From experience, older thinkpads usually sell for cheap, come with an inbuilt monitor, and are built sturdy. Highly recommend.

Random duckduckgo search brought me to this product. Maybe they are not comercially viable yet?

Samara Joy - A Joyful Holiday

There is actually a whole subsection of AI focused on training one model with the output of another called knowledge distillation.

File storage (as opposed to something like email) doesn’t seem to have a massive infrastructure that I have to participate in. I don’t have to trust a third party with my data.

I’d probably just encrypt my data before going into any of the clouds, which should keep it secure (with something like rclone).

To send data to someone, I’d probably use onionshare or something.

I think there a bunch of mispronunciations. OP seems to be referring to the “new” mispronounciation, while I was referring to the spelling out mispronunciation.

I think you’re right. I think some people say G-N-U.

I would keep it simple and use the zoom web client and restrict as much as possible.

However, if you must have an app, they support linux. Then you can sandbox it as you would other apps on your machine.

Going into another partition might be a bit safer, but I’m not sure the privacy vs convinience tradeoff works.

Ya, looked into it and I’m wrong. I still think there is potential but…

• Most popular messaging apps: signal doesn’t show up in top 6 (caveat: Jan 2023 but I don’t think trends changed drastically)
• Signal download numbers: complete flatline with massive spike in Jan 2021

Telegram is way bigger than I thought. Its bigger than snapchat. 😯

I think you’re right?

I also think they’re on the right track (and a better track than apps like telegram - lots of negative social baggage). They really have gotten much farther than any other privacy focused apps.

I don’t know, maybe I have a more optimistic view of the situation. It feel like they’re knocking on the door of going fully mainstream.

Signal: Because I want better messaging, and somehow they already achieved some adoption.

Firefox: If Firefox can somehow make their browser miles ahead of chrome, I think that’d be just plain good for the world.

Gitea/Forgejo: I think Github is another one of these centralized platforms that’s pretty ripe for disruption (and gitlab is just not gonna do it).

Lemmy: It’d be amazing to have all the kinks ironed out of lemmy.

Mastodon: Same thing as lemmy. Get social media out of the hands of big companies.

Mail-in-a-box: I want to be able to host my own email if I want to. Proton is great, but isn’t email supposed to be an open standard?

Framework: Not exactly a software project, but man I’d love to see them get the time to push out a ton of great different products and really spark the right to repair movement. It’s the first device I was actually excited to buy.

Linux Mint: I don’t use mint, but it seems like one of the most user friendly distros. I would love for them to make everything perfect and create a seamless experience (and really make a year of the linux desktop). I also think it would be great to just have one clear frontrunner for new users.

Coreboot: Make firmware open source? Yes please.

Truly Open Source LLM: I really don’t want this tech to be in just the hands of just a big company. I’d love for there to be an LLM that has not only it’s weights open, but the full dataset, training methods and everything open.

I think when you just get 10 years of dev time, you get an opportunity to push a project ahead of all it’s competitors. It is kind of interesting to get to pick and choose a project to be the frontrunner (even if they aren’t currently).

“As we investigated available CAPTCHA options, we weren’t satisfied, so we decided to develop our own,” Eamonn Maguire

Based.

Ya, okay that is understandable.

To be honest I have never tried a wasm reversing challenge. I may need to give it a shot.

I completely agree.

However, I still would rather have all the websites I visit pass through my browser’s api than be making straight syscalls.

I think it’s not perfect security but a good line of defense.

Hmm i guess I just haven’t spent enough time trying to parse unminified js.

I still would think though, if the code is simple enough to understand when you unminify the js, equivalent code should be similarly simple to understand if it’s wasm passed through IDA.

I’d argue that having a sandbox that can run binaries with a limited and customizable feature set is actually a good thing for the web. I think there are more technically competent solutions, but the fact that WASM is available on virtually every machine and os, makes it pretty powerful.

If implemented right WASM might speed up our web apps, keep the browser sandbox that is actually quite nice, and run on pretty much any machine. If they open sourced the code, that’d be even better.

Between minified js and WASM, I think I’d take WASM (I can’t understand minified js anyway). Between a pure html site and WASM, I think I’d take the pure html site (but I don’t think we will be living in that world anytime soon).

I think this is the most real answer. It kinda is all about tradeoffs.

If creating connections is more valuable to you than using some unsavory social media, then you have your answer.

I also think it is pretty hard to actually reduce identifying informatiom from these apps. Just based on your social network, the piece can be fitted. In addition, your college gives up a ton of your identifying info (gmail, contracted apps…). I’m not sure there are perfect answers.

To give a different opinion than all the thin-clients, old laptops can be a good choice too. I am a bit preferrential to really nice old thinkpads.

If you buy them used you can get insane prices (~$40) and also you get all the laptop conveniences of a keyboard, screen, battery (for power failure). Also I think the power/performance ratio is pretty much the same to the thin clients.

My algorithms prof recommended tim roughgarden’s course.

I haven’t watched the videos but his textbook is pretty nice.

Thanks for the correction, edited the post.