It is equivalent until Flatpak adds a new (probably completely justified) limitation to its sandbox that breaks your (needs unrestricted system-wide permissions) application, sure. Nevermind if you decide to add more features that go beyond what the sandbox allows, and then you need to figure out why they’re broken in your flatpak and what new flags you need to unbreak them. The problem is you’re constantly swimming upstream against a very strong current. It’s not a very sustainable mode of development. Like OP said, flatpak is designed for sandboxed desktop GUIs. It may be convenient at first to shoehorn your TUI application into it, but you’re working against its design and intent, and that is a genuine problem, for many reasons.

npm -g is another TUI install method I loathe. pipx/uv shares most of the same issues. Like the author, I’ve gone through almost all of the same options they have, and come to basically the same conclusions. There really is no good option for packaging and managing userspace TUI utilities. And it’s brutal. I hate that so many terminal utilities have standardized to use completely unrestricted, opaque and dangerous curl/sh copy-pastes, leaving anyone who’s not both fluent in shell script and willing to invest the time to inspect what the scripts are doing out in the cold, bravely running commands that are potentially malicious with no safety net. I understand it, it’s viable, it works, I do it myself for my own projects, but we have to acknowledge that it’s a symptom of the lack of any better solution for TUI packaging, and it’s okay to admit that it sucks, and we could do something so much better.

Sounds about right, my friend. I’ll meet you in the Badlands with the other nomads after the blackwall goes up!

Their user profile explains they believe it’s poisoning AI. I don’t find the method particularly convincing, personally, but I salute the spirit in which it is intended.

I donated a server to my brother across the country to use as his media server, it also doubles as my own offsite backup. And vice versa for his, although he’s not really tech savvy enough to care.

Why do we need a centralized hub for AI models anyway? I’ve never figured this out. We flock to these big “friendly” fucking companies with obviously unsustainable business models trying to own and sell things that should be shared in a decentralized, democratized mesh anyway. AI models should all be distributed magnet links, not hosted files. Why do we do this to ourselves?

The way things are going at Huggingface now, I imagine we probably will have to start building the infrastructure we need to handle AI models as distributed links sooner rather than later. Let the enshittification begin, we’ll move on to a different tactic for sharing AI models while cheerfully they squeeze cash out of people and businesses too lazy to adapt. Everything working as it should, I guess.

Yes, it’s not the technology I hate, it’s the people pushing it, demanding it, saying it will replace humans. Those people can fuck right off. Technology exists to serve humans, not the other way around. We are being sold a lie. The technology has some interesting aspects, but the pushers are pushing bullshit.

I used to think UBI was a reasonable solution, but I think that might be its problem, it’s too reasonable, it would probably be the only thing that can prevent total class warfare from breaking out. But these billionaires (and now trillionaires?) are fucking idiots and I kind of hope they are too stupid to realize they need to placate the masses to avoid it or so narcissistic they think they can actually win if it does. We’d fucking slaughter them in a class war, no problem. They are not as smart nor as well-prepared as they think that they are. I think they’re pushing all the wrong buttons and I think the way things are going they’re going to get burned. They’re flying too close to the sun, and like Icarus, they’re having a real fun time. Until at some point, suddenly, they’re not.

Zero. Zero accurately. They don’t even talk about it, because they don’t care. The arbitrary cruelty is a bonus feature.

This feels like marketing disguised as criticism.

I agree. I’m very interested to try it. I felt like Ornith 1.0 tried a little too hard to second-guess and overcorrect itself and would sometimes end up steering itself down an inescapable rabbit hole of self-correction ad absurdum, when ironically its first solution was often the best, sometimes would work as-is or with only a little refinement needed. I’m hopeful that 1.5 will improve that.

“9:40 AM EDT on August 17, 2026” so… yesterday. This is old news. Not to defend github, but it’s currently working fine for me and has been all day. Can confirm yesterday was a shitshow.

a camera openly displayed, but off,

I know enough about technology and big tech companies to be completely unwilling to believe that any device claiming to be “off” or even just to have some feature “off” can be trusted not to be collecting data anyway, at least in certain situations. They have completely and utterly destroyed that trust, and are at this very moment still dancing gleefully on its corpse. It doesn’t really make any sense for them to act surprised when we refuse to believe a company like Meta will take anyone’s privacy seriously.

No screenshots, but I had an old server with a pair of mirrored 8GB Seagates hosting a particularly specialized service on a very beefy and regularly maintained UPS and it had a server uptime of 21 years (had not been rebooted since somewhere around 1999) when I finally decommissioned it about 5 years ago, both disks would’ve been the same. It was on the public internet the whole time too, running Debian Slink with kernel 2.0.36, which had been awkwardly patched and rebuilt somehow to make the service (itself already obsolete at that time) actually work. I don’t know why I remember all this, but I do.

I do remember monitoring the SMART status at various points and the drive bearings must’ve been pretty cooked because those two drives were always running at 50-60C and I had a big old box fan pointed at the thing with the side panel off.

This example is also why I don’t always buy into the cult of “you must always regularly update all software immediately all the time”. Old software is not always bad software, same with old hardware. Sometimes it’s genuinely possible to have a bulletproof system. The problem is you never really know you do, until it either enters survivorship bias or becomes catastrophically proven otherwise. But you can make educated guesses, and if you’re going to naively assume that your old software must have exploitable security holes it seems equally naive to me to assume that updates must never have exploitable security holes. I think the risk calculus has to be done on a case-by-case basis.

I think we’re already at the point where Linux is more compatible with Windows software than Windows itself is.

Yes it’s important to always update to make sure you also have the newest security holes in addition to the old ones that nobody’s noticed. /s

Hobbyists are working in the billions or tens of billions. Trillions is insane. I’m sure some people can run it, but not many.

It’s used as a test of basic intelligence, but it’s also seriously incomplete and maybe a test of more advanced intelligence would be to have someone explain at least some of the many ways in which it’s incomplete.

If I told you to let me have your 5 treats later so that I can turn them into more treats than there are particles in the entire universe and I’ll give you half, you should probably call bullshit on that.

If I’m starving to death and I’m not going to survive until however much “later” is unless I eat one of those treats right now, then choosing “five treats later” would actually be the wrong choice.

This is not always a clear choice, either. The test is interesting, and it tells you a lot about how certain people think, but it isn’t universal, and it doesn’t actually prove anything. You need to understand and interpret why the answer makes sense in each context. And the context is always changing. We live on a changing planet. It is time to start thinking about how the context of “5 treats later” might have changed, and whether we are going to survive until whenever “later” is, and whether it is actually physically possible to provide all of those 5 treats in the hypothetical future that we are imagining.

Or is it money that has now been turned into fictional non-existent money, because it was stolen from our own future, where it was previously being held (we thought) safely in trust for us. They’re stealing the money from us. From our taxes, from our government funds and institutions, from our pensions. It’s our money. At least it nominally was, before all this happened. We’re being looted. The robbers are in our vault, they are packing our money into bags labelled “AI” as we speak.

Correct. There’s no direct way to prove they are or aren’t using their own open source server code, but if they weren’t, the behavior could still be proven to match or be different, and as soon as the behavior is different, that would prove they’re not running the open source code, and if hypothetically they aren’t running their own open source code and they intend on avoiding detection of that fact, then they still have to make their closed-source infrastructure exactly match the behavior of the open source software. And as long as they’re doing that, then the open source functionality remains a perfect predictor of the behavior of their infrastructure. So it’s still pretty transparent in that sense. But technically, of course, we don’t really know, and that’s a given.

Self-hosting is still preferable, and the only method I consider personally acceptable.

I use open source to avoid mysteries.