duncesplayed

If you ever see a headline that says "x% of people believe/want/feel y", it's nonsense. You can manufacture a crooked methodology to get x% of people to say anything.

"Can I have a minute of your time? There has been evidence that people who use alternative browsers are more likely to commit acts of terrorism and human trafficking. Would you be in favour of more support for alternative browsers, or would you rather have higher quality public schools?"

And just like magic, you can now write a headline that only 2% of people want a browser choice screen.

Seriously, I don't get distro hoppers. "I want my desktop wallpaper to be green. Can you tell me how to install an entirely new operating system with a green background?"

(I think you're arguing from an ethical standpoint whereas OP was arguing legally, but anyway....)

Theoretically, someone would be able ask an A.I. to recite an entire book for them

No, that shouldn't happen. If an AI were ever able to recite back its training data verbatim, that AI would be overfitting. It happens by accident sometimes early on in development when your training data is too small and your model is too big, but it's an error, and is something to be avoided and corrected.

The whole point of training is to get it to a point where it can't recite back any of its training data. In order for that to happen, the AI is forced to sort of generalize and abstract (sorry for anthropomorphizing) its training data. That's the only way to get it to be able to generate something new, which is the whole point of the endeavour.

Long story short, if an AI could recite back an entire book, by definition it could not be an AI, and it wouldn't resemble any of the popular LLMs we have now like ChatGPT. (But you may see snippets and pastiches and watermarks show up)

I unironically cannot use Photoshop. I grew up with GIMP and the Photoshop UI is completely alien and confusing for me, so I have no choice but to retreat into the safe warm UI of GIMP.

Does it do PGF/TiKZ or have something comparable?

Because we already know how quantum encryption works.

It's like how we proved the Halting Problem was undecideable long before the first computer was ever built.

You definitely have to ~~go to the Arch wiki~~Google in some cases. Knowing what the problem is and knowing how to fix it are sometimes seemingly unrelated. E.g., "Could not open foo.yaml: File not found" could actually mean "Some non-obvious file in the tarball was not set executable, which screwed up this one script that ran another script but couldn't run some other script which didn't give an error message, which made another script think the file had already been copied". If you can find someone out there who ran into exactly the same problem, you can find a solution to it, but if none of the words in your error message are completely unique, it can be very hard to find someone with the same problem.

One smart thing I think Microsoft did was try to give every error message a code. Googling for "gpoopapp E0013" is often easier and gets more precise results than having to type in "gpoopapp The file /home/bitchslayer69420/.config/share/whatever.yaml could not be opened: File not found"

Yeah, I remember when Linux was first becoming cool, in the mid-to-late 90s. There was a lot of folk wisdom going around, and one of them was "make an alias rm='rm -i' so you don't accidentally delete anything!"

And then there was the (correct, IMHO) counter-wisdom of "no, that actually makes it more likely to accidentally delete something, because one day you're going to be on a machine where that alias doesn't exist, but you've become dependent on it existing".

I don't mind creating aliases to add colour or change formatting a little bit or something, but don't make an alias to keep yourself safe, because it'll probably backfire on you.

Indeed. I used to have a circle of friends/acquaintances that had a huge number of vegans and vegetarians. I can honestly say I have encountered literally 0 vegans or vegetarians ever mention it unless food was being served. But if food is being served,,,I mean...you really can't avoid having to tell everyone.

On the other hand, I have witnessed a huge number of meat-eaters become insecurely defensive, aggressive, bullying, harrassing as soon as anybody mentions that they don't eat meat.

Are zip and 7z really that much easier?

tar cf foo.tar.xz wherever/
zip -r foo.zip wherever/
7z a foo.7z wherever/

I get that tar needs an f for no-longer-relevant reasons whereas other tools don't, but I never understood the meme about it beyond that. Is c for "create" really that much worse than a for "add"?