I'm starting to understand myself a little bit better these days.

I work a job for a brainless fuckwit who thinks a single google search can replace a skilled network engineer. I'm just about ready to walk out and let them find out just how well that would work out for them.

My family is completely bonkers. Father's an ultra far-right maga nazi. My mother is a bible bashing obedient enabler. My sister is a new wave hippy 'artist' who hasn't held a job for 20 year that refuses to speak to me because I joked about her friends doing psychedelics.

I'm too old to date, useless if I DID find a way to GET a date, and not interesting enough to hold a conversation on a date if I did, unless the other person wanted me to rant about the state of things for hours and somehow enjoyed that.

My old friends have either married and had kids, gone completely mental, (One was such a gun nut that they pointed one of their guns in my face) moved away and lost contact, or died.

I have 2 'friends' who I chat with on Discord. That's what I'm reduced to. Two people who enjoy joking around with me but probably wouldn't like me IRL.

I'm in North America and every time I see a lifted truck with the DPF removed, blasting silt out the 7 inch tailpipe with at least 1 TRUMP bumper sticker on it, I get a near unbearable urge to find the nearest bridge embankment at high speed. I never do and you don't need to give me resources for mental health, a psychiatrist, or 'prevention' resources, so don't trouble yourself with that.

If alien craft came to earth, I'd race to the nearest one, stick my thumb in the air and scream GET ME OUT OF HERE until I went hoarse.

Last night there was a "dangers of AI" talk at the local tech school, free for the public to attend, hosted by 2 local detectives from the police department.

I didn't have high hopes of technical information, but what I didn't expect was a standard "Here's how to protect yourselves from scams, elderly people" with the term "AI" glued on, and an extra 5 minutes of "They're cloning voices, do not fall for your "grandkid" calling from jail urgently needing bail money."

What I took from the talk and the questions from the public is this. No-one understands. The local police in my town are nice and are trying, but have absolutely no idea what they're up against, OR they are aware but unwilling to explain it to a room full of mostly elderly people. Maybe they've been told to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain"- to not spook the public?

The public, admittedly 90% elderly at this talk, haven't got a single solitary clue or a lick of critical thinking, asking questions like "how do I tell an email isn't from the person it says it is?" They asked questions like "So my Alexa is listening to me? Could that be used to clone my voice?"

The responses from the local speakers (again who I think are respectable, nice local cops) didn't respond with "Drown your Alexa in the bathtub when you get home" but assured the woman that "We don't think so, but if Amazon gets compromised, it's a possibility."

There was a little "think critically!" mixed in but it was not featured, not stressed as "the most important thing".

The worst takeaway was an organizer from the tech school bragging that they're integrating AI in to all of their courses.

If this is the level of understanding the general public has, I don't think we can expect them to act/vote accordingly for the threats we're facing.

I was just lamenting my cold weather gloves and thinking about how each type I try sucks in new and interesting ways and I thought-

Cyclists are probably glove experts. Anyone here willing to educate me on comfortable gloves that last and work with touch screens/etc? I don't ride, so I won't require big protection from road rash or extra padding/protection, so I might be asking in the wrong place.

Just a thought that occurred to me, a few thousand riders probably know where the good gloves are. Thanks in advance, or sorry in advance, whichever applies.

Critical thinking truly is dying, and at such speed I can barely believe my eyes. This is tough read.

Years ago I became a customer for MAIL. ** JUST. MAIL.**

I now have access to
VPN
-Don't care, don't want. I use a different service.
Drive
-I'd rather eat my own head than trust someone else's computer with my files. I self host.
Docs+Sheets, storing the documents in the abovementioned "Drive"
Are you joking?
ProtonPass
-Use a different self hosted solution
Wallet
-Not on your @#^ing life
Lumo AI
GFYS

Every single time I find out more trash got glued to my account I get angrier.

Either provide a "Mail+Calendar ONLY" package for a discount or prepare to lose a customer.

Working on a machine that BSOD'd 3-4 times a week, couldn't find much wrong but then I saw this. An NVME drive from a company named "OEMGenuine".
Their website 404's, waybackmachine says it was last cached 2 years ago, and even then it was a broken Godaddy landing page.

Found in a Thinkpad purchased from Amazon, sold by a third-party reseller who "upgrades" the devices before reselling.

Machine seems just fine/stable with a credible drive in it.

What's the craziest shady "brand" name you've seen in the wild?

EDIT: NEW Discovery! One of the ancient waybackmachine cached pages previously redirected to oemgenuine.NET! It's shoddy as hell but the .net domain is still visible today! oemgenuine.net

archive.is link to article from allabout.ai at https://www.allaboutai.com/resources/ai-statistics/ai-environment/

Points for something I've never tried.

Edit: Think I'll just blast Bazzite on it. The recent Gnome scales well and it has nice performance tweaks.
Cheers

Mint 20.3 - (I know, why you no on latest) Firefox failing to update this week- "Compressed data is corrupt"

Any tips/tricks I should know? Edit: formatting is bad with the copy/pasted output. Sorry.

(Reading database ... 1048865 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack .../firefox_116.0.2+linuxmint1+una_amd64.deb ... Unpacking firefox (116.0.2+linuxmint1+una) over (116.0+linuxmint1+una) ... **dpkg-deb (subprocess): decompressing archive member: lzma error: compressed data is corrupt

dpkg-deb: error: subprocess returned error exit status 2

dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/firefox_116.0.2+linuxmint1+una_amd64.deb (--unpack):

cannot copy extracted data for './usr/lib/firefox/fonts/TwemojiMozilla.ttf' to '/usr/lib/firefox/fonts /TwemojiMozilla.ttf.dpkg-new': unexpected end of file or stream

Preparing to unpack .../mozillavpn_2.16.1-focal1_amd64.deb ...

Unpacking mozillavpn (2.16.1-focal1) over (2.15.3-focal1) ...

dpkg: warning: unable to delete old directory '/usr/lib/mozillavpn': Directory not empty

dpkg: warning: unable to delete old directory '/usr/lib/mozilla/native-messaging-hosts': Directory not empty

dpkg: warning: unable to delete old directory '/usr/lib/mozilla': Directory not empty

Errors were encountered while processing:

/var/cache/apt/archives/firefox_116.0.2+linuxmint1+una_amd64.deb

E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) A package failed to install. Trying to recover:** Setting up mozillavpn (2.16.1-focal1) ... Installing new version of config file /etc/xdg/autostart/mozillavpn-startup.desktop ... Processing triggers for mime-support (3.64ubuntu1) ... Processing triggers for hicolor-icon-theme (0.17-2) ... Processing triggers for gnome-menus (3.36.0-1ubuntu1) ... Processing triggers for dbus (1.12.16-2ubuntu2.3) ... Processing triggers for mintsystem (8.5.4) ... Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.24+linuxmint1) ...

And then I looked up the band and found THIS https://youtu.be/Osqf4oIK0E8 I have questions

Not long after installing/subscribing, was suggested to update. Since then I've had the app crash when opening.

In case anyone else happens to see the same issue- at least for the time being, uninstalling/reinstalling seems to have done the trick.

Got a new Zimaboard yesterday, running through using it to migrate the Plex workload off of my Synology NAS- but running in to a strange issue.

When mounting the NAS (which I'm still using for the storage of my media) everythiing works great, authenticates with a user I created just for it, finds the shares and displays them correctly, but entering any of the shares, they "appear" to be empty in CasaOS's file browser, which of course they're not.

Things I've tested- connected to my NAS with that same user credential in a VM, shares appear/work correctly. User has read/write permissions inside those folders.

Triple-checked file permissions on the NAS- all good from test VM.

Updated the Zimaboard's Debian OS from SSH, updated CasaOS afterward. Rebooted numerous times.

Anyone here familiar with CasaOS that ships on Zimaboard who might be able to enlighten me?

I do a lot of VMWare work but I'd like to tinker with proxmox at home- I just don't want to bring an awful old HPE server/etc home to try it out on-

Anyone have any reccomendations for a quiet, small homelab server with a solid (12-16 thread) core count?