Nostr notes by Aaron Rainbolt

I was almost ready to be offended at the Ubuntu entry in this ...

2024-10-31T02:44:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…8yv4
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I was almost ready to be offended at the Ubuntu entry in this list (given I'm an Ubuntu Developer), but then you ended up recommending it at the end so we're good :)

FWIW the Snaps thing is really overblown by the media, there are a lot of misunderstandings there, and there actually are good reasons for Canonical to be continuing to pursue them. Ubuntu Pro, same thing, plus it's free btw even for small-scale commercial use and there are no rules against cloning the source of as many packages from it as you want :)

Note to self: think twice before removing an "automatically ...

2024-10-20T21:29:44Z

Note to self: think twice before removing an "automatically assume yes" option from your build system. You may find that your build suddenly requires lots of manual intervention.

#linux #debian #programming #what_have_i_done

I guess that's comforting. I still would probably not do it ...

2024-09-17T20:57:28Z

In reply to nevent1q…tea5
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I guess that's comforting. I still would probably not do it though.

Reasons why:

* Many "open-source AI" things are not open-source at all, but are only source-available if even that. Llama is an example of a source-available-but-not-even-that AI.
* AI is extremely difficult to audit to make sure it's doing things that are ethical. Much AI is open-weight (which is a hilarious example of true write-only memory - you can tune the model but you can't see how it was trained), and even fully open-source AI can't be audited without pouring over a corpus of data that would make your head explode. I don't want my AI advising me to do things because it happens to have a racist or manipulative nature thanks to being trained on the wrong data.
* AI when used in the wrong context is just so useless. AI writing tools have made much of the Web's content objectively bad, boring, and useless. AI image generators are actually neat when used properly but oftentimes make horrific results that people try to pass off as useful. When used to solve pointed, specific problems, AI can shine, but in other instances it can't be trusted to do things right and even using it can have a negative effect on work.

I'm a simple man, I see "AI integrated into the OS" ...

2024-09-17T20:51:42Z

In reply to nevent1q…wr5l
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I'm a simple man, I see "AI integrated into the OS" and I click "absolutely not" :P

Caffeinated... soap...?

2024-09-11T14:07:42Z

In reply to nevent1q…k87e
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Caffeinated... soap...?

You're going to publicly shame people you don't like? ...

2024-09-08T14:58:19Z

In reply to nevent1q…h5qm
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You're going to publicly shame people you don't like? Why? If it's just your feed you care about, blocking is enough. This is using emotional manipulation to control the content of the Open Web.

Not everyone checks the profile of a poster before hitting the star button on their post. But even if they did, this would be overkill. Like it or not, there are going to be people who are religious, or have an interest in politics, or who make a living creating things for YouTube, etc. Those are perfectly normal people who might have constructive input on questions you might ask or projects you might mention. If you really don't want to hear from them, block them, but shaming them publicly doesn't do anything useful. It leaves people feeling rejected for no good reason, and makes you look mean.

Feel free to add me to the wall of shame for being religious.

#linux #windows #mac

#Ventoy Security Concerns (please boost for visibility) Ventoy is ...

2024-08-05T18:36:38Z

#Ventoy Security Concerns (please boost for visibility)

Ventoy is a popular utility for making USB drives containing multiple operating systems in the form of bootable image files. While very useful in theory, the source tree contains numerous binary blobs without source code. This issue has been brought up to the authors multiple times, have not been corrected, and have even gotten worse (more blobs have been added to the code over time). This is a potential malware vector, similar to the "test files" in the xz-utils backdoor catastrophe.

Recently the author has ignored a very lengthy thread raising security concerns because of these binary blobs. Given the amount of attention the thread has gotten, this seems strange, especially given that the authors have been active since then. https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/2795

Stranger yet still, a video by Veronica Explains (Veronica's old account (npub1dml…x796)) on how to create bootable USB flash drives got flooded by comments heavily suggesting the use of Ventoy and even being somewhat accusing because Veronica didn't advertise Ventoy. This is... not anything I've seen users of ANY open-source project do, and it feels similar to the social engineering done against Lasse Collin that convinced him to add Jia Tan as a maintainer, thus compromising xz-utils. See the comments of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiSXClZauXA&t=3s

If you're using Ventoy, you may want to consider ceasing its use for the time being out of an abundance of caution. If you truly need its functionality, you might look into something like the IODD SSD Enclosure (https://www.iodd.shop/HDD/SSD-Enclosure) which can emulate an optical drive and allows you to select an ISO saved to the drive to boot from.

#linux #boot #security #malicious #backdoor