Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast

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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • There will be an explosion of AI services like ChatGPT that do exactly the same thing but much cheaper. They’ll run FOSS AI models that didn’t cost them billions of dollars to train and run on purpose-built hardware (i.e. not GPUs). “Big AI” will pivot to government contracts.

    As that fifth year comes around, companies will be announcing products that have these purpose-built chips inside them that can do a whole heck of a lot of stuff without requiring a constant connection to the Internet. Think: Toys, appliances, and very fancy cars.

    Every single piece of software will have been rewritten by AI so many times with so many clones it’ll be hard to distinguish good stuff from bad. The situation will become so problematic that every app store/repo will insist upon some kind of supply chain certification and possibly 3rd party verification.

    AI tools that search the Internet on behalf of the user will crush ad-based businesses like Google and Meta. The AI will automatically filter out the ads and other cruft from search results and return just the search results the user wanted in the first place. This will result in free search engines becoming even worse and paid search will become a necessity. It’ll probably get incorporated into plans like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc bundled plans where you pay for a certain amount of photo storage/whatever and get premium search as part of the bundle.









  • Riskable@programming.devtoLinux@programming.devLTT does another Linux Challenge
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    6 days ago

    I didn’t watch the video but… Why TF did he choose Pop! OS with Cosmic Desktop‽ That’s not something a non-technical user would choose. That’s like… Beta software (Cosmic) running on a Linux distro made and tested for very specific hardware sold by System76.

    That’s like trying to put wheels made for a truck on a random sedan. Like, yeah you can do that with a bit of effort but why? It makes no sense.

    If you’re going to put a Linux distro on random hardware pick something universal and stable that was made to run on random hardware like Kubuntu/Ubuntu. Especially if you’re new to Linux.

    Also, if you’re going to do something ridiculous like this why not just start with Gentoo? Don’t use the GUI installer either! Go the LFS+ route and take care picking your file systems and compile flags 😁

    BTW: Out of all the random people I’ve ever known to “try Linux”, the ones who had the best first-time experience all used KDE (Plasma) as their desktop. That means Kubuntu, Bazzite, or SteamOS. For newbies, always go with KDE. Seriously: Its interface for settings and the launcher are familiar enough to both Windows and Mac users that they don’t have a hard time while also being different enough that they don’t make bad assumptions about how things work (which is a problem for Gnome).




  • TVs, thermostats, “smart” anything, android phones, 3D printers, industrial equipment, routers, sensors (e.g. soil monitoring where there’s millions), and zillions more categories.

    Remember: Just about every “smart” device that’s connected to the Internet is running Linux and isn’t getting compromised anywhere near as often as embedded windows devices did (which is a big reason why companies stopped using embedded windows!). There’s vulnerabilities that crop up from time to time (e.g. cheap routers) but that problem can often be attributed to shitty practices on the part of the device manufacturer. Example: Using the same default credentials on every device, expecting the end user to change them.




  • One thing to think about with Linux—where I think you’re getting the wrong impression—there’s something like fifteen billion Linux installations globally. Compare that to Windows where there’s about 1.9 billion.

    Yet for some painfully obvious reason, Windows has about an order of magnitude more serious, actively exploited vulnerabilities than Linux. For every serious, actively exploited Linux vulnerability (which includes basically anything in the tens of thousands of packages + kernel that are available and ready to install in any Linux install), Windows has vastly more. And that’s just the stuff branded by Microsoft!

    There’s a whole lot of reasons why you’re much more secure in just about every way on a Linux install, but believe it or not, you know what the single most important factor is, that prevents malware from being much of a problem? Default permissions!

    It sounds silly, but whenever you download something on a Linux desktop you can’t just execute it. You have to take an extra step and mark that thing/malware as executable before you can run it. It’s a step where everyone stops to think, “hmm… Maybe I should double check this.” 😁

    This doesn’t stop the truly careless, of course. But it’s easily the biggest factor in preventing the sorts of “drive by malware” that people often get suckered into running.

    Contrast this with Windows where literally everything is executable by default. You can change a .txt to an .exe and BAM! Windows will now attempt to execute it when you double click on that file (that would throw an error, but you get the idea).