A few ideas:

• If it’s a hard drive, listen to see if you keep getting hard drive noises after the freeze.
• Try SSH’ing in to that box (or otherwise try making a network connection to it.) Just to make sure the system is actually freezing and it’s not just the graphics screwing up and not updating the display while continuing to boot.
• Delete/uninstall your AMD firmware. Or if you don’t have it installed, install it.
• If you’re currently booting in EFI mode, try BIOS mode. Or vice versa.
• Try booting with an incorrect “root” kernel parameter. My thought is maybe if it’s loading a module that’s causing issues, if it can’t get the root FS, it can’t load modules. If it doesn’t have the same issue, that will tell you something. (And if it does, that’ll tell you something too.)
• Try other distros’s live ISOs to see if you you can isolate anything that makes a difference.

I wonder if there’s a way to prevent people from even knowing that two different votes came from the same user.

What I outlined above should prevent anyone from knowing two different votes came from the same user… without specifically trying that user’s id on each. That’s what the salt (the comment/post id) is for.

I’ve personally been banned from one community for downvoting too consistently.

Votes should be anonymous.

I tend to agree, but the fact is that they aren’t anonymous. This tool just exposes the already-existing fact that Lemmy expressly does not guarantee anonymity for votes. The solution isn’t to not for the poster to not publish this tool. Believe me, such tools already exist in private even if none other than this one are published. Publishing this one only democratizes access to that information. (And not entirely, I don’t think. From what I’m seeing on the page, it looks like it still requires an admin account on an instance. Update: Actually, I’m not sure if it requires an admin account or not. Either way, though.) The solution is (if it’s possible) to make Lemmy itself protect voters’ anonymity.

The reason why instances know who has up/down voted things (rather than only keeping an anonymized “total” for each post/comment) is so it can prevent double-voting.

Maybe instead of usernames, the instances could store/trade… salted hashes of the usernames where the salt is the title or unique identifier of the post/comment being voted on? It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would allow the instance to figure out whether the currently-viewing or currently-voting user has already voted while also making it harder for anyone else to get that information. About the only way a tool could tell you exhaustively who had voted if that were how things worked that I can think of off hand is to try every username on Lemmy one-by-one until all the votes were accounted for.

(Of course, malicious instances could still keep track of usernames or unique user ids who up/downvoted, but only on the instance on which the vote was cast. Also, one downside of this approach would be increased CPU usage. How much? Not sure. It might be trivial. Or maybe not. Dunno.)

And there may be much better ways to do this. I haven’t really thought about it much. I also haven’t checked whether there is an open ticket asking for improved anonymity for votes already.

(Also, full disclosure, all of the above was written after only an extremely brief skim of the linked page.)

(One more edit. Something IHawkMike said led me to realize that the scheme I described above would allow instances to manipulate votes by just inventing hashes. Like, grabbing 512 bits of data from /dev/urandom and giving it to other instances as if it was a hash of a username or user id when, in fact, it’s not a hash of anything. Other instances wouldn’t be able to easily tell that it wasn’t the hash of a valid user id. I haven’t thought how to go about solving that yet. Maybe if it occurs to me, I’ll update this post.)

Congratulations, Google, you can spy on math now.

5318008

Clear.

5318008

Clear.

5318008

etc

NO

Both Daemon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez.

I mean, as long as they don’t butcher them like they did to, for instance, Ready Player One.

Don’t trust anything ChatGPT says. It makes shit up all the time.

I’ll take FOSS over the proprietary software we can be sure will do malicious things to us any day.

I don’t know anything really about Stormux or HomeAssistantOS, but ArchLinuxARM is honestly going down the tubes. I use it a lot, but I’m pretty well decided to switch away from it.

The ArchLinuxARM package repos are constantly ridiculously out of date, and the folks in charge of ArchLinuxARM a) aren’t doing anything to fix it and b) won’t let the community help or even talk about the issue. (They lock threads and otherwise shut down conversation on the topic.)

It’s a bummer. Arch is a great OS (coughasidefromsystemdcough) and it’s nice to be able to run it on a Raspberry Pi. But as it is, it’s hard to see it as usable for real-world use cases. Maybe someone someday will create a new Arm-focused version of Arch (maybe Arch proper will even decide to start supporting Arm) unrelated to the existing ArchLinuxARM project. But for now, it’s terrible.

That’s awesome! Welcome to the club and don’t be afraid to explore your system and ask questions!

Hell?

If you’re looking for recommendations, everything by Missie Elliot is worth listening to.

She might be mainstream/well-known enough that it kindof “goes without saying”, but just in case you’re not familiar with her.

Originally posted here, quoted below for convenience:

Real story.

I was in my late teens. My parents were dragging me to a tiny, kinda culty church every fuckin’ weekend. Didn’t really have much choice. (Hell, I hadn’t even told anyone yet that I thought Christianity was 100% bullshit.)

I had a reputation for knowing my stuff about computers. (Because normies – particularly boomer normies like Pastor Dipshit – don’t know the difference between programmers and PC support.)

So, one Sunday after the service, Pastor Dipshit asks me to look at his computer. His Outlook was giving an error dialog. Something about not being able to find an email on disk. Clicking the “ok” button just resulted immediately in another dialog, and while the error dialog was present you couldn’t interact with the main window, so this rendered Outlook unusable.

Turns out he’d gone and deleted a bunch of files from the filesystem. Like by navigating from “My Computer” down to the directory where Outlook stored its files. Rather than deleting emails through the Outlook GUI the way one is meant to.

So, I mused “hmm, I wonder if it’s just giving one error message per email that was affected.” I could see in the window behind the error dialog that the total count of emails in his inbox was only a couple hundred or something.

So I commenced to clicking as rapidly as I could. Probably about a minute of clicking later, no more error dialogs and Outlook was usable again.

And everyone marveled at my “genius.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t learn his lesson and continued to delete random files from the filesystem, but he kindof lost what was left of his connection to consensus reality and scared even my culty family away and we quit attending that church not terribly long after that, so I couldn’t say for sure.

Original prose is a marvelous spectacle.

But AI? I dunno. I remain skeptical.

(The above is not written by an AI. I promise. ;) )

LLMs, image generators like Stable Diffusion etc, and other of what’s come lately to be called “generative AI” should have no place on the Fediverse or anywhere else.

You best be bussin’ your rizz off my lawn no cap.

(Kidding. You know we love ya’ll, right?)

Reverse-engineer it and build an unlimited-use portal gun, of course!

I was always one of the youngest in my class. My birthday is very late in the year. I also graduated high school a year early and entered college while I was still technically 16. I got the occasional joke/comment about not being able to drink until I was a senior in college.

Nope.