DigitalDilemma

  • 2 Posts
  • 203 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

help-circle

  • Never heard of something like that, and I suspect anyone who started creating it soon filed it under “Really bad ideas” alongside “Whoops, why did my kernel just stop?”

    sar is the traditional way to watch for high load processes, but do the basics first as that’s not exactly trivial to get going. Things like running htop. Not only will that give you a simple breakdown of memory usage (others have already pointed out swap load which is very likely), but also sorting by cpu usage. htop is more than just a linux taskmgr, it’s a first step triage for stuff like this.


  • Google Tasks isn’t listed here.

    This was something I relied upon heavily. When I de-googled, I didn’t want to just move it to another cloud platform, and as a selfhoster I tried quite a few self hosted solutions. Some were very good, but also quite complicated and filled with features I didn’t want.

    So I wrote my own - Taskpony - and made it FOSS. It evolved into something that’s not a Google tasks copy, but suits my own needs better. Simple, easy, useful. I’ve really enjoyed the process of writing and sharing this.





  • Even if you do know code, nobody reads all the source code when trying something out.

    We still rely largely on trust, and herd protection. Lots of stars on github? Been around for a while? Keeps showing up in “Top lists” and on those posts on social media where people list the foss software they use? Issues get solved reasonably quickly and there’s no ancient and ignored posts on there? It hasn’t changed hands recently to somebody with a new account and no history? It’s probably a good project.

    It is still a risk, but a managed one.





  • You can’t trust an inherantly untrustworthy industry.

    The problem is that to make a good AI, you need a lot of input and we know from leaks and reports that many/most of the major players deliberately ignored copyright to train their models. If it was reachable, they used it. Are using it. Will use it. Like Johnny 5, there’s no limit to the data they want, or that their handlers want to feed them with. They’re the Cookie Monster at a biscuit factory.

    So when the question of trust comes up, you’d have to be pretty forgiving to overlook that they’re built on foundations of theft, and pretty naive to assume these companies have suddenly grown ethics and won’t use your data and input to train with, even when you’re using commercial systems that promise they won’t.

    Even in the event that there is an ethical provider that does their utmost to ensure your data doesn’t migrate (these do exist, at least in intention), this is an incredibly fast moving, ultra-competitive market where huge amounts of data are shifted around constantly and guardrails being notoriously hard to accurately define, let alone enforce. It’s inevitable stuff will leak.



  • Well, I’m absolutely certain people have taken lifelong orders for less than your example, but I’m thinking more about situations where someone is left alone, homeless and without any other options. Government aid is often slow to arrive, especially if you’re a single man, and homeless charities are always overstretched. Even today, it’s not such a stretch to imagine someone turning to God in their hour of need.

    (I’m athiest btw, I’m not arguing that it’s a good option, only that some people may see it as their only option and honestly, there are worse)





  • Good example.

    But don’t many join these days because of some personal calamity where they’ve already lost much? The church takes them in, gives them purpose and a roof over their heads.

    (I say “these days” as historically, under primogeniture, the second son of a wealthy lord would often be given to the church to give them purpose/keep them out of the way of the firstborn. Daughters were similarly steered into a nunnery to avoid the parents having to pay a substantial dowry)