Microsoft has recently announced Windows Copilot, an AI-powered assistant for Windows 11. Windows Copilot sits at the side of Windows 11, and can summarize content you’re viewing in apps, rewrite it, or even explain it. Microsoft is currently testing this internally and promised to release it to testers in June before rolling it out more broadly to Windows 11 users.
Oh my God, they're bringing back clippy.
Globally, an increase in anti-LGBTQ+ intolerance is impacting individuals and communities both online and off. The digital rights community has observed an uptick in censorship of LGBTQ+ websites as well as troubling attempts by several countries to pass explicitly anti-LGBTQ+ bills restricting...
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Cory Doctorow wrote a pretty good short story about this.
I'll admit this part did go a bit over my head.
It's referring to a strategy more commonly called 'triple e' or 'embrace, extend, extinguish' pioneered by Microsoft in the late 90's. The gist of it was that MS would adopt open standards and create proprietary extensions to the standard that were only usable on their platform. This would break the ability of users of non MS software to communicate with those in Microsoft's ecosystem and push users off those platforms.
Oh, yeah, I guess that seems kinda out of the blue with out context, sorry about that. One of the threads that inspired this post had some millenials complaining about genz, which struck me as ironic since millenials have historically been on the receiving end of intergenerational slap fighting.
I think this recent video from Strange Aeons on the tumblr mogai community is relevant to a lot of the discussions on labels I've seen here recently. It's a 30 minute video, so I'll summarize the key takeaways:
- Most of the 'genz and their infinite genders' discourse is referring to a group of teenagers on tumblr called the mogai community.
- The mogai community liked to create lots of labels. Most of these labels would never see any use and they were never really meant to, because it was mostly a sort of linguistic game for bored teenagers.
- Sometimes the mogai community were abrasive assholes because they were literal children.
- The anti-sjw era of shitty internet discourse often centered around pretending that this community was more widespread and serious than it actually was.
It is silly to pretend that an entire generation is summed up by the internet posts of a small group of teenagers. Millenials, especially, should know better, because y'all got the same shit from boomers with the participation trophy stereotype.
Just treat people with basic human dignity and respect. Peace, y'all.
Njalla is pretty nice.
The bi-cycle is the (involuntary) switch between being attracted to fem people and masc people. Not all bi folks experience it, but it's fairly common. It's called the bi-cycle because it tends to be cyclical.
Good point. Testing would probably be a better choice; I'll edit the parent comment to reflect that
Debian-specific advice
Debian is a stable distro, so software versions will remain pretty much the same over the life cycle. This is good if stability (software not changing out from under you) is desired, but if you want to take advantage of new features as they are added to whatever software you're running, it's less beneficial. So, if you're going to run debian as a desktop os, I would recommend switching your apt sources to point to the unstable branch: sid switching your apt sources to point to testing (see below).
You'll probably see a lot of older tutorials and stackoverflow posts that use apt-get, which predates apt, instead of apt as the package manager. apt is the recommended frontend; apt-get will work, but apt will have a nicer user experience.
Also, on the topic of apt, there are three ways to run updates that you'll probably see online; this stackexchange post provides a pretty good explanation of the differences between them.
General linux advice that I think is worth sharing
Man pages are pretty helpful once you know how to navigate them. Some tips regarding that:
- You mentioned that you tried manjaro, so I think you probably already know what
manis, but just in case:manis the command that you use to pull up manual pages for basically everything. - You can search through the man database for a keyword with the
aproposorman -kcommands. For example,apropos videopulls up a list of all the man pages that have the word video in their names or descriptions. - You might notice when running the above command that there are numbers in parentheses after the manual names. This is because the manuals are broken out into 9 sections based on the types of pages they contain. You can put the section number before the name to specify which section to pull up the manual from. So, if you had two manuals named
fooin sections 1 and 3, to pull up the one for section 3 you would use the command:man 3 foo. If you want to read more,manhas it's own manual page, which you can pull up withman man. - You can search for text in
manwith/and?./performs a forward search and?performs a backwards search. You can jump forward to the next result in the search withnor back to the previous result withp. - The bottom of man pages will have a 'see also' section, which lists related commands. Some man pages will also have an examples section.
Another good place to look for documentation is the arch wiki. A lot of the information on there translates to other distros fairly well, and it's got huge amounts of well written information. If you use duckduckgo, the bang for it is !aw.
The shell is pretty intimidating for a lot of new users. While it's not strictly necessary for most things, I do think that you'll have a smoother linux experience if you become at least a little bit comfortable using it. Here is a bash guide aimed at beginners.
Finishing Thoughts
Looking back at what I've written, I realize that I have dumped a lot of information on you. So I think the best piece of advice that I can offer is this: Becoming comfortable with linux (or any new operating system) takes time and can feel overwhelming. Don't feel pressured to understand everything immediately and don't be afraid to go slow; Rome wasn't built in a day.
I've been running linux as a daily driver for 6 or 7 years now, and I run debian on my servers, so if you have any questions now or in the future, I am happy to try to answer them.
In a victory for transparency in police use of facial recognition, a New Jersey appellate court today ruled that state prosecutors—who charged a man for armed robbery after the technology showed he was a “possible match” for the suspect—must turn over to the defendant detailed information about the....
That's true. I don't personally post photos of myself online, but I suppose other people have probably put up pictures I'm in at some point. I don't think it would need to be all your photos, though, just a large enough number to poison the dataset. I could be wrong about that, though.
I do wonder if adversarial manipulations will become a service offered by image hosts, similar to stripping metadata in the future.
I wonder if adversarial attacks would work to counter this.
If you're interested in common lisp, Practical Common Lisp is a pretty good starting point.
Simone Giertz makes lots of really cool robots/mechanical things.
MichaelCthulu makes swords out of scrap.
I really like the group readings of plays that they have. Here's a couple that I really enjoyed:
Mine currently runs on an old pi3 with an external hard drive plugged in via a powered usb hub. I'm using openmediavault at the moment, but I'm probably going to swap it over to just NFS when I get the chance. I'm also planning to swap out the single external drive for 4 drives in a soft RAID through LVM.
