make it easy to configure and manage various common disk-related configurations (RAID, SMB, NFS, etc). you can certainly do all this yourself, but it might not have a pretty, unified user interface, or you might have to deal with software that isn’t compatible with some version of a library that’s in your distro of choice… all resolvable things, but they take time to solve: anywhere from installing a package manually to applying a kernel patch and recompiling the kernel to get something to work

i’d avoid BIOS-based RAID… it doesn’t really offer many benefits over linux-based raid like MDADM, and MDADM offers a LOT of up-sides for portability, repairability, diagnostics, etc

let’s not go too far though… the holders of h264/h265 did put a lot of money and effort into developing the codec: a new actual thing… they are not patent trolls, who by definition produce nothing new other than legal mess

a healthy democracy requires others to have privacy. people like investigative journalists need to be able to blend in with the crowd and expose government wrongdoing

blending in the the crowd is the important part: if everyone cares about privacy, nobody sticks out for caring about privacy… but if nobody cares about privacy, the investigative journalist suddenly looks really obvious and can be targeted much more easily

if someone doesn’t think they have anything to hide, that’s fine (wrong, but fine) however they can help to make sure the government acts appropriately simply by not splashing data around everywhere for all to see

only sort of correct: the GDPR applies globally (see this comment: https://jlai.lu/comment/4089576), however if you don’t ever plan on visiting or doing business in the EU it’s probably one of those things that people would ignore because it’d be too difficult/impossible for the EU to actually follow up on

i don’t agree with that definition of creative… there’s lots of engineering work that’s creative: writing code and designing systems can be a very creative process, but doesn’t involve feeling… it’s problem solving, and thats a creative process. you’re narrowly defining creativity as artistic expression of emotion, however there’s lots of ways to be creative

now, i think thats a bit of a strawman (so i’ll elaborate on the broader point), but i think its important to define terms

i agree we should be skeptical of marketing hype for sure: the type of creativity that i believe ML is currently capable of is directionless. it doesn’t understand what it’s creating… but the truth lies somewhere in the middle

ML is definitively creating something new that didn’t exist before (in fact i’d say that its trouble with hallucinations of language are a good example of that: it certainly didn’t copy those characters/words from anywhere!)… this fits the easiest definition of creative: marked by the ability or power to create

the far more difficult definition is: having the quality of something created rather than imitated

the key here being “rather than imitated” which is a really hard thing to prove, even for humans! which is why our copyright laws basically say that if you have evidence that you created something first, you pretty much win: we don’t really try to decide whether something was created or imitated

with things like transformative works or things that are similar, it’s a bit more of a grey area… but the argument isn’t about whether something is an imitation; rather it’s argued about how different the work is from the original

that’s a lack of understanding of concepts though, rather than a lack of creativity… curation requires that you understand the concept that you’re trying to curate: this looks more like a dog than this; this is a more attractive sunset than this

current LLMs and ML don’t understand concepts, which is their main issue

id argue that it kind of does “think about its own thoughts” to some degree: modern ML is layered, and each layer of the net feeds into the next… one layer of the net “thinks about” the “thoughts” of the previous layer. now, it doesn’t do this as a whole but neither do we: memories and neural connections are lossy; heck even creating a creative work isn’t going to turn out exactly like you thought it in your head (your muscle memory and skill level will effect the translation from brain to paper/canvas/screen)

but even we hallucinate in the same way. don’t look at a bike, and then try and draw a bike… you’ll get general things like pedals, wheels, seat, handlebars, but it’ll be all connected wrong. this is a common example people use to show how our brains aren’t as precise and we might like to think… drawing a bike requires a lot of very specific things to be in very specific places and that’s not how our brain remembers the concept of “bike”

it’s only qualitative because we don’t understand it

when an LLM “experiences” new data via training, that’s subjective too: it works its way through the network in a manner that’s different depending on what came before it… if different training data came before it, the network would look differently and the data would change the network as a whole in a different way

and experience is ongoing learning, so if an LLM were training on things after the pretraining period then that’d allow it to be creative in your definition?

but in that case, what’s the difference between doing that all at once, and doing it over a period of time?

experience is just tweaking your neurons to make new/different connections

yeah that’s also correct and a very valid criticism

ml doesn’t understand jokes very well, so honestly it’s not a shit example lol

the other important thing with all of this is that even if your girlfriend is taking care, THEY STILL KNOW

people around you (or “you”, in this case) using these services impacts your privacy

is there anything we can do about that? probably not

but it’s worth being aware of

i’ve seen the bullet points from that article riffed in different ways, but i think that’s the most important part:

• They know you rang a phone sex line at 2:24 am and spoke for 18 minutes. But they don’t know what you talked about.
• They know you called the suicide prevention hotline from the Golden Gate Bridge. But the topic of the call remains a secret.
• They know you got an email from an HIV testing service, then called your doctor, then visited an HIV support group website in the same hour. But they don’t know what was in the email or what you talked about on the phone.
• They know you received an email from a digital rights activist group with the subject line “Let’s Tell Congress: Stop SESTA/FOSTA” and then called your elected representative immediately after. But the content of those communications remains safe from government intrusion.
• They know you called a gynecologist, spoke for a half hour, and then called the local abortion clinic’s number later that day.

i can’t find a single reference to that. i think you’re confused

for clarity, i think that the worst thing anyone’s been able to decisively prove about telegrams encryption is that it’s vulnerable to replay attacks… which in the context of privacy rather than full security isn’t suuuuper problematic

that’s not to say that there aren’t other flaws; that’s kinda the point behind “rule number 1: DONT INVENT YOUR OWN CRYPTO”: you just don’t know what flaws there are… AES (etc) has had a LOT of eyes on it

but for the most part, the negativity with the crypto boils down to what-ifs

yeah it’s only that because for the discover stuff plex has to find it on IMDB

i hope that everyone realises that the benefit of activitypub has nothing to do with mastodon taking to mastodon, lemmy talking to lemmy, etc but the strength is tooting a reply to a peertube video and having a discussion on lemmy in which all these comments are shared

… bluesky has none of this

however, what bluesky has:

• (currently) the sign up process is easy: you don’t need to understand federation or why to choose a server - you just… register
• honestly, more people interact in the circles that i’m in (no; it’s not furry: i hear though that their population has exploded though) critical mass is more important than anything for a social platform
• custom feeds are legit cool af… i don’t have time to filter posts and we can’t expect people to add their own metadata; i want code to do it for me! its like “the algorithm” is now many and you can choose which one depending on your mood… also if you don’t like it you can choose a whole new one that some random 3rd party wrote, or make one yourself

none of that is intrinsic to bsky, or will remain in the long-term i think (federation implies needing a more complex sign-up process)

hey i never said that i believe it… you’re right it sounds like BS, or more likely as someone said: sounds like an april fools page that got left up

but it’s good to be wary of software in general, and to know its limitations

OSes have protections built in, yup, but that’s no guarantee. we like hardware switches because there’s physically no way that the mic/cam can be in use: software is always 1 bug or exploit away from not doing what it’s supposed to

add tailscale and you’re golden