I think what you’re looking for is known as kiosk software. Basically a locked down browser that has limited or zero user interaction possible.

Or by deliberately breaking DNS on that host. Add the entries you want to allow to /etc/hosts and not supply any upstream DNS servers. (Change of needing maintenance if those sites change IP)

“That’s a great question!” </ai>

The truth is, we don’t need AI to have misinformation, and AI is not the biggest problem in the current post-truth society. There has been a war going on globally in undermining truth for a long time. The old saying, “The first casualty in war is truth” is invalid now, because truth is no longer relevant and lies are weaponised like never before in history. People don’t want to be certain of something, their first reaction to news is to react at a deep and emotional level and the science of misinformation is highly refined and successful in making most people react in a certain way. It takes effort and training not to do that, and most of us can’t.

Journalists have been warning us about this for decades but integrity costs money, and that funding has been under attack too. It’s pretty depressing whichever way you look at it.

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I think this is the most downvoted thing I’ve seen on Lemmy.

Good show, chaps!

One of the interesting things about surveys is you only learn about the sort of people who complete surveys.

Thanks for the full and reasoned explanation.

I do agree there is nuance, and it is very difficult to balance these things when there is often not a great choice about who ultimately ends up with your money.

cancelled Prime in 2025 to boycott USA

Costco for local cucumbers, milk and cereal,

So Amazon bad, Costco good? Both huge American based multinationals, no?

Yes, I maybe misremembered the title. I couldn’t find it in a quick search and it’s up in the loft in a box somewhere.

A book. Teach yourself Perl in 30 days. (Edit - may have been 21 days)

I bought it around 25-30 years ago. I have dyslexia and autism and have had problems learning from books in the past, but something about the way that was written just clicked for me.

It allowed me to write some pretty cool software, including a huge system that ran a large animal charity for a very long time, tons of automation software and scripts, and several full webuis. Indirectly it led me to a new career where I write perl every day.

(I can write in many other languages now, but that was the keystone of everything for me)

Money going online really changed the mood.

So true. Money spoils everything.

Lack of knowledge was the big problem before the internet. Late 80s, early 90s.

Take Phreaking.

Dialup BBSs (1200/75, 2400 or 9600 baud) were the primary source of dodgy files that I knew of. Some would have a secret area with various texts about hacking and quasi-illegal behaviour, including pornography of all flavours and of course the anarchists’ handbook. There were a few hacking and phreaking related stuff (getting free phone calls was huge then, given the cost of online activities - blackboxing, blueboxing, etc) and often required researching the types of PBX being used until you knew more than the people employed to run the things. To get access to this you’d need to suck up to the BBS owner, or prove your worth and “I’m not a law enforcement officer, honest” credits. Vouchsafing friends and others was another way, and there was cross-checking of you by sysops talking to each other.

The security on phone systems was laughable by modern standards, but at the time it was something very strongly guarded and if you found something, you made sure it stayed private. The phone companies helped by constantly denying anything was happening, but stakes were high. Legal consequences were high, but so were the rewards if you could get free calls.

Myself, I never did, but I always wanted to. Not having my monthly phone bills of hundreds of pounds would have been really nice…

When ADSL and always-on connections became available, phreaking stopped overnight.

Thats because you dont have savings.

I’m sorry, why did you assume that?

I guess you never considered that someone older might like a safe and boring job because they’ve finally worked out how to compartmentalise work and life, or maybe it lets them work from home or is conveniently close, or that they have friends there and are accepted as who they are, or that they believe in the work they’re doing, or their health isn’t so great and they don’t want upheaval, or they’ve already had an exciting job and it demanded too much of them, or any one of a lot of other possible reasons.

Maybe they even have enough to retire today, but that they like that boring job you’re so dismissive of and don’t fancy facing the void that retirement can bring, having seen friends retire and just… stop, because they had nothing else to fill their days with, dying soon after.

Maybe, just maybe, your bleak experience of a working life isn’t the same for everyone.

I hope you figure things out a little better as you get older and not jump to conclusions.

I can understand that view, but I’ve personally experienced things where it absolutely can be this and I respectfully disagree with you. I think what OP describes is more likely to be hardware than the OS.

Firstly - different drive for linux. A dying drive can freeze and take down its host, regardless of OS.

Secondly, linux uses memory very differently to windows, especially in relation to caching the filesystem. Linux might be accessing memory that Windows doesn’t get to.

We also don’t know what loads OP puts on his computer when running windows and linux. Maybe he has windows to game with, or may he uses linux for LLM/compute work and runs it full tilt. Each may do very different things and tax different aspects of the hardware.

It’s simply not safe to assume anything when diagnosing intermittent problems with hardware. The only reliable method is methodical testing and isolation.

Others have already given some good advice, but rather than let it sit and wait to error, use the program “stress”

It’ll work specific components hard which can help locate whether it’s a CPU/Heat problem, or Memory, or disk.

And if it still fails on random things, take a long hard look at your PSU and measure voltages if you can. But if everything else checks out, motherboard could be it. Tiny cracks/dry joints, even inside the pcb layers, can lead to occasional problems that come and go with heat or vibration and are impossible to accurately diagnose beyond swapping it out.

If I was in my 20s, I’d be off like a shot.

At 30, I’d think for about 5 minutes before doing it.

At 40 I’d try to have a backup plan in place.

Now I’m in my 50s, I’d cling onto that safe and boring job like a limpet.

We did experiment with local models. They were okay, if a little slow with the resources we allocated for testing. Ultimately though, we paid for copilot. I’m still a little sceptical that it won’t leak data, despite the assurances, so I do clean anything sensitive before pasting.

As for best models - generally gpt4 or 5 is my go-to, but the others have their uses. I tend to stick with one until it annoys me, then move on. Claude’s pretty good for code help, imo, but there’s not really a huge difference between them.

What’s your experiences?

Sysadmin here, this is my usual flow for various distros

1. as /u/FigMcLargeHuge mentions, recent logfiles in /var/log. Notably /var/log/messages (EL) and syslog (Debian) but anything that’s recent.

2. journalctl - More and more things are moving to binary logging. If you know the process, then journalctl -u processname restricts to just that. also add a -f for tailing it for ongoing logs.

3. dmesg -T - especially at system level, this captures any hardware/low level logs. (-T reports actual times, not just seconds since boot)

4. Once you have some logs that you think are related, but don’t know WTF they actually mean, you have two options. The first is to google likely strings. This is… ineffective much of the time - accidental misinformation and outdated advice is increasingly common. The answer might be there, but it takes time and can be frustrating to weed out the cruft.

The better way, (IMO, and people downvote me for saying this) is to use AI. Get a few lines of logs with the errors, check them for confidential information, and simply paste the suspect lines into chatgpt, gemini, claude, co-pilot, whatever. No need for context, it’ll figure that out. The LLM will, 4 times out of 5, identify the problem very quickly.

Now, once it’s identified that, it will offer to fix it for you. This is where you’ve got to be on your toes as LLMs are really really quick to give bad advice at this level. But that first triage is nearly always worth doing and helps shape your own mind as to what’s going on. AI is still useful for fixing it, but do understand what it’s telling you to do.

Is offline file editing an issue with all file syncing tools?

I’ve been using Syncthing for a year or so and not noticed that it’s any worse or better at this than GDrive or Dropbox

Seconded. Great bit of software.

It’s technology like this that I think will become more and more important as governments seek to restrict access to large parts of the internet. UK and Australia are forging ahead in censorship, and the EU is well on their way. The US already does some censorship, as do large parts of Asia and Russia.

No matter the reason given, it’s always about control. So less easily censored technologies will be very useful for anyone that wants the ability to research truth, or at least, alternate points of view.