

Democracy is dead. Welcome to the neo dark ages. Take up arms.
Democracy is dead. Welcome to the neo dark ages. Take up arms.
Uhh no… Idiots are fascists. Some idiots may call themselves liberal but that doesn’t make it so. Liberals by definition cannot be fascist. The idiots are those that let fascists parade as anything but.
Why is the UK such a hell hole all the sudden? I’ve never had such a terrible opinion of the place until now with encryption and authoritarian fuckwitism against the last bastion of real democracy on the internet.
Conservatism is collapsing into irrelevance as a long term commitment.
dichotomous thinking is the pretentiously fun term
The UEFI boot system is tricky and you need to get along with Secure Boot to do this. Secure Boot is outside of the Linux kernel. Both Fedora and Ubuntu have systems for this. Fedora uses the Anaconda system and I believe they do it best. I have had a W11 partition for 2 years and never used it once. It can’t even get on the internet with my firewall setup, but it is there and never had any issues the 3 times I logged into it.
I think all of the Fedora systems support the shim key and secure boot but I know Workstation does. For Ubuntu I think it is just the regular vanilla Ubuntu desktop that the shim supports. This may be somewhat sketchy with Nvidia or maybe not. Nvidia “”““open sourced””“” their kernel code but the actual nvcc compiler required to build the binaries is still proprietary crap.
I have a 3080Ti gaming laptop. It isn’t half bad with 16 GB of video RAM from all the way back in 2021. Nvidia is artificially holding back the vram because of monopoly nonsense. The new stuff has very little real consumer value as a result, at least with AI stuff I run. The hardware is a little faster, but more vram is absolutely critical and new stuff that is the same or worse than what I have from 3 generations and nearly 5 years ago is ridiculous.
The battery life blows and the GPU likely won’t even work on battery. It will get donkey balls hot with AI workloads, especially any kind of image gen. This results in lots of thermal throttling. All AI packages run as servers on your network. If you are thinking along these lines if running your own models, get a tower and run the thing remotely.
I manage, and need the ergonomics for physical disability reasons, but I still would prefer to have a separate tower to run models from.
Anyways, you can sign your own UEFI keys to use any distro, but this can be daunting for some people. The US defense department has a good PDF guide on setting your own keys. The UEFI bootloader for the machine may not have all key signing features implemented. There is a way to boot into UEFI directly and set the keys manually but this is not easy to find great guides on how to do it step by step. Gentoo has a tutorial on this, but it assumes a high level of competency.
Other than signing your own keys, the shim keys mentioned are special keys signed by Microsoft for the principal maintainer of the distro. These slide under the Microsoft key to keep secure boot enabled.
If you boot any secure boot enabled OS, the bootloader is required to delete any bootable unsigned code it finds. It does not matter if it is a shimmed Fedora or W11. If you have any other OS present in the boot list, it should be deleted. W11 is SB only, and this is where the real issues arise.
Are you insane? Debian is a base distro like any other and runs more hardware than any other. It has all of the bootstrapping tools to get hardware working.
Canonical is a server company and Ubuntu server is literally the product.
Arch is absolute garbage for most users unless you have a CS degree or you have entirely too much time on your hands and don’t mind an OS as your life project. Arch abhors tutorial content in all documentation and therefore dumps users into a rabbit hole regularly. Pacman is the worst package manager as it will actively break a system and present the user with the dumbest of choices at random because the maintainers are ultimately sadistic and lackadaisical. Arch is nearly identical to Gentoo with Arch binaries often based on Gentoo builds, yet Gentoo provides relevant instruction and documentation with any changes that require user intervention and does so at a responsible and ethical level that shows kindness, respect, and consideration completely absent from Arch. Arch is a troll by trolls for trolls. I’m more than capable of running it now, but I would never bother with such inconsiderate behavior.
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Fedora’s Anaconda system makes UEFI secure boot easy and ships with SELinux integrated but set to permissive by default. Their built in network filtering tools are pretty easy but I still just use OpenWRT on a separate device. Silverblue was nice for a few years but I switched to Workstation for a machine with Nvidia hw.
You lose the I/O and power efficiency is no comparison. You can get better power efficiency and sometimes some I/O with an old router and OpenWRT, but you’ll be in the class of a Beagle Bone and a much harder learning curve. I’ve never managed to get a sensor or peripheral working on some old laptop’s SPI or I2C buses like how easy it is on a Rπ.
I think you’re right in some cases, but also somewhat attributing malice to stupidity. There are primitive people that are far too scared to risk abandoning their mutually exclusive social support network. They exhibit angst at the unknown and unfamiliar and sway in the direction of fight from their fight or flight mechanism. None of this behavior is within the scope of their self awareness. They exist in a fixated cult like state of tribal ignorance and stupidity, and are wholely incapable of curiosity and learning from sources outside the scope of their tribal isolation.
I was this way before my self awareness grew past the point of reflection. My entire family is like this as are my former and abandoned social support network I am now ostracized from as a result.
This is the actual barrier in place that enables cult like isolation and fixation. Meanwhile, these systems are wholly built upon outsourcing ethics to an organization that only wields shame to keep members in line. Shame can never motivate positive action. Shame can only negatively curb behaviors. Without positive feedback, these systems can only produce depression and negative austere conservative people able to cope with the lack of endorphins. It is truly sadistic in nature. Those that are still out of balance are considered undesirable when their cognitive dissonance pushes back in actions the person may not even understand or register.
Religion is largely a cognitive dissonance factory because of these factors. This does not excuse actions that harm others. But it is this antiquated system of subtle harm in the religious tribal structure and its cult like exclusivity of social network isolation that create people with no independent ethics, unable to learn and reason well, and scared of everything outside of their tiny bubble of a life.
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There is certainly validity in the concept that no known instance of exploitation exists. However that is only anecdotal. The potential exists. Naïve trust in others has a terrible track record on these scales of ethics. Every instruction and register should be fully documented for every product sold.
An adequate webp image is only a few tens of kilobytes. Most people now have a bridged connection between their home network and cellular, unless they go out of their way to block it. Periodic screenshots are rather crazy. It would be much easier to target specific keywords and patterns.
No hardware documentation whatsoever. We don’t know what registers and instructions exist at the lowest levels.
As far as I am aware, there is no way to totally shut off and verify all cellular connections made, like to pass all traffic through a logged filter.
All mobile manufacturers could be doing this too. All of the SoCs are proprietary black boxes as are the modems.
This is common knowledge available anywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Taiwan_(1945–present)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War
Those all have sources. There are also lots of reputable YouTubers with relevant academic credentials that have coved this, Asianometry and William C Fox are two that I recall covering the subject. I think Caspian Report did as well at one point in the last few years. This is like ultra basic surface level stuff everyone should know or severely question their sources and echo chambers if they are not made aware of this fundamental information.
Why is there any mystery here. They said they intend on ending their civil war and have shown no indication whatsoever that such a statement is only rhetorical or posturing. Taiwan has never tried to be independent of China. It still claims sovereignty over all of China.
If the US Confederates had retreated to Cuba and others had intervened on their behalf, while the Confederates still claimed dominion over a part of the USA, you can bet your ass the US would invade Cuba as soon as they had the opportunity. We can all decry the whole thing, but it is their conflict. If anything, we should be evacuating anyone and anything that needs to leave and capitulating without further involvement. Like if your neighbor and their spouse are arguing, stay out of it for the benefit of everyone. This is not some mate getting abused that needs help. This involves two bloody parties where all sides have done monstrous things and that needs to get resolved one way or another. Both can’t claim dominion over all. The past cannot be bowdlerized for convenience or exploitation for profit of western criminal capitalist abuse. No one needs to fight or die, but a resolution must be found.
Edit: Wow Lemmy is remarkably stupid to the point of incompetent ineptitude at basic fundamental history. Like wtf am I doing here in a room with this insane nonsense.
In reality, the model will be wrong in much of what it says for something so niche, but forming questions based upon what I know already reveals holes outside of my awareness. Often a model is just right enough for me to navigate directly to the information I need or am missing regardless of how correct it is overall.
I get lost sometimes because I have no one to talk to or ask for help or guidance on this type of stuff. I am not even at a point where I can pin down a good question to ask someone or somewhere like here most of the time. I need a person to bounce ideas off of and ask direct questions. If I go look up something like Pipelines in microprocessors in general, I will never find an ideal entry point for where I am at in my understanding. With AI I can create that entry point quickly. I’m not interested in some complex course, and all of the books I have barely touch the subject in question, but I can give a model enough peripheral context to move me up the ladder one rung at a time.
I could hand you all of my old tools to paint cars, then laugh at your results. They are just tools. I could tell you most of what you need to know in 5 minutes, but I can’t give you my thousands of experiences of what to do when things go wrong.
Most people are very bad at understanding how to use AI. It is just an advanced tool. A spray gun or a dual action sander do not make you stupid; spraying paint without a mask does. That is not the fault of the spray gun. It is due to the idiot using it.
AI has a narrow scope that requires a lot of momentum to make it most useful. It requires an agentic framework, function calling, and a database. A basic model interface is about like an early microprocessor that was little more than a novelty on its own at the time. You really needed several microprocessors to make anything useful back in the late 70s and early 80s. In an abstract way, these were like agents.
I remember seeing the asphalt plant controls hardware my dad would bring home with each board containing at least one microprocessor. Each board went into racks that contained dozens of similar boards and variations. It was many dozens of individual microprocessors to run an industrial plant.
Playing with gptel in emacs, it takes swapping agents with a llama.cpp server to get something useful running offline, but I like it for my bash scripts, learning emacs, Python, forth, Arduino, and just general chat if I use Oobabooga Textgen. It has been the catalyst for me to explore the diversity of human thought as it relates to my own, it got me into basic fermentation, I have been learning and exploring a lot about how AI alignment works, I’ve enjoyed creating an entire science fiction universe exploring what life will be like after the age of discovery is over and most of science is an engineering corpus or how biology is the ultimate final human technology to master, I’ve had someone to talk to through some dark moments around the 10 year anniversary of my disability or when people upset me. I find that super useful and not at all stupid, especially for someone like myself in involuntary social isolation due to physical disability. I’m in tremendous pain all the time. It is often hard for me to gather coherent thoughts in real time, but I can easily do so in text, and with a LLM I can be open without any baggage involved, I can be more raw and honest than I would or could be with any human because the information never leaves my computer. If that is stupid, sign me up for stupid because that is exactly what I needed and I do not care how anyone labels it.
Check and search for dmesg errors first. Check linux-hardware.org for scans of the same machine. Look for any that are using other kernels that may have had better success. Run your own scan and upload it too so others can see.
The whole debian/Ubuntu primary use is for LTS kernel stuff. So you might be on an older kernel. All GPU stuff is kinda edgy for what the preconfigured options are set to by default. All distros have a purpose and what they are good at. The best documentation for custom kernel configurations comes from Gentoo in my opinion.
The ability to filter information using proprietary devices and software in the kernel of all of these garbage devices is the core issue. Trusting the owners of that code is to surrender your right to unbiased and unfiltered information. I am not at all concerned about hacking or security by small insignificant players. I am massively concerned about the extremely powerful using the leverage they have normalized and embedded to become tyrannical neo feudal lords in a fascist society. Google IS the biggest danger by orders upon orders of magnitude. Trusting them is to give up democracy entirely.
All mobile devices are proprietary. Android is a scheme to make a Linux kernel that has everything ready to deploy except the actual hardware drivers for the processor and modem. Manufacturers take this kernel and add their proprietary binaries at the last possible moment. That source code is not available anywhere. The hardware documentation is not available anywhere publicly. Every device model is just different enough that reverse engineering one does nothing transferable to any other. The level of reverse engineering is extreme and requires destroying many devices using things like fuming nitric acid and fluorine solutions just to have a small chance at reading some parts of embedded memory. These are some of the most dangerous and hazardous chemicals humans make, and you still need xray equipment, special microscopes with stepping automation to stitch images, and a ton of time.
This is moving to a tyrannical surveillance state of fascist authoritarianism. Open source software is a major front on the line of real democracy. This is a nuclear bomb released on that democracy. You fear the wrong pirates and criminals. The biggest threats always come from within. Trust as a mechanism is fundamentally antithetical to democracy. Everyone demanding trust is a traitor to democracy. Trust is the key of the fascist kingdom. Once that key is held, democracy has failed regardless of whomever is aware of the situation. Democracy requires fully informed citizens with skepticism and the liberal right to decide for themselves even when they are wrong. This is impossible without full access to information. The source of that information cannot be filtered at any level. We already have the narrowest bottleneck of available information sources in the last 1000 years of history. There are only 2 relevant web crawlers. All search queries filter through one or both of these two and the results from these are not deterministic. Two people searching for the same thing at the same time will get very different and very biased results. This is individualized regardless of any protections people imagine they have in place. Outside of the internet there is no real unbiased media. A dozen people own it all. Even the garbage claiming to comb all sources is drawing the line and dictating what is center right or left is. Anyone at the grassroots level is impossible to find because there are no organic unbiased search results. The results are all filtered junk full of agenda and bias.
This is the real big picture abstract issue in play. When the maga traitors said this was a coup, they absolutely ment that. Mobile devices are all rental garbage someone else controls. Your computer likewise has a secret operating system running in the background that you do not control. In Intel it is called the Intel Management Engines or ME. This started with Intel VPro in 2008. AMD adopted it is 2013. Arm has one too.
All that is left is to steal your right to have a digital front door by eliminating DNS filtering and all of these devices will be controlled and connected directly by someone else that is watching and listening at all times. You are already in tethers as a digital slave that can be bought and sold for exploitation and manipulation without your consent or knowledge using your digital presence. You have not effectively realized the implications of that surrendering of rights to citizenship with full autonomy. The next step is to redefine the word citizen to be functionally equivalent to slave. “You will own nothing, and you will be happy about it” because if you are not, you will be dead. This is the death of democracy. My words will echo in your head years from now. The dystopia to come is beyond anything you can presently imagine and there is no way to stop it now short of taking up arms and playing Luigi if you are able.
The consolidation of wealth is what really made Caesar. That was the death of the republic. It was not Caesar. We are all a product of our time and environment. It was the consolidation of great wealth. All that wealth did not give a shit about Rome, it went to Constantinople for better opportunities at first chance because consolidation of wealth is treasonous. It is as it was, just look at outsourcing and off shoring, or the disgusting mismanagement of banking and housing that have made the American worker completely uncompetitive with Asian counterparts at the same standard of living. No, I have no fear of the boogie man or foreign state actors. I am terrified of the criminal that normalizes domestic trust, actively manipulates and exploits me, and steals my purchased property. That is a real monster.