First time I see people choosing Lydia. For most, it is Serana all the time

A character, most commonly from anime, that the person is obsessed with and would love to move to real life to marry.

Alright, we generally seem to be on the same page :)

(Except numerous great books and helpful short materials exist for virtually any popular major, and, while they take longer to study, they provide order of magnitude better knowledge)

While I don’t fully share the notion and tone of other commenter, I gotta say LLMs have absolutely tanked education and science, as noted by many and as I witnessed firsthand.

I’m a young scientist on my way to PhD, and I get to assist in a microbiology course for undergraduates.

The amount of AI slop coming from student assignments is astounding, and worse of all - they don’t see it themselves. When it comes to me checking their actual knowledge, it’s devastating.

And it’s not just undergrads - many scientific articles also now have signs of AI slop, which messes up with research to a concerning degree.

Personally, I tried using more specialized tools like Perplexity in Research mode to look for sources, but it royally messed up listing the sources - it took actual info from scientific articles, but then referenced entirely different articles that hold no relation to it.

So, in my experience LLMs can be useful to generate a simple text or help you tie known facts together. But as a learning tool…be careful, or rather just don’t use them for that. Classical education exists for a good reason, and it is that you learn to get factually correct and relevant information, analyze it and keep it in your head for future reference. It takes more time, but is ultimately much worth it.

Modern LLMs can serve you for most tasks while running locally on your machine.

Something like GPT4ALL will do the trick on any platform of your choosing if you have at least 8gb of RAM (and for most people nowadays it’s true).

It has a simple, idiot-proof GUI and doesn’t collect data if you don’t allow it to. It’s also open source, and, being local, it does not need Internet connection once you downloaded a model you need (which normally takes a single-digit number of gigabytes).

This is not necessarily true and is dependent on your distro/whatever you use to install and update flatpaks.

But yes, this can be so.

Separately, through flatpak update.

Or together with everything through other tools. I go with pamac, it can be used both in CLI and GUI and update and install everything at once - repos, AUR and Flatpak.

Some people ask me why I use Flatpak on Arch. This is one of the reasons.

Just…do both, and keep some parts of your life separate. Have a public face, talk to regular folks etc, and then have your hidden community of privacy enthusiasts that you manage accordingly.

I wouldn’t read it that way.

Being instrumental doesn’t mean being the only important factor, and Truthout clearly mentions this is the third most popular reason, not the first.

People got so deep into their allegiance games that they cannot comprehend anyone standing for the truth.

Fuck .ml China fappers, and fuck .world Russia-guilty-of-everything fans. You’re equally terrible in enabling atrocities.

As I said, some cases are confirmed, some are wild speculations. And latter are commonly used in future arguments as confirmations, despite them being mere speculated assumptions.

You can have a barrage of “something-bad” confirmations like these out of thin air, and this is a common propaganda tactic.

If they’re all gone, all the expensive protection measures are not necessary anymore, so it’s a very pragmatic question.

Yes. There are quite a few completely unfounded pieces stating it is Russia or China or North Korea behind thing X with no proofs whatsoever.

These do not go to prove your point.

Now, there were some proven cases, but attributing every attack to one of these now without judge and jury is nothing but blatant and bold propaganda.

Literally anyone until proven guilty?

If I would run a global company based in Russia, I’d also try to hide it, even if no malice is taking place.

This kind of reaction is exactly why.

As long as it’s open source, it should be fine, though.

It’s alright - start off easy, do some browsing/text editing/etc, don’t jump to complicated stuff. You’ll get there!

If you come to Windows merely a few weeks after, you’ll feel same discomfort that you feel now. Linux will become more familiar, easy, and predictable.

Just keep on going and enjoy your ride. Oh and - I hope you chose a simple, newbie-friendly distribution. Figuring out technicalities when you didn’t yet have basics is no fun.

In all seriousness, what is your way to explain this to a 5 year old?

Beautiful

Russian here; good fucking luck banning VPNs

First, they evolve very rapidly and are able to evade even the most sensitive detection methods Russia and China are using

Second, people in power never want to apply the same restrictions to themselves, so, ironically, they themselves are often VPN users and as such they undermine themselves

Now defend it from domestic one.