palordrolap

The change of the meaning of the G in GPU from “graphics” to “general” is even less well documented and used than the “V” of DVD changing from “video” to “versatile”.

Indeed it only occurred to me what it must have changed to and to go looking to confirm after seeing your comment.

And frankly they ought to have changed the name to something like “MPPU” if they wanted it to stick (massively parallel).

This had me going down the rabbit hole of the other compression algorithm that has had my interest for a long time: Arithmetic coding.

It looks like all the patents on that have expired… sooo, original bzip resurrection when?

Here I was expecting a graphics demo to blow our collective minds but instead I got a story about a local LLM for cheap. It is <current year>. I should have known better.

Were I the author / tech cobbler here, I’d be concerned that too much time with an LLM, local or otherwise, might erode or dull my apparently fairly sharp reasoning and tech skills. (Clarification: Not my sharpness, theirs. I’m a potato.)

Other thoughts: For a minute I thought this whole thing was a tribute to, or a troll in the manner of, that one Redditor that always spun their stories around to being about their dad beating them with jumper cables.

Also, my old PC developed an issue like the warm reboot problem, except with the network interface. I couldn’t just restart, I had to power off and back on. I never did bother to find out whether it was early signs of hardware failure or whether it was an old hardware / newer kernel mismatch.

Anything that isn’t encrypted at the message level will be accessible in plaintext at some point on a mail provider’s hardware.

Secure protocols only ensure that mail gets to the mail provider and leaves again without someone else reading the message on the wire. On the server, there is no such protection.

Take a look at any mail message’s headers for Received. Any server that added a header, and maybe a few others besides, had full access to the plain text of the whole message.

A good provider might have encrypted volumes in case a server is stolen, but while those volumes are live, messages on there are effectively plain text.

This is an unavoidable fact.

For many years, I had access to hundreds if not thousands of customer mailboxes but neither I nor my colleagues had any need or desire to go snooping, and I expect we would have been sued out of existence had we done so, contracts or otherwise.

The closest I ever got was when trying to help a customer determine what was happening to messages being sent from a third party. I was able to confirm that messages from that third party were indeed landing in the mailbox (literally grepping for the From: header in newly arrived messages) and then confirming that the message had been collected by something outside our network.

Then we had to go through the usual customer-side troubleshooting, like other things that might be picking up the mail, junk mail collection systems, message rules and so on.

A few customers were uncomfortable as and when they realised we were able to see all their mail. They got an abridged version of the above and were told about the benefits of things like PGP or having their own mail server to reduce the chance for snooping.

Insufficient demand means insufficient return on investment, so of course prices need to go up to make up the shortfall.

And in another story on my feed, we have a trillionaire with the opposite problem, where there’s too much demand, so of course, prices need to go up to reduce demand.

Distrowatch may still rank by number of clicks on a distro on their site. I have been convinced for a number of years that MX Linux has maintained its top position there because people click on it wondering what the heck it is, keeping it at the top in a self-perpetuating loop.

This is neither an endorsement nor a criticism of MX Linux, by the way. Maybe it’s awesome. I’ve just never used it, and probably never will.