Justin

SteamOS is immutable, you always get the same update no matter what you were running before. I think the only files that can get out of sync are in your home folder.

This looks super useful! Would be interesting to see this as a systemd service built into NixOS, so my gaming machine could always have this running without any manual steps.

I guess that makes sense, but I wonder if it would be hard to get clean data out of the per-token confidence values. The LLM could be hallucinating, or it could just be generating bad grammar. It seems like it’s hard enough already to get LLMs to distinguish between “killing processes” and murder, but maybe there could be some novel training and inference techniques that come up.

I thought confidence levels were for image recognition? How do confidence levels work for transformer LLMs?

It’s a bubble

Windows requires that antuviruses run at kernel level, programs which are notoriously buggy and harmful. It is a design flaw to require users to implement mandatory security features in this way. (it is literally not possible to run windows 10 or 11 without an antivirus) Similar security programs on Linux do not run at kernel level, nor should they.

Furthermore, every copy of Windows since Windows 7 requires that kernel modules are signed by Microsoft themselves. Microsoft personally signed off on this code that crashed millions of computers.

Is this implying that a publicly-traded corporation whose software is installed on millions of computers around the world has the same level of agency and responsibility as a preschooler?

When it comes to IT reliability and security, kinda, yeah.

Windows AV and MDM is a bit of a horror show in the corporate space. I worked somewhere where developers weren’t allowed to use WSL because it was blocked by McAfee. We also had 3 different MDMs running and they were slow as balls even though they were modern 8 core laptops.

Didn’t know 70% was a “couple percent”

If someone hands a toddler a gun and they shoot someone, who’s fault is it?

Microsoft*

This is an industry wide issue. This is just the first symptom.

The fact that random companies like Crowdstrike have kernel drivers in millions of computers they they ship remotely is a security risk in and of itself. We’re lucky crowdstrike just shipped a bug that crashes computers, other companies could have shipped a lot worse.

No shit. These machines are as advanced as a nuclear power plant, they’re gonna have a bit more proprietary software and security protocols than you’d think. Not as simple as just pressing “start” with these machines.

I wonder if asianometry will do a video about the software on ASML machines sometime.

Definitely! If your VPN keeps logs, is in a surveillance-friendly jurisdiction, etc, then details of your internet traffic can be revealed by your VPN. I recommend Mullvad, paid with cash, for the most security. It can also help to pick VPN servers outside of the most egregious jurisdictions, like picking EU servers over US or HK servers.

DoH is meant to hide your internet activity from your ISP/cell-provider since DNS is otherwise unencrypted. If you trust your VPN, then you can trust unencrypted DNS.

The first step in security is to answer who you’re defending against. Someone stealing your phone? A cop with a STINGRAY device? All the security decisions you make are based on your initial threat model.

Generally, home internet, wifi, and cellular data are considered safe against passers-by (assuming your wifi password is strong). However, they are also assumed to be eavesdropped on by your ISP and government. Details of your internet traffic can then also be revealed by your ISP to other people during legal action, such as if you’re being investigated for piracy.

There are ways to further protect your internet traffic from being snooped on, even from your ISP and government, by using things like HTTPS, DNS over HTTPS, and of course, VPNs.

It would accelerate the ongoing brain drain in Hong Kong at least, and encourage the stragglers to finally leave for more democratic countries. Banning Google in Hong Kong would be a shitshow for the CCP, but Google doesn’t have any sort of spine or ethics.

The people? Democracy really isn’t that hard.

NixOS users install KDE using a NixOS config option, as there’s a lot of configuration needed to make KDE run beyond just installing the binaries.