My first introduction to winget as a sysadmin was horrible. Why Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided to make winget reliant on the user environment still baffles me. Why on earth would they require admin rights for some commands if you need to have logged into the system once?! Even the user created for LAPS does not have that requirement!

Even getting it to run through a service on system level requires you to find the nondescript directory of the executable (which may or may not he the same on other devices!) To get basic functionality going. But even with the --ignore-unknown flag (because it is not able to determine the version of packages when run through a service) winget will refuse to update without a user environment.

That is true. However, 2 things have to be considered here:

1. LLMs are easily manipulatable. So if the LLM says some advice, the person can easily spin it in a way where the LLM believes that its own advice doesn’t apply even when it does. And admitting problems in oneself exist is harder in some people.
2. LLMs can talk like a person, but will miss out on details about the other, making their advice rather boilerplate, which can be very hit or miss.

In contrast, people can overcome both hindrances. They can either try to make the other realize the issues they are denying are going on, or coerce the other to still try the advice. Generally, our gift of reading little aspects of how the other talks/behaves helps us communicate with the other a lot more than we think.

Overall, not really, since with a competent talking partner you also would get ways to improve your situation, and help with pressing matters. It might be good in the short term, but there needs to be more to be good in the long run.

My guess would be the same phenomenon that existed with ELIZA. People want to be heard, especially lonely people, and LLMs are pretty good at that, asking questions and acting supportive, by design.

This whole situation reminds me of that fact that some people hire escorts to just have someone to talk to.

I think another big problem that hampers the computer age in many places is bureaucracy and clinging to old structures.

For many companies there are checks that are enforced, simply because there is no trust in a new system, or the processes to be automated requires a major reorganisation that spans departments, and those departments might oppose such a restructuring, may it be for fear of their jobs, simply clinging to old processes or not having the capacity to carry out bigger projects.

Not only that, but a cheap PSU can also fry your other PC parts due to power surges when it breaks.

I don’t think that systemd is really bending the knee too hard on this one. Actually, I think this move is actually a great way to render any sort of age verification, when using systemd, inert. Because, let’s think about it: it’s an optional field, in a JSON file that NEEDS to be editable at all times. If a distro decides to implement any serious age verification, it will have to store the data, namely the date of birth, somewhere. The /home folder would be wrong, as the user could edit that at all times. The userdb on the other hand can be restricted, meaning that the user can only edit it with user privileges. So if a government questions the seriousness of this verification method, distros can just claim that it is the administrative duty of the parent to prevent their children accessing things they shouldn’t, and that the Linux kernel itself provides the proper tool to do it without constant supervision. Yet systemd cannot enforce any stricter rules because service users, especially root, are not real people and thus cannot have any age verification. The only solution would be to tie these accounts to a person. This would cause an outrage at companies, considering that this role would most likely be the CEO or CIO, and if that device is stolen their identity could be linked to a crime, and I doubt any police station would bother trying to retrieve that laptop.

So this change will most likely be the maximum systemd can do without breaking distros for corporations, while at the same time allow classic Linux users, who most likely give themselves admin rights, a way to render any verification null and void by editing this optional field on their own.

EDIT: Also, being mad at an organisation trying to meet the laws in order to be usable will solve nothing. As you said yourself: a strong stance is needed. So complaining about systemd and trying to make them revert it will do nothing, because there will always be someone who bends the knee. If you want to do something, organize or join a protest and go to the streets, show that the law is for the people, not to be used as an oppression tool.

I mean, the introduction of the date of birth field is obviously done to make it easy for distros to comply with age verification by simply saving the birth date and nothing else.

As for the other fields: what use would it have to have such info at OS level? What application would use these fields and how? I mean, some fields, like the ‘location’ one, already are pretty useless, as, for example, the ‘location’ field doesn’t seem to bhave any firm consensus on how it should be formatted. Even the documentation lists both “Berlin, Germany” as well as “Basement, Room 3a” as valid values.

So I doubt not introducing such fields has any sort of political agenda to it, but just raises the question on why such fields would be useful to begin with.

That is a valid point. Of course it still would be rather anonymised, but it could always be a ‘frog in the pot’ type situation, where most drastic changes are introduced very slowly. My main concern at the end of the day is how much info will be required to be given to services and how much data will be actually stored. If it’s anonymised, then I don’t see much of a threat. If a service requires me to fully identify for an age check, that’s an entirely different thing, especially considering the last of Discord’s data leaks.

I find that move extremely funny, since it’s purely made for sensationalism and nothing else. I mean, if you hate how systems implemented age verification, then why don’t you remove its identity verification too, i.e. also optional fields for stuff like your address an e-mail that most users don’t even fill out.

There is no mechanism verifying what birth date you type in - you can type whatever date you want and systems doesn’t care.

I’d say no matter where you stand with age verification, this is the best solution to handle the situation. After all, any and all age checks we have nowadays are a black box anyways. There is no real knowing how other systems are checking ages, and there is AFAIK no real government mandated rules on how it is verified. They could make you scan your ID’s front, back, nuclear composition and dietary preferences and give you a result that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a proper age verification procedure.

If the government wants to introduce age verification, they have to do it themselves - build an API that handles the age verification, similar to how the digital ID in Germany works, as an example. If they want proper age verification, they also have to take the blame themselves if things go wrong.

For the problems you encountered: the refresh rate can be set in the monitor settings. If you can’t go any higher, then there might be a problem with your graphics drivers. It is also important to add that Pop!OS is based on Ubuntu, which can take ages to implement modern changes. For Gaming I would generally recommend a rolling release distro, maybe it be OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora, etc… Otherwise you might not get the cutting edge tech that you need.

As for Tetr.io: it seems to be a problem with Vulcan, namely that improperly configured drivers will use the iGPU by default. How do you install/run that game?

Huh, TIL. I guess the image is just clickbait then.

The only thing that comes to mind is that undersea cables are often under attack by sharks.

I have to disagree with that. Most positions in factory jobs exist because human labour is very cheap, especially in terms of flexibility. I doubt there are many positions where a robot with a less humanoid shape wouldn’t do a better job than a human or a humanoid robot. It’s just often cheaper to employ these workers because you pay them a salary, either on a hourly basis or on a monthly one, yet don’t have to worry about maintenance. With robots you have less hourly costs, but a much bigger overhead, as you now have to hire qualified technicians to perform regular maintenance on those machines, and also semi-regularly order replacement parts. These costs will rise alongside the complexity of these robots. And humanoid robots are much, much more complex than industrial robots, especially as they need to incorporate a lot more sensors that most industrial robots just won’t need. Sensors that might be very sensitive or require regular calibrations to ensure they work properly. That doesn’t come cheap.

Even when we look over the costs, humans will always be more versatile than robots. Give a person a book on how to do a job and they will perform it with the help of the books, and develop their working style to even work more efficiently. In contrast, robots would need a much more thorough training in order to work properly. This could be done traditionally by hardcoding the logic, or by using neural networks, which would be more intuitive, but are prone to create undesired results if one doesn’t have a good eye for the involved factors. And this process would need to be repeated for each job, and again if jobs would be fused together. And of course one would have to adhere for hardware limitations. A processor can only work so fast, and there are limitations on storage space, data transfer speed and reliability that also come to play when it comes to saving the training data.

Then what niche will they fulfill? What work requires a humanoid form?

The easiest way is Docker Desktop, though I myself installed only the docker engine itself, which still was pretty easy to do. I did that because I had a dedicated server with no GUI. It does require to add the reposity though, but the documentation is pretty straightforward to follow.

Did you sync your library? It was confusing for the first time for me as well, but Jellyfin requires you to synchronise your library if you add or remove files.

Docker is basically similar to a flatpak: you download a package via Docker and it will practically do everything for you, so you only have to take care of the config file, if even needed.

I’m sceptical with Windows, considering that most programs are installed via EXE files, so the outcry will be huge. But I’m not saying it can’t be a possibility.

With Ubuntu there would only be a chance of it happening if they also make their distro immutable. That way the user could not as easily install packages the traditional way. But even then there might be ways to disable this immutable mode for troubleshooting. However, this, in my opinion, would cause a mass exodus as Canonical does not have the same advantage as Microsoft or Google have: Windows and android are, to an extent, closed off ecosystems. Thus switching to another system is very hard, as not every software is available on every other system, so potentially subpar alternatives and comparability layers, whose functionality mostly depends on whether the company behind the original system is actively fighting against these tools or not. Ubuntu on the other hand, is a Linux distro, so you cab make it like Theseus and recreate this distro more or less with the sum of its parts, if need be.

If a factory can afford robots, they already have acquired it. Industrial robots excel at their work already due to them being extremely precise already. If you need transportation robots, there are already ones that euter run on embedded rails or are already fully self-driving using wheels. Humanoid robots solve no issues that the industry hasn’t already solved. It would just be a robot that would be less stable compared to any other transportation robot nor as precise as stationed ones while also more complex, and thus easier to break down, with the only upside it being that it’s more of a generalist, but that is also sort of a moot point because a human could do it still cheaper.

The real use case of humanoid robots is very niche, with it being in environment where classic robot models fails, that being an environment that cannot be modified for classic robot use (e.g. mountainous terrain) where flying is not a viable option. After all, the human body, and the bodies of quite a few animals, excel at climbing rough and steep terrain whereas most, if not all, currently commercially available robots fail at it, or at the very least do very poorly.