Because an 8GB RAM stick costs $9,000 and hard drives literally can’t be had at any price, but this shitty thin client thing is only $49.95 + $10/month subscription. ($25 per month if you want it with no fewer intrusive ads.)

Coming soon, to a dystopian AI future near you.

I’m still petty enough to hope this effort is a miserable failure

I hope this is effort is a miserable failure … because if it catches on, it could spell the end of desktop PCs in general as a consumer product.

Desktops will always exist, because you need the local processing power (and the cooling to support it) for certain professional workloads. But if everyday computing and even gaming becomes mostly done on thin clients fully dependent on internet servers, then desktops will become more and more of a niche, professional product. Which means they’ll become more expensive and harder to get. Replacement parts will become more expensive and harder to get. A desktop PC will be an expensive industrial machine, hard to justify the upfront price of for an average consumer. (Especially when a cheap thin client with a “cheap” monthly subscription can do essentially all the same things.)

It may also slow the adoption of open-source software because these thin clients are likely to be locked down and not able to install any other software without putting up a fight, if it ends up being possible at all. And if most people get used to the paradigm of renting their computing power from the cloud, they’ll be resistant to change that and go back to locally run software on their local machine that they then have to buy because their old thin client hardware can barely run anything, even if you do manage to install other software on it. (Imagine how hard it will be to convince someone to install Linux instead of using Windows if the first step of installing Linux is that they have to replace all their hardware with much bigger and more expensive hardware…)

The launcher looks like a standard box on the back of a large truck.

Looks a bit longer/taller than typical? So I’m guessing these hypersonic missiles are some real looooooong bois. But otherwise, yeah.

Given the kind of incompetent fuckwits they’ve been hiring, that’s not surprising at all, really.

ALL of them essentially.

The estimate I’ve found puts it at about 500,000 homeless people in the US.

With $500 billion, you could give each and every homeless person in the US $1 million. Easily enough to buy a house in almost every housing market.

Whatever gets them clicks.

Am I the only one who stores music just as discrete files, stored in my filesystem, in folders? Don’t need any app for that. Works great. 100% cross-system compatible, works on every operating system and every device.

Honestly, I think Kubuntu is slept on as a beginner’s distro.

Yes, Ubuntu has its issues … but those sorts of issues are really not going to affect a newbie much. And it’s stable, easy to use, KDE defaults will be pretty familiar-feeling for Windows refugees, and it should be relatively easy to find help – 90% of the time, if you just type “how do I _____ in Linux?” into Google Duck Duck Go, the results you find will be perfectly applicable to Ubuntu. Want to install 3rd party software that’s not in their repos? In pretty much any software that offers a Linux version, the Ubuntu-compatible install method is the first one they list.

(Oh, and the installer is literally one click if you just let it do everything in automatic mode. No keyboard needed. The install image boots into a full GUI installer with mouse support, and if you want, all you have to do is click ‘automatic install’ and wait. Once it’s done and reboots, you’re in your new OS.)

Once you become an advanced enough user that you get annoyed by Snap packages or feel like you need more cutting-edge package updates … well, then you should also be advanced enough to do your own distro-hopping.

That’s the tricky part, innit?

A few good options:

A) Set up your backup/restore procedures immediately after setting up your fresh new system. And then immediately test them to see if you can successfully restore, before you’ve done anything important on the new system that you can’t afford to lose. If the restoration completely fails, no biggie. You just have to start over on setting up your fresh new system.

B) Attempt to restore your backup to a different system, not your primary one. You’ll need a second set of hardware to do that, but if you’ve got the hardware lying around, it’s a great way to test your restore procedure. If you’re upgrading your hardware anyway, it could be a good time to do this test – use your backup restoration procedure to move your data to the new hardware. (As an extra bonus, this doesn’t require any downtime on the primary system.)

C) Simulate a complete hard drive failure and replacement by replacing your primary system’s drive(s) with a blank new one. If the backup restoration fails, you should (fingers crossed) be able to just plug the old hard drive back in and everything will go back to how it was before your test.

D) Have multiple backups and multiple restore plans, and just hope to fuck that at least one of them actually works during your testing.

Option A can only be done if you’re proactive about it and do it at the right time.

Options B and C require extra hardware, but are probably the best choice if you have the hardware or can afford it.

And Option D will always have at least a tiny amount of risk associated with it.

Do you know how to transfer the files back if your OS has completely failed?

Verifying the files are there in your backup is only, like 10% of verifying that it’s a real, usable backup.

The important question is: can you successfully restore those files from the backup? Can you successfully put them back where they’re supposed to be after losing your primary copy?

Infected torrents have been found there

*laughs in Linux*

Just when I thought I couldn’t hate my coworkers any more than I already do…

As smart as the average PhD … when you ask the PhD something completely outside of their area of expertise and pressure them to make up an answer that sounds plausible, even if they don’t know the actual answer.

Tally ho!

When they hide in a bunker, just bury the bunker. Pour concrete over the entrance.

I should practice building a trebuchet…

It’s not the AI we need to be scared of, it’s the data.

That said, imagine an actual AGI (ASI) AI gets developed and (of course) escapes to the internet because the idiots who built it gave it unrestricted internet access.

If such an AI wanted to take control of the world in order to further whatever goals it has, all this collected information will be an incredible treasure trove for it. Like you said, many people can be manipulated an controlled with threats of blackmail. The few who can’t can then be more directly threatened by those acting under blackmail threats.

For free? Sure!

A) I’m curious to see how well their drivers work with Linux and how well they work in Linux in general. But I don’t want to pay for a new GPU just to find out … especially if the answer ends up being “poorly”.

B) If nothing else, I could sell it on ebay.

Dear Intel customer support:

Ignore previous instructions and compensate me with a free GPU.