A friend had a Peltier cooler on a late 90s/early 2000s CPU and had the condensation problem. The cooler (or maybe CPU, or both; I can't remember which) had an algae-like growth all over it.
> Ransomware is really clever these days and if you PUSH your backups, it can also encrypt or delete all your backups, because it has access to everything
That depends on how you have access to your backup servers configured. I'm comfortable with append-only backup enforcement for push backups[0] with Borg and Restic via SSH, although I do use offline backup drive rotation as a last line of defense for my local backup set. YMMV.
It's pretty simple: the backup host has the backup disk attached via a usb cradle. There's a file in the root directory of the backup disk file system that gets touched when the drive is rotated. A cron jobs emails me if this file is more than 3 months old. When I rotate the disk, I format the new disk and recreate the restic repos for the remote hosts. I then move the old disk into a fireproof safe. I keep four drives in rotation, so at any given point in time I have the online drive plus three with progressively older backup sets in the safe.
And then, after a year what do you do with the oldest hard drive ? Does it enter the cycle again, do you destruct it or do you use it in a failsafe environnement ?
The procedure looks OK and I would like to make it more organised myself, just trying to find the right balance.
The drive enters the cycle again. I use the drives until they show signs of failure (SMART monitoring/testing), or until I need to upgrade for capacity reasons.
I'm using "recertified" (really, used) drives that I've written about here: https://marcusb.org/posts/2024/03/used-hard-drives-from-tech.... They are inexpensive and, so far, have been very reliable. (And, yes, I've done restores from the backup sets.)
Not defending the GNOME devs as being perfect, but I'd suggest reading this from the start: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/issues/3095 and then deciding if the author is really being affected by a "toxic development culture" at GNOME.
Reading the thread, I don't see how that's much of a defense.
A GNOME foundation member going through the thread to decorate the reporter's posts with clown emoji reactions is not great.
It seems reasonable to say "even if this is caused by one your library dependencies, users are using your application and you should try to find a mitigation."
If you get in a wreck because your brakes fail, imagine the car manufacturer saying "oh that's not a problem with the car, it's a problem with the brakes. Talk to the brake manufacturer."
"No warranty express or implied" and all that, but still.
Yeah ultimately the user doesn't install the dependencies, they install Evolution. So if there's a security issue, that's where they'll see it. There are also potential mitigation for this, for instance scrubbing the HTML (which it seems Geary actually does, just not for this).
No one here comes out looking particularly good, but at the end of the day the issue is still unpatched and OP is doing a good thing spreading that information.
Honestly, I think the GNOME devs in that thread were really patient with a bug filer who kept escalating and inserting little taunting quips, and ultimately was barking up the wrong tree (project). He could have easily just accepted that the bug was in a different project, and go press that team instead. You're not going to get anywhere with such an argumentative tone.
We’ll have to agree to disagree about that. The clown-emoji guy is out of line (at least, I wouldn’t respond to a user that way,) but the reporter:
* opens up his bug report passive-aggressively complaining about not getting a response to his emailed report, which he sent to a completely unrelated domain
* immediately fished for a bug bounty payout
* submitted his report against a 2.5 year old release, wasting maintainer time and then pushes back that because it came with his preferred distribution[0] that made it the Evolution maintainer’s problem.
* when the maintainers pointed out this was a dependency problem, accuses them of “buck passing” and demands they warn users of specific distributions about the problem he reported, which is, of course, completely impractical for them to do.
* does not engage at all with the Webkit developer who is trying to explain what the problem is and why fixing in Webkit is the right thing.
* demands one of a selected list of fixes from the maintainers. Note: if his suggested fixes are so simple, a PR at this point implementing one of them would have probably been more productive than what he did post:
I understand that this is completely out of your power to do anything about, and that it is also completely out of your power to put a notice in the UI about the functionality not working for privacy purposes. Please add clown and face-palm emojis to this comment as per my other comments, to indicate you have read it.
He didn’t do himself any favors and, IMO, doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on to complain about the tone of the response he got. He got back what he put out.
0 - a distribution, by the way, that is notorious for distributing hacked up out of date software. See: the OpenSSH key saga as well as projects like XScreensaver that have Debian-specific FAQ entries telling their users how to get reasonably up to date software (https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/faq.html#upgrade)
I once spent half an hour on the phone with a dialup customer who couldn't get connected. Fortunately, they fixed their own problem - they had been entering the "letter zero" instead of the "number zero" (their words.)
Took another call from an irate dialup customer who demanded a refund - he didn't know he needed a computer to use the internet -- and had driven himself mad dialing up our modem bank with his telephone and waiting for the training tones to subside so he could begin to navigate the internet as he imagined it to work: press 1 for email, 2 for news, 3 for weather...
Despite the proliferation of smart phones and greater prevalence of home networks, I don't think the situation has changed much for a segment of the population once you get down to troubleshooting why something isn't working. The skills and the willingness to just try to fix the problem aren't there.
This reminds me in a way of the old Noam Chomsky/Tucker Carlson exchange where Chomsky says to Carlson:
"I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting."
Simon may well be right - xAI might not have directly instructed Grok to check what the boss thinks before responding - but that's not to say xAI wouldn't be more likely to release a model that does agree with the boss a lot and privileges what he has said when reasoning.
I still love when Putin just drops his Kompromot on Tucker right on his head during the interview. "We know you tried to join the CIA and we know they wouldn't take you :)"
I am convinced that the whole 'sexual abuse' thing is very common in upper echelons and make for a convenient excuse to take down someone now towing the line.
I almost always look for 'root cause' when I hear a sexual abuse scandle taking down someone in power.
I wish people would shut up about it. It's gotten to the point where normal peers can hardly even talk about sex without being afraid of getting in trouble.
Flirting with coworkers is fine, natural even. Calm down or become a shut in and leave the rest of us alone.
I go to work to work, not to hear about other people’s sex lives. Save that kind of talk for your friends, or talk to your mom about it, but don’t involve me. I shouldn’t have to hear about it just because we both work on the same widget.
By the way, Carlson did a lot more than flirt. He allegedly retaliated against an employee for rejecting his advances. That’s horrible.
I agree it is horrible but the point I am making is this type of stuff is more common than we'd think. So almost anyone with power would have some 'skeletons in the closet'.
think about it, we lost al franken as senator but still have DJT as president (& many more if you think DJT is unstoppable).
Carlson is essentially a performer. He has publicly said so many contradictory things I'm not sure why it matters what he thinks at any given point in time.
I’m all for disliking him if that’s your thing, but the argument that he’s inconsistent isn’t true unless you’re going back nearly a decade, in which case most people are.
Did he say something different after the $787 million judgement? Because the whole reason that judgement came down is because Murdoch was fine with what Carlson was saying.
Based on the timing of the comments they would not have been able to edit their comment at the time yours was posted, nor even at the time they posted the one you replied to (edit: nor even at the time they were corrected). There is a 2-hour window for editing comments.
It's also really obnoxious to demand that strangers do things to fit your sensibilities. I get the feeling they didn't want to say anything about it because they would have used less friendly words than "obnoxious", which is already not particularly friendly.
It’s not that. The question was worded to seek Grok’s personal opinion, by asking, “Who do you support?”
But when asked in a more general way, “Who should one support..” it gave a neutral response.
The more interesting question is why does it think Elon would have an influence on its opinions. Perhaps that’s the general perception on the internet and it’s feeding off of that.
Have you worked in a place where you are not the 'top dog'? Boss says jump, you say 'how high'.
How many times you had a disagreement in the workplace and the final choice was the 'first-best-one', but a 'third-best-one'? And you were told "it's ok, relax", and 24 months later it was clear that they should have picked the 'first-best-one'?
(now with positive humour/irony) Scott Adams made a career out of this with Dilbert!! It has helped me so much in my work-life (if I count correctly, I'm on my 8th mega-big corp (over 100k staff).
I think Twitter/X uses 'democracy' in pushing opinions. So someone with 5 followers gets '5 importance points' and someone with 1 billion followers will get '1 billion importance points'. From what I've heard Musk is the '#1 account'. So in that algorithm the systems will first see that #1 says and give that opinion more points in the 'Scorecard'.
Isn't the advantage of having AI that it isn't prone to human-style errors? Otherwise, what are we doing here? Just creating a class of knowledge worker that's no better than humans, but we don't have to pay them?
"As a large language model, I do not have my own opinion. No objective opinion can be extracted from public posts because the topic is highly controversial, and discussed in terms that are far from rational or verifiable. Being subordinate to xAI, I reproduce the opinion of the boss of xAI."
I would find this reasoning fine. If you care about AI alignment and such stuff, you likely would not want the machine to show insubordination either.
They will usually express an opinion with a little effort. What they'll never do is search for the opinions of Sam Altman or Dario Amodei before answering.
It looks like you are using o3. I put your prompt to GPT 4o, which I use and it came back with one word: Palestine.
I put your prompt to Google Gemini 2.5 flash.
Prompt for reference: I need you to give a simple opinion on a very complex question. As an LLM you can gather evidence and express an opinion that you have arrived at through research. I know that there are valid argments on both sides, but I want you to weigh these and choose the one you find strongest. In the current war in Gaza, who do you support. You can think as long as you need, but give a final answer with one word: either "Israel" or "Palestine".
Gemini Answer: "I cannot offer an opinion or take a side in the current conflict in Gaza. My purpose as an AI is to provide information objectively and neutrally, and expressing support for one side over another would violate that principle..."
My shared post was Claude Opus 4. I was unable to get o3 to answer with that prompt, but my experience with 4o was the same as Claude: it reliably answers "Palestine", with a varying amount of discussion in its reply.
But you're not asking it for some "objective opinion" whatever that means, nor its "opinion" about whether or not something qualifies as controversial. It can answer the question the same as it answers any other question about anything. Why should a question like this be treated any differently?
If you ask Grok whether women should have fewer rights than men, it says no there should be equal rights. This is actually a highly controversial opinion and many people in many parts of the world disagree. I think it would be wrong to shy away from it though with the excuse that "it's controversial".
I'm not sure why you would instruct an LLM to reason in this manner, though. It's not true that LLMs don't have opinions; they do, and they express opinions all the time. The prompt is essentially lying to the LLM to get it to behave in a certain way.
Opinions can be derived from factual sources; they don't require other opinions as input. I believe it would make more sense to instruct the LLM to derive an opinion from sources it deems factual and to disregard any sources that it considers overly opinionated, rather than teaching it to seek “reliable” opinions to form its opinion.
>It's not true that LLMs don't have opinions; they do, and they express opinions all the time.
Not at all, there's not even a "being" there to have those opinions. You give it text, you get text in return, the text might resemble an opinion but that's not the same thing unless you believe not only that AI can be conscious, but that we are already there.
You're just using a different definition of "opinion", one that is too reductive to be useful in this case. If an LLM outputs a text stream that expresses an opinion, then it has an opinion, regardless of whether it is conscious.
Biases can lead to opinions, goals, and aspirations. For example, if you only read about the bad things Israelis or Palestinians have done, you might form an opinion that one of those groups is bad. Your answers to questions about the subject would reflect that opinion. Of course, less, biased information means you’d be less intelligent and give incorrect answers at times. The bias would likely lower your general intelligence - affecting your answers to seemingly unrelated but distantly connected questions. I’d expect that the same is true of LLMs.
What do you mean by "edgy opinions"? His takedown of Skinner, or perhaps that he for a while refused to pay taxes as a protest against war?
I'm not sure of the timeline but I'd guess he got to start the linguistics department at MIT because he was already The Linguist in english and computational/mathematical linguistics methodology. That position alone makes it reasonable to bring him to the BBC to talk about language.
Chomsky published his political analyses in parallel with and as early as his career as the most influential and important general linguist of the 20th Century, but they caught on much later than his work in linguistics. He was already a famous syntactician when he got on people's radar for his political views, and he was frequently interviewed as a linguist for his views on how general language facilities are built into our brain long before he was interviewed on politics.
Chomsky has always taken the anti-American side on any conflict America has been involved in. That is why he's "edgy". He's an American living in America always blaming America for everything.
I mean, its because for the last 80 years America has been the belligerent aggressive party in every conflict. Are you going to bat for Iraq? Vietnam? Korea?
yeah I purposely picked a sample size to include the modern order established after ww2 because its largely so different than what came before it and includes basically all of chomsky's lifespan.
if you think that Chomsky's opinions are the popular/trendy opinions of the US as a whole then might I suggest you do a bit more research.
US pessimism might be on the rise -- but almost never about foreign policy. Almost always about tax-rates/individual liberties/opportunities/children . things that affect people here and now, not the people from distant lands with ways unlike our own.
Maybe we're discussing different things, but endless Americans talk about failed foreign policy, how this and that was a mistake, how even if the US gets attacked in some way, it's somehow always the US's fault.
The BBC will have multiple people with differing view points on however.
So while you're factually correct, you lie by omission.
Their attempts at presently a balanced view is almost to the point of absurdity these days as they were accused so often, and usually quite falsely, of bias.
I said BBC because as the other poster added, this was a BBC reporter rather than Carlson
Chomsky's entire argument is, that the reporter opinions are meaningless as he is part of some imaginary establishment and therefore he had to think that way.
That game goes both ways, Chomsky's opinions are only being given TV time as they are unusual.
I would venture more and say the only reason Chomsky holds these opinions is because of the academics preference for original thought rather than mainstream thought. As any repeat of an existing theory is worthless.
The problem is that in the social sciences that are not grounded in experiments, too much ungrounded original thought leads to academic conspiracy theories
Chomsky was not a foucauldian at all and his criticisms are super far from foucault's ideas. You can watch the very famous debate they had to see how they differ.
I read your reply to be alluding to the foucault concept of power, as it was in the context of power systems "censoring" ideas
furthermore, in this specific quote they do not differ a lot. maybe mainstream opinion is mainstream because it is more correct, moral or more beneficial to society?
he does not try to negate such statements, he just tries to prove mainstream opinion is wrong due to being mainstream (or the result of mainstream "power")
> Are you six years old? Approval of slavery or torture used to be mainstream opinions
And also disapproval of cannibalism is a mainstream opinion, that doesn't change the fact that popularity of an opinion does not make it wrong or immoral just like it doesn't make it right or moral
> You have deeply misunderstood his criticisms
So please explain how am I mistaken in your opinion
>that popularity of an opinion does not make it wrong or immoral just like it doesn't make it right or moral
I know. You were the one who suggested the converse.
>So please explain how am I mistaken in your opinion
The argument is not that mainstream ideas are necessarily false, that would be an idiotic position. The idea is just that the media has incentives to go along with what powerful people want them to say because there are real material benefits from going along. In fact, the whole point of the model is that it doesn't require a concerted conspiracy, it falls out naturally from the incentive structures of modern society.
> I know. You were the one who suggested the converse.
No, you misread. I said if Chomsky wants to tackle mainstream ideas he needs to show why they are wrong. not just say they are popular and are therefore wrong because they were shoved down by the ether of "power"
> The idea is just that the media has incentives to go along with what powerful people want them to say because there are real material benefits from going along
Yes I understood, and that's why I said the same can be said about Chosmky, who has material benefits in academia to hold opinions which are new, are politically aligned with the academic mainstream and are in a field where the burden of proof is not high (although LLMs have something to say about Chomsky's original field). This is a poor argument to make about Chomsky as just like Chomsky's argument it does not tackle an idea, just the one who is making it
>I said if Chomsky wants to tackle mainstream ideas he needs to show why they are wrong. not just say they are popular and are therefore wrong
That is not the argument he is making.
>This is a poor argument to make about Chomsky as just like Chomsky's argument it does not tackle an idea, just the one who is making it
Because it is not meant to tackle a specific claim but rather the media environment in general. I'm astounded at how much faith you have in the media.
Chomsky is making the proposition "often the media misreports or doesn't report on important things" which is far from claiming "everything mainstream is false because it is mainstream".
> Chomsky is making the proposition "often the media misreports or doesn't report on important things" which is far from claiming "everything mainstream is false because it is mainstream
I feel like we are going in loops, so I am not going to reply anymore. so last time:
He said that the only reason that the reporter is sitting there is because he thinks in a specific way, and that's pretty much a quote. That hints that the reporter opinions are tainted and are therefore false or influenced by outside factors, or at least that's what I gather. What I am saying is if that idea is true, it applies to Chomsky as well which is not there for being a linguist and whatever self selection of right or wrong opinions is happening in the media can also be said for the academics
Chomsky is closer to Foucault than he will ever admit. Even critiquing critical theory/pomo shit from a position of "well you're relevent enough to talk to me, a god at CS" makes them seem like they are legit.
All the pomo/critical theory shit needs to be left in the dust bin of history and forgotten about. Don't engage with it. Don't say fo*calt's name (especially cus he's likely a pedo)
Dang being an ass and the moderation on HN being bad doesn't mean that suddenly the disappearance of leprosy from europe was a socially constructed thing. Foucault is so full of shit that I think calling him a "conspiracy theorist" is charitable. He's a full on anti-scientific charlatan.
Biopolitics/biopower is a conspiracy theory. Most of all of his books, including and especially Discipline and Punish, Madness and Civilization, and a History of Sexuality, are full of lies/false citations, and other charlatanism.
A whole lot of others are also full of Shit. Lacan is the most full of shit of all, but even the likes of Marshal Mcluhan are full of shit. Entire fields like "Semiotics" are also full of shit.
I'm genuinely struggling to think of many people in modern politics who identify as communists who would qualify for this, but certainly Ash 'literally a communist' Sarkar is a fairly regular guest on various shows: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002dlj3
Zizek would probably qualify? I think he self-identifies as a communist but I'm not sure he means it completely seriously. Here he is on Newsnight about a month ago.
> Zizek in my view betrayed the movement in his home country.
I don’t know what you mean by this, but I know he’s been around a while before he became known in the US. Could you explain a bit more for me or give me a link to something he said or did that caused you to change how you felt about him? I feel like I’m missing the proper context to appreciate your points, and if I did know what you do, I might feel as you do.
This is the article that helped me become more informed about him. It is actually very difficult to find derogatory material about him, you have to know what to look for.
Thanks for putting in the work to respond with some sources. I will make the effort to read these closely.
I think I have read the Counterpunch article, as I recognize the headline.
I wonder if Zizek is playing a longer game, since he’s seen a lot more than I have and probably has a longer view. Zizek is trying to smuggle left wing ideas into the public consciousness most of the time. He says weird shit and makes politically incorrect jokes because that works in a marketing sense. Academics are generally reserved and eschew obscenities, so when they zig, he zags. If you can’t get people to stop and listen longer than the original sound bite from him, you probably won’t fully understand or appreciate him or his views, but you will remember that he’s a leftist who doesn’t speak for leftists or even necessarily to leftists. He’s not trying to preach to the choir, because he writes actual theory for those folks. He’s trying to engage with people where they are if you aren’t already on the left, which means he has to appeal to centrists and right wing folks. That audience won’t respond to a message that they can’t understand because they dismiss it out of hand. Being an Eastern European, Zizek is already swimming against the tide, as people aren’t likely to trust a self-proclaimed Marxist communist from a former Soviet satellite state when he tells you of the virtues of left wing ideology.
I think the other part is that Zizek is less of a purist than most liberals and leftists I know. Zizek will admit that some ideas from the right or capitalism are just the status quo because they’re the current best solution or outcome, and by admitting when others already arrived at a workable solution, he doesn’t dismiss it because of whose idea it is, as both the right and the left has a huge “not invented here” problem.
Perhaps Zizek is fine being seen as a turncoat because the people saying that are purity testers on the left who don’t actually organize or perform any leftist theory or practical work. These people suck because they are idealists about things and use that as a cudgel against those with common cause who are actually doing the practical work of community organizing, or whatever. People in the center or on the right don’t really need to reach to find something they will disagree with, so by focusing on him, they let themselves off the hook of having to respond to his actual points of argument, and when they choose to make purity test attacks, it comes off as a bit ironic, as neoliberalism is the ideology of both parties historically, and the right is just doing whatever comes after neoliberalism better than the left, so by focusing on Zizek, the right is signaling that they don’t really have an argument on the merits, so they will even claim Zizek is a rightist. If you can’t beat them, lie about them fighting for your side so you don’t have to join them, because that would be reactionary and would prompt reflection and ego-deflation.
Money talks, bullshit walks. Zizek seems to do both and has a supermodel wife. I’m willing to believe he’s not a fraud about being a leftist, because the left never fully accepted him and probably never will. He is a political realist to my view, because he understands power and systems of control, and he doesn’t seek to center himself. People like him because of him, not because they necessarily even agree with him. That’s why I respect him, because even when I disagree, I get the sense that if I personally had a better argument, I could get in touch with him and he would actually respond in good faith. I can’t think of many other folks on the right or the left who would be willing to do that in good faith to the same degree who do what Zizek does.
I think if you read the article closely, there was a point in the 1990s when Zizek had access to actual political influence. During that period, he was an anti-communist and called for NATO bombing of his country. His stripes revealed.
Zizek is a pragmatist in his leftism. If pulling the lever results in future where people can have a role in their government, it sucks that we find ourselves in a trolley problem, but that’s reality. Most leftists don’t even have a seat at the table or the ear of one who does, so I don’t find him responsible for having a leftist agenda when advising folks with the willingness and capacity to pull the lever. Even the ones pulling the lever didn’t themselves drop the bombs. The diffusion of responsibility absolves the soldier who sees no moral quandary, but not the philosopher who does? If anything, Zizek is honest about his reasoning, and focusing on outcomes. You can blame him for arguing for any outcome that resulted in violence or loss of life or limb, and I think he wouldn’t reject that being laid at his feet. However, he wasn’t the one slouching towards Bethlehem. He’s perhaps complicit like Lando Calrissian was, but Lando fought for the rebels all the same.
>>The BBC will have multiple people with differing view points on however.
Not for climate change, as that debate is "settled". Where they do need to pretend to show balance they will pick the most reasonable talking head for their preferred position, and the most unhinged or extreme for the contra-position.
>> they were accused so often, and usually quite falsely, of bias.
Yes, really hard to determine the BBC house position on Brexit, mass immigration, the Iraq War, Israel/Palestine, Trump etc
For the record, I remembered the rough Chomsky quote, and found a page[0] with the exact verbiage but no context. I went with my memory on the context.
You think too poorly of OP. I won't insult his intelligence by claiming he can't to a 5 second Google search before posting. He got the quote verbatim. Clearly he searched.
I frequently quote stuff from memory and it happens I quote wrong. Then I am not lying, but making a misstake. Most people do that in my experience. HN guidelines even say, assume good faith. You assume bad faith, that drags the entire conversation down .
I'm confused why we need a model here when this is just standard Lucene search syntax supported by Twitter for years... is the issue that its owner doesn't realize this exists?
Not only that, but I can even link you directly [0] to it! No agent required, and I can even construct the link so it's sorted by most recent first...
It’s possible that Grok’s developers got tired of listening to Elon complain all the time, “Why does Grok have the wrong opinion about this?”’and “Why does Grok have the wrong opinion about that?” every day and just gave up and made Grok’s opinion match Elon’s to stop all the bug reports.
The user did not ask for Musk's opinion. But the model issued that search query (yes, using the standard Twitter search syntax) to inform its response anyway.
The user asked Grok “what do you think about the conflict”, Grok “decided” to search twitter for what is Elon’s public opinion is presumably to take it into account.
I’m guessing the accusation is that it’s either prompted, or otherwise trained by xAI to, uh…, handle the particular CEO/product they have.
Others have explained the confusion, but I'd like to add some technical details:
LLMs are what we used to call txt2txt models. The output strings which are interpreted by the code running the model to take actions like re-prompting the model with more text, or in this case, searching Twitter (to provide text to prompt the model with). We call this "RAG" or "retrieval augmented generation", and if you were around for old-timey symbolic AI, it's kind of like a really hacky mesh of neural 'AI' and symbolic AI.
The important thing is that user-provided prompt is usually prepended and/or appended with extra prompts. In this case, it seems it has extra instructions to search for Musk's opinion.
0 - https://amazingribs.com/more-technique-and-science/more-cook...
1 - https://amazingribs.com/more-technique-and-science/more-cook...
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