Yeah, I think we agree on that point. I didn’t mean to make it sound like it’s intentionally trying to trick you.

When it’s trying to convince you that it’s right using tricks of confidence, I’d say it’s behaving like a con man. At least it’s indistinguishable from the behavior of a con man.

There’s an SBC called Le Potato that usually goes for around $40.

An AMD GPU and Bazzite would be great for you. The AMD GPU makes installing any Linux system easier, cause the drivers are already there.

Maybe, but it’s hard to know that. Something running in the firmware of a chip in an embedded device is harder to identify than something powering the whole device. There’s also no reliable, publicly available statistics on embedded OSes I could find. So yeah, Linux might not be the most common kernel for embedded systems.

I’ve heard people say things along the lines of “the Linux revolution never happened”.

Utterly false. Linux is, by a huuuuuuge margin, the most popular OS kernel in the world. It’s the most popular kernel for mobile phones. It’s the most popular kernel for servers. It’s the most popular kernel for SBCs. It may be the most popular kernel for embedded applications, but it’s hard to know that. The only place it’s not the most popular kernel is desktops/laptops.

I love my Epson Ecotank. It solves most of these issues.

I didn’t say the code didn’t work. I said it was dog shit. Dog shit code can still work, but it will have problems. What it produced looks like an intern wrote it. Nothing against interns, they’re just not gonna be able to write production quality code.

It’s also really unsettling to ask it about my own libraries and have it answer questions about them. It was trained on my code, and I just feel disgusted about that. Like, whatever, they’re not breaking the rules of the license, but it’s still disconcerting to know that they could plagiarize a bunch of my code if someone asked the right prompt.

(And for anyone thinking it, yes, I see the joke about how it was my bad code that it trained on. Funny enough, some of the code I know was in its training data is code I wrote when I was 19, and yeah, it is bad code.)

I meant more like the one instance, rather than the software.

No, because I can’t see anyone’s posts outside of Bluesky.

Legitimately, no. I tried to use it to write code and the code it wrote was dog shit. I tried to use it to write an article and the article it wrote was dog shit. I tried to use it to generate a logo and the logo it generated was both dog shit and raster graphic, so I wouldn’t even have been able to use it.

It’s good at answering some simple things, but sometimes even gets that wrong. It’s like an extremely confident but undeniably stupid friend.

Oh, actually it did do something right. I asked it to help flesh out an idea and turn it into an outline, and it was pretty good at that. So I guess for going from idea to outline and maybe outline to first draft, it’s ok.

Yes, absolutely.

Yes, the freedom to murder people would not be good for most people, but you are taking away others’ freedoms when you do that. But, this thread is about private property, speech, starting a family, and thought. Maybe I should have been more specific in my original comment. A better world wouldn’t require sacrificing these freedoms. It would require giving up the freedom to take others’ freedoms away.

Any freedom that means you have control over your own body and thoughts, I would consider an “essential” freedom, and those are the ones that I mean when I say a better world wouldn’t require giving up those freedoms. If you’re giving up your right to control your own body, you’re inviting a worse world.

By design, it’s supposed to be barely profitable, so it makes sense it would cross that boundary once in a while. Then some miners leave the network or slow their hash rate, the difficulty is adjusted automatically, and it becomes profitable again. It’s actually a pretty interesting strategy.

Ostensibly, the difficulty depends on how many miners there are on the network. More miners = more difficult. Fewer miners = less difficult. The “difficulty” is just how “lucky” you have to be to hit a successful hash on a block. The block’s hash is based on the previous block + all the transactions you include in your block + a random number you add. That random number is what you change to try to hit a successful hash. If the hash starts with a certain number of zeroes, you have a successful block you can add to the chain, and you’re rewarded with some brand new coin in your wallet (you include that in the transactions in your block). If not, you change the random number and try again. How many times you have to try again is controlled by the leading zeroes requirement. You’re competing with every other miner on the network to find a successful block first.

The amount of new coin constantly goes down as the chain gets longer, until it hits zero and mining doesn’t create new coin. Then, you would charge a fee for including someone’s transaction (a lot of miners already charge a fee). The more zeroes required at the start of the hash, the “harder” it is to mine. The network automatically adjusts how many zeroes are required to keep new blocks being added at a roughly constant rate (one block every ten minutes is the target).

All of this is enforced by the algorithm Bitcoin miners use. If a “rogue miner” submits a block that doesn’t meet these criteria, the other miners just reject the block and don’t add it to their copy of the blockchain. The consensus is what really matters, and no one entity controls a majority of miners. Each miner has their own copy of the entire blockchain, so each miner can validate any block it receives before adding it to the chain.

Fewer miners would mean blocks are being added too slowly at the current difficulty, and the network adjusts to make it easier to hit a successful hash. The network automatically adjusts difficulty every 2,016 blocks (it’s all just math, and it’s part of the Bitcoin algorithm), which is roughly every 2 weeks. So, it should in theory only be not profitable for up to two weeks.

(Please note that this is simplified to the point of being technically wrong, but in principle, that’s how it works. Technically, in a mining pool, you can still get rewarded even if you don’t hit a successful hash. You get rewarded based on the hash rate you provide to the pool, with the understanding that you won’t get the full reward when you hit a successful block. Also, it’s not really about the number of zeroes, but a “target” hash that your hash needs to be “below”. A hash might have the same number of leading zeroes, but not be below the target, so wouldn’t be successful. That’s really unlikely. In practice, this basically means more leading zeroes. If the target got high enough, it can even have no leading zeroes. That would probably require an intergalactic sized network.)

We’re talking about a better world and giving up freedoms. Americans have given up a bunch of freedoms and have gotten a worse world because of it.

America is not nearly as free as it claims to be.

“Calm down. You’re acting very presidential right now.”

A better world wouldn’t require sacrificing freedoms.

There’s ChimeraOS. Not sure what it’s based on.

I mean, Wine stands for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”.