Dave.

The article is quite fixated on how dialup was around in the early 2000s, and how Americans used dialup in the early 2000s with screeching modems, and how AOL turned off their dialup last year and only a thousand people were using dialup by then.

But there’s no indication that this has anything to do with the application, except for maybe everyone used a popular means to connect to the Internet to use it when it was first built.

Now if someone maintained a bank of modems and people legitimately called them up and connected to the system like it was an ISP, and it was secure by way of that was the only way to access it as opposed to over the Internet, then sure, I can see that maybe it’s time to work on that part.

Complains about incomprehensible short commands in legacy shells.

Builds own shell with a new set of incomprehensible short commands, minus the hookers and blackjack of existing shells.

(Insert xkcd standards comic here)

I’m quite sick of my browsers auto-updating and adding stuff I don’t need.

I’m pretty much at the point where I’m going to turn browser updates off. It’s perfectly functional for me as is, and if I ever hear of some crippling browser security issue I’ll consider its impact myself before thinking about updating.

You’re not thinking black-swan enough.

You’re typing your comments using a blob of goo with about a hundred million neurons in it that cycles under a hundred hertz and draws less than 20 watts.

I don’t think that we’ll be running packs of goo in our PCs any time soon. But I do think some entirely different way of looking at the problem will emerge that will reduce computational requirements by many orders of magnitude. And it won’t involve gigantic statistical engines trying to find the best average response to a question.

I’m just waiting for the closed-source AI industry to have their Black Swan moment.

Something’s going to come out of left field from the open AI community and all that investment in proprietary models and mega-compute is going to be rendered useless.

Every large AI startup is racing to be the last one standing. They are all gobbling up compute resources to ensure that they have the best competitive advantage when others go broke. That includes soaking up all the future supply they can to restrict their competitors ability to do the same. In < 5 years time there is only going to be one commercial AI company left, and all the rest will just be skeletons picked clean of all their resources.

Be prepared to live with whatever hardware you have now for about 10 years. If you’re lucky things will be back on an even keel by then.

Statistically your weird internal corpo program that was made bespoke over a decade several decades ago …

Won’t work at all because it lives on a shared drive that needs your windows login and your PC to be joined to the domain to reach it, and IT just said “lol no” to your request to join your home made windows VM to the domain.

Get some M-Discs and burn a couple of copies of your docs and photos. The theoretical lifetime of M-disc is ~1000 years. Good luck finding a Blu-ray drive in the 30th century though.

That’s quite an odessy. I put MX Linux on my 13 year old dell laptop, and there was an option in the MX utilities app to install the NVIDIA 340 drivers for it, and it merged them into the 7.0.something kernel that I had in about 3 minutes.

This isn’t meant as snark. Get settled into things for a few months with what you’ve got and then boot a few distros off USB and see if there’s something that better suits you or your hardware. You’ll have a good idea by then if what you really want/need.

Your ISP can theoretically use your home Wi-Fi router to track your movements.

This requires ancillary hardware that isn’t present on wifi routers, and then it also requires wifi devices spread around the place to provide a signal source for human bodies to distort, and then it requires significant computational hardware that also isn’t present in common home wifi routers.

Not to say that the general method can’t be used for basic presence detection - Philips Hue ZigBee devices can use the variations in the background signal strength of ZigBee devices they can see around them to infer that someone is in a room, so they can switch lights on/off automatically. But it requires multiple devices in a room for it to work reliably and they need calibration as well.

So does every city, suburb, town, factory, mine, processing plant, farm, etc.

What you’re missing is that all these things provide economic benefits locally.

A datacentre uses prodigious amounts of local resources, but doesn’t provide much in the way of local returns. It’s very much a case of “privatise the profits, socialise the losses” for the locals.

Brave’s been making, uh, some controversial philosophical design choices lately.

I mean, they had some before, but now they also have a few more lately that have riled people up a bit.

I use them for a bit of coding leverage, and they require a fair bit of… not hand holding, but explicitness, maybe. Otherwise they wander down the path of statistical averageness, and the average code they saw during training was shit.

So they’ll happily serve up a pile of inefficient dogshit, complete with working tests and docs and all of that. And then they’ll happily refactor it at your suggestion to slowly turn it into something that’s resource friendly and generally secure and generally expandable.

But there’s no way for them to do that by themselves if you don’t have the basic domain knowledge to guide them in the right direction. You’ll just get average code, and once you’ve been in the game for a few decades, you realise that nice, efficient, quality code is the rarity, not the norm.

If you’re not creating more than 800GB a day of new data you can just let it run with a faster drive as a buffer in front of it.

Or get 10 of them and run them in parallel. Maybe get 11 and throw in a bit of parity, just in case bitrot surfaces after the first 1000 years or something.

It’s often not possible on other operating systems. Especially the consumer versions of a certain operating system starting with “W”, that system will refuse to have duplicate IPs.

But essentially it’s always been possible (but, probably not preferred these days) to have redundant routes/paths on Unix systems. The way you have it now is more of a side effect of being able to do more complex network setups, like using different interfaces to talk to different subnets, or using a slow link as a backup to a fast link.

With your current setup you should get a slow failover ability, for example if you ping some other device and then unplug your Ethernet cable, you’ll have a bit of a pause in replies and then they will start again as the stack switches to the other link.

The “metric 600” on your Wi-Fi adapter indicates to the system that it is a higher cost route than your Ethernet one. So the IP stack will prefer sending packets out via the Ethernet port.

Local devices who haven’t heard from you lately will send to whatever device gives them a response to their ARP (“who has IP address X?”) request first, and seeing as Ethernet is lower latency than WiFi, they will mostly use your Ethernet adapter as their target when sending data to you.

Devices that have received data from you already will have the MAC address of your Ethernet adapter in their ARP table, so they’ll just send packets to that without bothering to issue an ARP request.

Devices off your subnet talk to your router, so they don’t care about your MAC address, they’ll just use IP to talk to your router, who will then do the ARP request and hand the packets on to your computer via whatever interface answers first.

You’re a bit behind the times. adduser has been asking for your full name since the dawn of Unix.

Edit: and if you don’t put in your full name, how will people know who they’re fingering?!

The beamwidth of Voyager 1’s antenna is about 0.5 degrees. In practical terms, that’s very narrow, about an 8 metre wide beam at a kilometre distance.

At its current distance, by the time the beam reaches Earth it is 224 million kilometres wide, 1.5x the distance from the Earth to the sun.

Now imagine the light from a car’s taillights lighting up the back wall of a garage as it reverses in. Then spread that same amount of light out over that 224 million km wide beamwidth. That’s what Voyager is putting out and what the Deep Space Network dishes have to listen for.

“508 Resource Limit Is Reached”

How apt

I have MX Linux on a 14 year old Dell Laptop.

Works great because it’s got a lightweight desktop, and it has a tool (a GUI tool even!) that seamlessly merges the last available Nvidia 340 drivers for my GPU into the latest kernel. Parked at the desktop with no desktop apps running, it uses about 800MB of ram, leaving 15 GB left for whatever I need to run. Which I have found is plenty for my use case, I’ve never seen swap in use.

The MX tools are good, like everyone else has been saying here. They take away a lot of the fiddly business associated with the average “sysadmin” things that an end user needs to do.