Most of the Web GUIs are designed for interaction/collaboration between multiple people, and are massive overkill for one person. Tools like gitk/git gui are more than enough to see what’s going on graphically.

If you want to install all the other stuff, that’s completely up to you, but a lot of people don’t seem to realise that the Web GUI stuff and command line are completely separate things, and you don’t have to install both of them.

If you don’t need the web gui stuff (and you shouldn’t for personal use) you can set up a git server using gitolite. Very easy to manage

Yeah, that’s basically why I got out of IT. Too many managers/clients refusing to listen to warnings about what would happen when they did X, then blaming the techies when things went to shit.

Because they are the “boss”, they have 0 accountability. Worst case for them is a golden handshake, and failing upwards where the cycle starts again.

I think they have some areas where they’re very useful, but beyond those areas they’re only OK at best. They don’t come close to living up to the hype, which is mostly based on “the next version will be mind blowing!”.

They are a new type of app, nothing more. New types of apps can be extremely useful, and make a lot of tasks easier, e.g. spreadsheets. I would say at best generative AI is as game changing as spreadsheets were, but maybe less.

The hype machine wants us to believe they are as revolutionary as the PC itself, or the car. In fact 10 times as revolutionary! I just don’t buy it… at least not in the foreseeable future.

Of course people could do that, but you have to find someone willing to do it or be able to afford to pay for it. It happens but it’s maybe 5% or students or less.

There is always going to be cheating. But once it becomes nearly impossible to detect, and maybe 30% or more people are doing it, the system breaks down.

Good luck doing one on one assessments in a uni course of 300+

Or find a smaller instance. If everyone joins a bigger instance it’s just moving the problem

Yeah, it’s a fricken nightmare… Windows is ok in a well managed corporate setup where all the crap is uninstalled

I bought a laptop recently which came with Windows. I was going to setup dual boot because I need Office365 for work… but in the end I just gave up, deleted windows and installed Ubuntu.

I hear lots of people used to using Windows saying “I tried Linux and couldn’t get anything to work”… it’s not that I don’t believe them, but I really struggle to understand it. Windows is so much worse!

I’m not sure what makes you think the law applies to billionaires

LLMs choose words based on probabilities, i.e. given the word “blue”, it will have a list of words and probabilities that those words should follow “blue”. So “sky” would be a high probability, “car” might also be quite high, as well as a long list of other words. The LLM chooses the words not by selecting whatever has the highest probability, but with a degree of randomness. This has been found to make the text sound more natural.

To watermark, you essentially make this randomness happen in a predefined way, at least for cases where many different words could fit. So (to use a flawed example), you might make it so that “blue” is followed by “car” rather than “sky”. You do this throughout the text, and in a way that doesn’t affect the meaning of the text. It is then possible to write a simple algorithm to detect whether this text was written by an AI, because of the probability of different words appearing in particular sequences. Because its spread throughout the text, it’s quite difficult to remove the watermark completely (although not impossible).

Here’s an article that explains it better than I can: https://www.kdnuggets.com/2023/03/watermarking-help-mitigate-potential-risks-llms.html

You have to be careful with any TLD. People outside the US have found themselves subject to US law because they had a US controlled domain name.

Some ccTLDs are fine, some are not, but you have to think carefully when you buy it.

There’s always software I can’t use properly (and not just Windows stuff), some stuff badly configured with weird error messages… last time I was not able to even use the apt command

I’m not sure what you were doing to break apt, but it was probably something pretty funky (or at least adding a bunch of repos without really thinking about it).

The thing with Linux is that it doesn’t stop you doing stupid shit as much as Windows. If you know what you’re doing, that’s a really good thing. It’s really annoying when your OS stops you doing something for your own protection if you know that you’re not going to break anything. Simple example: Windows locks any file that’s open, Linux doesn’t. That’s really convenient, but you can screw things up badly if you’re not careful.

If you’re a beginner, I would suggest sticking to the GUI, i.e. control panels, software installed, etc. in Ubuntu. If you ever go into command line, be really careful, and understand what you’re doing. Definitely do not copy and paste commands you find online without understanding them reasonably well. Ubuntu puts in pretty good protections in its graphical tools. You’ll be able to do whatever you need to do, but shouldn’t break anything. Over time, you’ll pick up some knowledge and be able to do more in the command line (etc.) without breaking things.

You might want to look up the law of unintended consequences.

The bigger the intervention, the bigger the potential unintended consequence.

By far the easiest solution to climate change is not emitting greenhouse gasses in the first place. It is still a monumental challenge but if we don’t do that, we’re just treating the symptoms not the cause

That is the exact opposite from my experience. Winodws has always been unstable, slow, and requires rebooting and reinstalling often. Linux is none of those things.

spez is a Musk fanboi. What a surprise.

Reddit’s clearly in a death spiral, but I’ve been wondering if was going to go thru an “alt right” phase. Guess we know now.

Brutal dictators.

The cops are moving in with tear gas and rubber bullets…