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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • It would be better to have this as a FUSE filesystem though - you mount it on an empty directory, point the tool at your unorganised data and let it run its indexing and LLM categorisation/labelling, and your files are resurfaced under the mountpoint without any potentially damaging changes to the original data.

    The other option would be just generating a bunch of symlinks, but I personally feel a FUSE implementation would be cleaner.

    It’s pretty clear that actually renaming the original files based on the output of an LLM is a bad idea though.


  • I saw a job posting for Senior Software Engineer position at a large tech company (not Big Tech, but high profile and widely known) which required candidates to have “an excellent academic track record, including in high school.” A lot of these requirements feel deliberately arbitrary, and like an effort to thin the herd rather than filter for good candidates.







  • It’s an interesting idea! I think there are many such applications for federation protocols.

    A few thoughts/questions:

    • Ideally you’ll need a stable identifier for each specific product. Most small online stores I use have product names riddled with typos, so a way to tackle that would be nice.
    • What’s the data model? Would each store be an ActivityPub Actor? Like each one would have a username and publish inventory updates?
    • Where do these updates go (maybe something akin to a Lemmy “community”)?
    • If you’re just relying on stores’ self-reported stock levels, where’s the benefit of using a federated model? Could you just build an open source app that scrapes retailers’ websites and collates that information?
    • Is the eventual goal that this competes with Amazon et al? I.e. it becomes an actual marketplace, perhaps with a “buy” and “sell” Action, and where vendors’ instances are effectively web stores?

  • Crostini is an official feature built by Google that allows you to run Linux on a tightly integrated hypervisor inside Chrome OS. You keep a lot of Chrome OS’ security benefits while getting a Linux machine to play with.

    That said, no, it’s not illegal to install a different operating system on your Chromebook hardware. They are just PCs, under the hood. You might lose some hardware security features though, e.g. the capabilities provided by integration of the Titan silicon.

    If you had a job at Google, corporate IT would definitely not be happy if you wiped the company-managed OS and installed an unmanaged Linux distro :)



  • Tl;dr: TPMs are very unlikely to make your privacy better or worse, but they could definitely be abused by a company like MS to make end users’ experiences worse. They could also be used for significant security and privacy gains… they’re a tool.

    The TPM can be used to provide a cryptographic binding between aspects of your system’s configuration and a unique key which is resident within the TPM (a process called “attestation”). It can also generate secondary keys that are associated with the base key, and use those to do cryptographic operations like encryption/decryption and authentication.

    Telemetry wise, the TPM’s only utility might be to “prove” that the data sent from your PC wasn’t tampered with. That said, I don’t think MS is actually doing that, and they don’t need to in order to be incredibly invasive in their telemetry.

    The (imo) worst way in which a TPM might be abused in a user-hostile sense is to detect if the OS has been modified by the user, or if an installation isn’t legitimate, etc. That could be used to disable certain features if you try to install unauthorised software, dual boot Linux or whatever. This would be similar to the smartphones of today, which can for example disable access to banking apps if jailbroken/rooted.

    TPMs (>2.0 at least) otherwise have the potential to realise a significant improvement in security and privacy for users, if used correctly. They can be used for encryption and credentials that are bound in hardware and therefore practically impossible to steal. And can detect hardware tampering and potentially foil Evil Maid attacks. Imagine if your login sessions for various websites were bound to your hardware, such that a dodgy extension could never steal your cookies.