I feel you. Upgraded my desktop around 2023/24 with 32GB DDR4 RAM, cost me about 70€ back then.
We didn’t know how good we had it…

Wouldn’t the whole 125B non-n-gram parameters still have to fit into VRAM, though?

They didn’t use an acoustic coupler as in the image any more, you are correct ;-)
The noise was also still emitted by the more modern variants during dialing and connection establishment, and as I was reading the meme’s text without paying much attention to the symbolic picture, I instantly thought of the standard 56k modem we still had.

Or worse, get dialed up yourself by a faxmachine with a wrong number in its memory.
It will try. And try. And try.
And at some point, you will just shut down your phone and hope it is over soon when the remote side finally cancels the unsuccessful sending operation.

I havent seen a modem like that in 40 years

My parents still used one until about 15 years ago.
Downside of living in the nice rural, but broadband-free, countryside…

Serious headbanging instead on my side!

I always thought more that it sounded musical somehow.

But then again, I am a huge fan of things like Progressive Industrial Death Metal, so maybe this doesn’t amount for much…

Hot take:
Any direct exposure to interactive apps, no matter how short, is too much for a five year old.

Just occasionally say something to them in the foreign language once in a while, effect will be greater without getting them hooked early on to interactive media with addictive properties.

The devices in question all were fat formatted, for which it is quite easy to reconstruct most of the “deleted” content using readily available simple tools (which I did).
But that was some time in the past, nowadays most systems use some kind of base encryption, making it less likely to easily find something.
The phone, on the other hand, was just not doing a factory reset before selling it, but only deleting files (and missing stuff, like some mail folders) and not having a password-protection at all… 😬

Thing seems to be though, that OP did not use LUKS consistently, but mixed with unencrypted uses.
In this case, fast, file-oriented secure-erase (or just throwing away all the LUKS headers, if the remaining partition was encrypted) might miss the remnants of old unencrypted uses.
So, specifically in OPs case, I am not sure if there is another safe option than a full-device overwrite e.g. using dd.

some small percentage of the data will still be around, because they do overprovisioning.

That’s why I wrote “directly accessible data”. You are certainly right that safely erasing all data on SSDs is hard to impossible to achieve, but so is the read access to it.
That means if we disregard the drug distribution or similar scenarios, should be enough for the normal person.

But I mean secure wipe isn’t hard… It’s copy-pasting 2 more commands from the Arch wiki, compared to the dd command.

But it will take significantly longer (typically using /dev/random and multiple passes) without noticably increasing security for SSDs.

It will have also have the same possible write-speed-penalty issue as the zero-overwriting, but this won’t be OPs problem any more because he is selling the SSD.

Is anyone even likely to be curious enough to look?

Well, can only speak for me, but first thing I do.
I mean, you can never know which administrative scandal you might uncover…
I stop the moment I find private stuff, though.
Had that three or four times already, the only case I was considering doing something about it was a completely unsecured and unerased phone still containing a bunch of business emails that clearly were sensitive or even confidential stuff.
I just told the seller how he screwed up here, instead of making a bigger fuss out of it.

You don’t have to install anything on it, just connect it to a running PC and do a dd if=/dev/zero, that should be enough to get rid of any remnants directly accessible.
Unless you are part of a drug distribution organization, in that case just use a hammer, a microwave and a blowtorch.

The first thing that came to my mind also.

This sounds like another privacy nightmare put on top of the already more than questionable Flock installations.

First day on the internet?

No, 95 or so cents to establish a trusted bot-in-human-skin would be a bargain, so doesn’t offer any protection.

I am thinking more of a web of trust kind of thing, ideally based on physically meeting people and exchanging keys in the respective first trust stages, and also with an easy option to distrust signing certificates again in the trust chain.

But somebody made a decision to not have you guys killed

Absolutely, not questioning that for a moment!
(Same reason my wife wears similar lights when riding her horse along public roads in winter also it also looks embarrasing).

My military time has been before the incident you mentiioned btw (got drafted in 1995 for 10 months), which makes the incident even more tragic (if they didn’t use the warning lights), as the lights at the rear seem to already have been common practice in some armies at the time…

I fondly remember back in the days doing military exercise marches on public roads:
The last soldier in the column would have to walk with a signalling light attached to the top of his helmet.
I typically walked in some front row (benefit of being tall and placed there for some military-aesthetics reasons), so was at least spared that embarrassment. :-)

we’re all hanging around in Messenger groups with some “Is a real human” vetting process

I think there is a very high likelihood this, or a communication concept based on this, will be the future. Maybe like SSL trusted identity certificates, but not for websites, but for users.

I guess I prefer the Unix philosophy of doing things:
Have a bunch of combinable small programs each being dedicated to a single function and doing that well instead of large complex monoliths.