Dran

It’s almost certainly related to cloud-init, (the canonical tool for handling deployment automation) or Ubuntu pro (extra long support for backporting security packages to older distros, plus some conveniences). They’re pre installed as a convenience to paid users of those services, that’s the (IMHO, quite reasonable) model they use to fund the distro. I would expect that some or all of that traffic would disappear if you disable/remove those two services.

https://cloud-init.io/

https://ubuntu.com/pro

I think that holds true in this case… but I’ll be damned if the ltt screwdriver isn’t the best hand tool I’ve ever owned.

RE: backups, I’d recommend altering your workflow. Instead of taking an image of a box, automate the creation of that box. Create a bash script that takes a base OS, and installs everything you use fresh. Then have it apply configuration files where appropriate, and lastly figure out which applications really need backup blobs to work properly (thunderbird, for example). Once you have that, your backups become just the data itself. Photos, documents, etc. Everything else is effectively ephemeral because it can be reproduced through automation.

Takes a lot less space, is a lot more portable. And much better in scenarios where something in your OS is broken or you get a new computer and want to replicate your setup.

There’s nothing magic about Soylent for weight loss. It’s a simple equation of calories in and calories out. The advantages that Soylent offered me was convenience for counting said calories, convenience for meal prep, and being reasonably certain my body was getting a decent distribution of micronutrients

Yes, 375 -> 250

I did ~1.5 years of only Soylent, then transitioned into 2/3 meals per day being Soylent, which I’ve done for the last ~6-7yrs.

I’m the healthiest I’ve ever been, but it does require discipline, exercise and attention like anything else. Calories are calories and if you consume more than you burn, you’ll poop a lot and gain weight. If you drink at a significant deficit (my 1.5years was at 1200kcal/day) you will poop once or twice a week and it will take a few months of your body getting used to it for it to be more than liquid.

As others have said though, it’s a deceptively dehydrating liquid. You absolutely still need to drink water, and your water intake will largely dictate how much you pee.

Outlook being on that list is crazy.

Depends on where you work and what their policies are. My work does have many strict policies on following licenses, protecting sensitive data, etc

My solution was to MIT license and open source everything I write. It follows all policies while still giving me the flexibility to fork/share the code with any other institutions that want to run something similar.

It also had the added benefit of forcing me to properly manage secrets, gitignores, etc

The proper deepseek r1 requires about 500gb of ram/vram to run, which is orders of magnitude more ram than modern phones have. The smaller models called “deepseek r1” are not the real deepseek model that everyone is talking about.

The difference is I (the contributor of content) have the same access as anyone else to the data, and could use it for my own purposes if I wanted to.

On a platform like reddit, access to the raw data is controlled and cannot be format shifted / used in any way I wanted to.

For the average user you’re definitely right, but I will say for the sysadmin of headless systems, having a powerful cli editor is a godsend. While it may seem arcane and unnecessary, learning vim is easier than managing remote x or sshfs or copying files to and from a system.

I didn’t learn vim to be a contrarian; I learned it because it seemed (and still seems to be) the path of least resistance for many workflows.

Raid is not a backup!

I run ubuntu’s server base headless install with a self-curated minimal set of gui packages on top of that (X11, awesome, pulse, thunar) but there’s no reason you couldn’t install kde with wayland. Building the system yourself gets you really far in the anti-bloatware dept, and the breadth of wiki/google/gpt based around Debian/Ubuntu means you can figure just about any issues out. I do this on a ~$200 eBay random old Dell + a 3050 6gb (slot power only).

For lighter gaming I’ll use the Ubuntu PC directly, but for anything heavier I have a win11 PC in the basement that has no other task than to pipe steam over sunshine/moonlight

It is the best of both worlds.

If there are any water pipes through the second half of the house you cannot let those exterior walls reach freezing temperatures. Whatever solution you go with needs to account for the entire space in some capacity.

I’m sorry but this is just a fundamentally incorrect take on the physics at play here.

You unfortunately can’t ever prevent further breakdown. Every time you run any voltage through any CPU, you are always slowly breaking down gate-oxides. This is a normal, non-thermal failure mode of consumer CPUs. The issue is that this breakdown is non-linear. As the breakdown process increases, it increases resistance inside the die, and as a consequence requires higher minimum voltages to remain stable. That higher voltage accelerates the rate of idle damage, making time disproportionately more damaging the more damaged a chip is.

If you want to read more on these failure modes, I’d recommend the following papers:

L. Shi et al., “Effects of Oxide Electric Field Stress on the Gate Oxide Reliability of Commercial SiC Power MOSFETs,” 2022 IEEE 9th Workshop on Wide Bandgap Power Devices & Applications

Y. Qian et al., “Modeling of Hot Carrier Injection on Gate-Induced Drain Leakage in PDSOI nMOSFET,” 2021 IEEE International Conference on Integrated Circuits, Technologies and Applications

The “problem” is that the more you understand the engineering, the less you believe Intel when they say they can fix it in microcode. Without writing an entire essay, the TL/DR is that the instability gets worse over time, and the only way that happens is if applied voltages are breaking down dielectric barriers within the chip. This damage is irreparable, 100% of chips in the wild are irreparably damaging themselves over time.

Even if Intel can slow the bleeding with microcode, they can’t repair the damage, and every chip that has ever ran under the bad code will have a measurably shorter lifespan. For the average gamer, that sometimes hasn’t even been the average warranty period.

Are you maybe thinking of https://distr1.org/ made by the i3 guy?

That’s… not remotely true? Linux can absolutely install kernel drivers. If you mean running windows games under wine then sure, but then we’re no longer talking apples:apples. You could do the same thing on windows by running a game in a VM.

This is correct, as in windows a driver is the most straightforward method to runlevel0 access. It absolutely could at any time do exactly what crowdstrike did. But also so could Nvidia/amd with GPU drivers, your motherboard manufacturer with chipset and RGB drivers, etc. it’s not quite the smoking gun people make it out to be, as there are a lot of legitimate reasons to have this kind of system access.

The egregious part was that crowdstrike users agreed to allow a vendor to bypass canary channels and deploy straight to their endpoints.

Endpoint is any PC/laptop/sign/POS/etc. It’s a catchall term for anything that isn’t a server. it basically refers to any machine that might be logged into and used by a non-IT user.