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I have an HP laser printer from like 1992, before they turned to US=Privateers; rest-of-the-world=criminal pirates. HP died as a company when they spun off Agilent/Keysight as test equipment and continued the branding for contract manufactured consumer garbage. HP does not make anything. They market, place stickers on what others manufacture, and create ponzi scheme-like extortion scams, as the shriveled shell of a dying husk disconnected completely from their now long irrelevant past.

Makes sense to me, but I’m odd like anon too I guess. I won’t work for places that have an HR department for (likely) similar complex reasoning. I don’t fit the mold or follow the rules like most people in a job. Just give me responsibilities and I’ll be as reliable as if you do them yourself. I don’t handle arbitrary people and bureaucracy well. I just do what makes sense in the moment like a business owner that is very conservative. I ran my own businesses for a long time and act like the employees I wish I had been able to find. When a company has an HR department it says they are inflexible and incompetent in efficiency and abstraction. I know I will be miserable in such a place where layers are used to mask managerial incompetence and political maneuvering.

Similarly, a person that likes to shop around and date a lot says quite a bit about their ethics and mindset. I’ve never used a dating app in my life. All of my long term relationships are from friends of friends. I have no curiosity about who is out there in general or judging people based on their best sales force lies or old pictures. I am only interested in the rare people that say or do something candidly interesting when I am not expecting it; like if someone has a nerdy passionate interest or interesting quark. The average person is not interesting to me, and average people are on dating apps.

Plus, I know what I am, and I do not care to try and sell that to anyone. I would much rather the person at least have some familiarity with me beforehand. Starting off formally of calling it “dating” just sounds silly to me. Like, let’s be friends first for awhile. “Dating” puts sex in play on some kind of level. No one can think straight after that addiction starts. So, friends-first for me, and dating apps are not the kind of environment where I can find nerdy interesting friends without extra baggage and expectations.

No judgement here.

The Harkonnericans ignored the freemen in their seitches…

TBH: tl;dr (…but read ~1/4 and skimmed the rest.)

Emacs can likely do most, if not all, of what you’re looking for.

As far as distros, go with either Fedora Workstation or Silverblue. If you can run SB, try to avoid messing with the base system as much as possible, skip using the toolbox containers system and just use distrobox. With distrobox, you have almost all Linux distros available as containers, so you build on them. The only exception I know of is NIX. You can’t run NIX in distrobox. You probably could run the NIX package manager, but that involves this weird setup where a user owned directory exists in / root. Personally, this is just too weird for me to use it. I expect all user activity and configuration files to be confined to /home/$USER/

Fedora just works, but try and lag behind the release cycle a little bit. Like right now F40 is pretty solid, but there were some issues in the first month or so after F40 first came out. I have lagged in every release since ~F28 and never had issues. I switched to F40 within the first week or so and a few packages were wonky. Basically Python was super fresh and did some odd stuff with containers where it did not work without manually removing and replacing Python in each container. I think that was the only manual intervention issue I’ve had with Fedora. I have a 3080Ti laptop with the 16 GB GPU. The Anaconda system in Fedora builds the Nvidia kernel module automatically in the background each time the kernel is updated. It works flawlessly, even with secure boot enabled.

If they choose feudalism, I chose to join (or start) the siege outside their walls. I am a citizen. I refuse to submit to a king or a lord albeit in politics or this anti capitalism move against democracy and an open market. You cannot have citizenship and democracy without the fundamental human right of ownership.

While it is outside of the scope of most people’s abilities, the bios is on a flash chip that can be removed, read, and disassembled. I’m no expert here by any stretch. That said, my usual check with software is to simply check for http in strings. Even with a binary like a bios ROM, I can pass it through the $ strings command to look for any addresses. No matter what kind of malicious nonsense the software is doing, it has very low value unless it can dial out.

My lack of a complete understanding in this area is why I use a whitelist firewall for most of my devices. It is also the ultimate ad and tracker blocker as I only visit the places I chose to access. I don’t conform to the lowest developer’s ethics and will simply stop using any site or service that fails to be direct and transparent.

The thing is, even most whitelist firewalls are inadequate. They only filter incoming packets. That is really an inadequate model in most cases now, especially with local large language models where it is impossible to verify their capabilities. My reason for all thus bla bla bla is to say, a whitelist on a trusted 3rd party device is a PITA but an effective low barrier way to prevent any bad actor from communicating with the questionable device. It still leaves you open to a potential situation where the device could be sending a packet stream to the outside world over something like UDP.

Otherwise, the main thing I would be concerned with, if it is a UEFI device, are the UEFI secure boot keys. Whomever holds these keys has a lower ring access than the operating system kernel. Anything happening in kernel or user space is effectively under their control.

Anyways, the main way to monitor and check the device is a trusted 3rd party router that blocks any unauthorized connections. This can be challenging to setup with something like OpenWRT. There is a forked OpenWRT device running a version that makes a lot of this easier called PC WRT. That can make a whitelist fw a little easier than sorting out NF Tables and scripting a whitelist firewall.

Went out with this girl I really liked but brought a friend too just to make it less one on one and more casual. I really liked her and thought it went well. When I drove my friend home, in conversation, he told me I could do better. It was such a stupid destructive thought. All three of us were into the arts. He was into videography, she was photography, and I was painting airbrushed graphics on motorcycles. I dated her for a little while again later and more seriously, but my life was more of a mess then and it didn’t work out. That was one of my biggest mistakes in life; not realizing my lack of emotional depth and letting other’s opinions hold sway or weight. I partition my emotions now. I’m not sure how I feel in the moment. My first reaction is likely worthless, so “I’ll have to get back to you later” - is my usual response. People who whine about how everyone is about to lose their job at work, or tell me how I should feel about others are like giant red flags telling me to avoid them as toxic. Really, in a way I do not lack emotional depth as much as that part of my inner voice speaks quietly and I need to take the time to listen to it carefully. That girl and life lesson are the same thing to me; an abstracted patch, forever holding that part of my personality. When that red flag flies in my head, she is the one waving it; holding me back; telling me to think it through.

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IIRC there was a blog post article in the last year-ish about a researcher at Intel that had been working on using FPGA’s for AI. IIRC, they mentioned that the issue they could not overcome was power and scaling. I seem to recall them mentioning that analog had a similar issue with scaling and throughput, but that is the weakest aspect I recall in my abstractions when my main curiosity is why large FPGA’s are not the present goto tech.

I’m on the edge of my understanding here, but I think the issue with analog is the depth of tensor rank dimensions. Analog is great and super efficient for the first few dimensions, but AI can have many rank dimensions, and there is no telling what the future of algorithms will hold. Building for optimising the way models work presently is practically guaranteed to result in a useless product by the time it is fabricated and brought to market.

This is insane logic. Like there are killers in prison so all humans are killers type of nonsense. I can go out on the street and give someone a hundred bucks to say absolutely anything on camera. At an individual level, submitting this as proof of anything is psychotic. As far as I’m concerned the criminal gerrymandering corruption is the noise floor. When some asshat can lose the popular vote and still win, you better sure as hell show me evidence of a disparity greater than that percentage of difference. That is the standard of conservative criminality. Your standard. It works both ways buddy. If you can’t show multi sourced bipartisan evidence if this scale, you fail your own corrupt standards of voting requirements. You need proof of hundreds of thousands and not some tin foil hatted trailer trash speculative garbage or half baked conspiracy nonsense.

Kudzu was the last bioweapons unit of the Union army in the US civil war. It never surrendered, it is still fighting the American South, and winning the guerilla war.

Now be honest, have any of you written a text parsing script with a dictionary?

I have, with AI, but for other creative reasons. The idea has crossed my mind as an amusing exercise. PC-autoreplace

Love a girl on top; take the top girl down.

This looks a lot like trolling. The community here certainly doesn’t seem to care for it.

We have a damn good business model here folks. All we need to do is sandbox the idiots so that they pay to see what they want to see and only they see it.

I would like to phone a friend Regis; Jean-Christophe Bonaparte.

Born in Huntsville Hospital… From one rocket town to the other. I can see Vandenberg launches from my roof.

They are a contributing factor in the whole system of gratuity as pay. WH is an interesting niche in that, those that work there generally make decent money, like a good bit better than most fast food joints. It requires people skills, and a crisis management type of multitasking, but often there will only be the minimum required staff in the better run places. It is not too unusual to see a place with only 2-4 people working with a packed restaurant.

The gratuity culture is that you always must tip, but not excessively. However staying past your welcome/meal is not considered acceptable behavior, nor is showing up and not ordering. There are slower WH’s in smaller towns where it is more acceptable to hang out when the place is not busy, but these are more like the exception. This is also a place that typically is associated with the idealized single working mom stereotype. You’ll often find places where the employee shifts are flexible for these types of circumstances. There is often also some tangible drama to a WH, both from the staff and the customers. There are usually WH’s within many residential communities or right on the outskirts. You’ll often find the same people present as part of a regular routine. It usually does not involve dangerous culture or violence, but WH is a funny place to go find out and watch the drama of the local community if one is close to where you live.

When I lived in the suburbs of Atlanta, I knew everyone that worked at my local WH and could find out what was going on in the neighborhood based on the collective conversations that happened there. In a WH there is no real privacy or formality. It is one of the few places where striking up a conversation with anyone is acceptable if not expected. You can sit there and be quiet and answer tersely to indicate you just want to be left alone, but that is the exception.

This is part of the southern libertarian republicanism ideal of independent hard work to bootstrap success. This is an illusion that leads to decay and poverty, as time has shown, but is still a core part of southern culture. I’m not saying it is right or wrong. I live in California now. There are no Waffle Houses here because California does not participate in this poverty wage type of exception to ethical pay. Overall, there is no effective alternative to turn to for people on either side, customers or workers. Places like California do not have an equivalent establishment for ultra budget dining 24/7 either. I’ve lived in both areas long term. I don’t know of a good solution.