If this is your first time installing Linux, keep it simple.

what partitions do linux distros need to function ?

One is enough for Linux alone. Two if you want to dual boot (one for Windows, another for Linux). Everything else is optional.

what linux distros support secure boot with nvidia drivers ?

I don’t have a full list, but I’m reasonably certain that Linux Mint supports secure boot UEFI, and I’m sure that it supports NVidia drivers.

Note that you can disable secure boot to run other distros if necessary/desired.

is it bad idea to install linux on a single drive in its own partition ?

As in, single boot? It’s only a bad idea if you need Windows for some reason. But then you could run Windows from a virtual machine, as the other poster said.

I have heard some linux distros like linux mint and ubuntu have a habit of touching other efi partitions when being told not to, are there any other distros that do that ?

I’m really unsure if this actually happens; I’ve dual booted Windows with Ubuntu for years, and to my knowledge Ubuntu never touched the Windows partition without my permission.

Plus if this happened I bet that a lot of people would be raging.

Is there anything else I should be aware about ?

Don’t look for exact copies of the software that you typically use with Windows. Instead, look for software that fills the same purpose.

When possible, let your distribution install software for you, through its own package manager. Downloading and running random executables from the internet is a last resort.

The Arch wiki is a godsend even if you don’t use Arch. (I don’t use Arch BTW.)

When asking people for help, make sure to include which distro you’re running, and which version.

This screams FAITH (Filthy Assumptions Instead of THinking) from a distance, on multiple levels:

1. Assuming that the current machine learning development will lead to artificial general intelligence. Will it?
2. Assuming that said AGI would appear in time to reduce power consumption. Will it?
3. Assuming that lowering the future power consumption will be enough to address issues caused by the current power consumption. Will it?
4. Assuming that addressing issues from a distant future means that the whole process won’t cause harm for people in a nearer future. Will it?

Furthermore, Gates in the quote is being disingenuous:

“Let’s not go overboard on this,” he said. “Datacenters are, in the most extreme case, a 6 percent addition [to the energy load] but probably only 2 to 2.5 percent. The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6 percent reduction? And the answer is: certainly,” Gates said.

The answer addresses something far, far more specific than the main issue.

If I may, here’s my alternative solution for the problem, in the same style as Gates’:

Kill everyone between the North Pole and the Equator.

What do you mean, it would kill 85% people in the world? Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, right? Nobody that I know personally lives there, so Not My Problem®. (Just keep Japan, I need my anime to watch.)

…I’m being clearly sarcastic to deliver a point here - it’s trivially easy to underestimate issues affecting humankind, and problems associated with their solutions, if you are not directly affected by either. Gates is some billionaire bubbled around rich people; this sort of problem will affect the poor first, as the rich can simply throw enough money into their problems to make them go away.

More like the straw that broke the camel’s back. And a sign that Microsoft’s behaviour is still the same as it was in IE times.

I know that this expression desensitises people to something serious, but it describes Microsoft - the “it”/corporation - perfectly: rapist mentality. It shows how eager Microsoft is to disregard consent, users saying “no, I don’t want it”, and to force itself over the users as long as it gets some benefit out of it.

Including new obnoxious advertisement slots into an already released product - one that you paid for - is only a result of that mentality.

I thought about this a while ago. My conclusion was that the simplest way to handle this would be to copy multireddits, and expand upon them.

Here’s how I see it working.

Users can create multireddits multicommunities multis as they want. What goes within a multi is up to the user; for example if you want to create a “myfavs” multi with !potatoism, !illegallysmolcats and !anime_art, you do you.

The multi owner can:

1. edit it - change name, add/remove comms to/from the multi
2. make the multi public or private
3. use the multi as their feed, instead of Subscribed/Local/All
4. use the multi to bulk subscribe, unsub, or block comms

By default a multi would be private, and available only for the user creating it. However, you can make it public if you want; this would create a link for that multi, available for everyone checking your profile. (Or you could share it directly.)

You can use someone else’s public multi as your feed or to bulk subscribe/unsub/block comms. You can also “fork” = copy it; that would create an identical multi associated with your profile, that then you can edit.

Those mistakes would be easily solved by something that doesn’t even need to think. Just add a filter of acceptable orders, or hire a low wage human who does not give a shit about the customers special orders.

That wouldn’t address the bulk of the issue, only the most egregious examples of it.

For every funny output like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving me 200 burgers”, there’s likely tens, hundreds, thousands of outputs like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving 1 burger”, that sound sensible but are still the same problem.

It’s simply the wrong tool for the job. Using LLMs here is like hammering screws, or screwdriving nails. LLMs are a decent tool for things that you can supervision (not the case here), or where a large amount of false positives+negatives is not a big deal (not the case here either).

Yup.

The post and the comments make me glad that I never bothered with Less Wrong. It makes HN and Reddit look smart in comparison.

Here’s a link to the original formulation of Roko’s Basilisk. The text that it refers to (Altruist’s Burden) is this one.

You know, I’ve seen plenty variations of Pascal’s Wager. But this is probably the first one that makes me say “it’s even dumber than the original”.

Next on the news: “Hitler ate bread.”

I’m being cheeky, but I don’t genuinely think that “Nazi are using a tool that is being used by other people” is newsworthy.

Regarding the blue octopus, mentioned in the end of the text: when I criticise the concept of dogwhistle, it’s this sort of shit that I’m talking about. I don’t even like Thunberg; but, unless there is context justifying the association of that octopus plushy with antisemitism, it’s simply a bloody toy dammit.

The alt text is nice, too: The weird sense of duty really good sysadmins have can border on the sociopathic, but it’s nice to know that it stands between the forces of darkness and your cat blog’s servers.

Frankly, I think that the only reason why this is considered “disputed” is because a lot of pedants that gravitate towards classical texts are like Gladstone. They don’t see what the author says, on a discursive level; they see individual words, and that screws with their ability to understand metaphors, thus poetry, thus the epics.

For reference. I don’t speak Greek, but I do speak Latin. If I were to drink a sip of booze every bloody time that a muppet translated Plautus (a comedian) with unfunny shite, or Caesar (a general) with flowery and convoluted words, my liver would be probably floating the same seas as Odysseus’ ship. (It’s likely the same with Sanskrit given the egregiousness of “I am become Death”.)

Dyes play a huge role, but it boils down to relevance.

Dark vs. light is probably the first thing that becomes relevant for us, as the difference is [literally] like night and day; then hot colours (red, etc.) because of fruits and blood. Then the rest.

I didn’t dig too much into Homer’s usage of “bronze sky” (unlike the wine-faced = inebriating sea), but if I had to take a guess, he wasn’t referring to the colour but calling it “glorious”, or perhaps a “noble” sky.

No, the ancients did not “fail to see the colour blue”. Nor the Himba, mentioned in the text. Both simply don’t assign the shades that you’d call “blue” in English to their own special colour word. Each language splits the colour space in different ways.

I’ll illustrate this with an example in the opposite direction - English using a single primary word for colour, while another language (Russian) uses two:

In Russian, those three are considered separated colours; they aren’t a hue of each other, goluboj is not sinij or vice versa, just like neither is zeljonyj. In English however you’d lump the first two together as “blue”, and the third one as “green”.

Does that mean that your typical English speaker fails to see one of the first two shades? No. And if necessary they might even use expressions to specify one or another shade, like “sky blue” vs. “dark blue”. They still lump them together as “blue” though, unlike Russian speakers, and they might not pay too much attention to those silly details.

That’s basically what Himba speakers do, except towards all three of them. Here’s how the language splits colours:

You could approximate it in English as:

• vapa - white, light [anything]
• zoozu - black, dark but not reddish, purple
• serandu - more saturated reds and reddish oranges
• dumbu - more saturated yellows, yellowish oranges, and extra saturated greens
• burou - your run-of-the-mill green and blue

Now, check the colours that I posted with Russian terms. Just like English doesn’t care about the difference between two of them, Himba doesn’t care about the third one either.

There’s also an interesting case with Japanese, that recently split 青/ao and 緑/midori as their own colours. Not too much time ago, Japanese did the same as Himba, and referred to the colour of grass and the sky by 青/ao; however people started referring to the yellower hues of that range by 緑/midori (lit. “verdure”), until it became its own basic word.

That’s actually problematic for traffic legislation, because it requires the colour of traffic lights to be 青/ao, and people nowadays don’t associate it with green. Resulting into…

…cyan lights. They’re blue enough to fit the letter of the legislation, but green enough to be recognised as green lights!

Now, regarding specific excerpts from the text:

Gladstone noticed Homer described the sea color as “wine-dark,” not “deep blue,” sparking his inquiry.

Gladstone (and sadly, many people handling ancient texts) likely had the same poetic sensibility as a potato.

The relevant expression here is ⟨οἶνοψ πόντος⟩ oînops póntos; it’s roughly translatable as “wine-faced sea”, or “sea that looks like wine”. Here’s an example of that in Odyssey, Liber VII, 250-ish:

[245] ἔνθα μὲν Ἄτλαντος θυγάτηρ, δολόεσσα Καλυψὼ 
ναίει ἐυπλόκαμος, δεινὴ θεός: οὐδέ τις αὐτῇ
μίσγεται οὔτε θεῶν οὔτε θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων.
ἀλλ᾽ ἐμὲ τὸν δύστηνον ἐφέστιον ἤγαγε δαίμων
οἶον, ἐπεί μοι νῆα θοὴν ἀργῆτι κεραυνῷ
[250] Ζεὺς ἔλσας ἐκέασσε μέσῳ ἐνὶ **οἴνοπι πόντῳ**

Murray translated that as “wine-dark”:

[245] Therein dwells the fair-tressed daughter of Atlas, guileful Calypso, a dread goddess, and with her no one either of gods or mortals hath aught to do; but me in my wretchedness did fate bring to her hearth alone, for Zeus had smitten my swift ship with his bright thunderbolt, [250] and had shattered it in the midst of the wine-dark sea.

Why would be Homer referring to the colour of the sea? It’s contextually irrelevant here. However, once you replace that “wine-dark” from the translation with “inebriating”, suddenly the expression makes sense, Homer is comparing the sea with booze! He’s saying that it’s dangerous to enjoy that sea, that you should be extra careful with it. (You could also say that the sea is itself drunk - violent and erratic).

The ancient Egyptians were the first to adopt a word to describe the color blue.

I’m really unsure if this is the exception that proves the rule (since the Egyptians synthesised a blue dye from copper silicate) or simply incorrect.

At least accordingly to Wiktionary, the word ḫsbḏ* refers to lapis lazuli (the mineral) and its usage for colour is non-basic (a hue). The actual primary word for what English calls “blue” is shared with what English calls “green”, and it would be wꜣḏ*.

*in hieroglyphs:

So Mint can perform the same role as a tablet

Yeah, you could argue that Mint allows that laptop to perform the same role as a tablet; it’s at most used for simple image edition, web browsing, and listening music through the SMB network (from my computer because hers has practically no storage).

Without a Linux distro the other options would be to “perform” as electronic junk or virus breeding grounds.

I keep seeing these posts and comments, trying to convince people This Is The Year of The Linux Desktop.

Drop off the strawman. That is neither what the author of the article said, nor what I did.

The rest of your comment boils down to you noisily beating that strawman to death, and can be safely disregarded as such.

To reinforce the author’s views, with my own experience:

I’ve been using Linux for, like, 20 years? Back then I dual booted it with XP, and my first two distros (Mandriva and Kurumin) are already discontinued. I remember LILO.

So I’m probably a programmer, right? …nope, my grads are Linguistics and Chemistry. And Linux didn’t make me into a programmer either, the most I can do is to pull out a 10 lines bash script with some websearch.

So this “Linux is for programmers” myth didn’t even apply to the 00s, let alone now.

You need a minimum of 8GB of RAM and a fairly recent CPU to do any kind of professional work at a non-jittery pace [in Windows]. This means that if you want to have a secondary PC or laptop, you’ll need to pay a premium for that too.

Relevant detail: Microsoft’s obsession with generative models, plus its eagerness to shove wares down your throat, will likely make this worse. (You don’t use Copilot? Or Recall? Who cares? It’ll be installed by default, running in the background~)

Linux, on the other hand, can easily boot up on a 10-year-old laptop with just 2GB of RAM, and work fine. This makes it the perfect OS for my secondary devices that I can carry places without worrying about accidental damage.

My mum is using a fossil like this. It has 4GB or so; it’s a bit slow but it works with an updated Mint, even if it wouldn’t with Windows 10.

Sure, you can delay an update [in Windows], but it’s just for five weeks.

I gave the link a check… what a pain. For reference, in Linux Mint, MATE edition:

That’s it. You click a button. It’s probably the same deal in other desktop environments.

By far, my biggest issue with flags in r/place and Canvas does not apply to a (like you said) 20x30. It’s stuff like this:

\

People covering and fiercely defending huge chunks of the canvas, for something that is completely unoriginal, repetitive, and boring. And yet it still gets a pass - unlike, say, The Void; everyone fights The Void.

Another additional issue that I have has to do with identity: the reason why we [people in general] “default” to a national flag, for identity, is because our media and governments bomb us with a nationalistic discourse, seeking to forge an identity that “happens” to coincide with that they want.

But, once we go past that, there are far more meaningful things out there to identify ourselves with - such as our cultures and communities, and most of the time they don’t coincide with the countries and their flags.

As such I don’t think that this is a discourse that we should promote, through the usage of the symbols associated with that discourse.

Maybe where you’re from it’s easy to separate your government flag as its own symbol that doesn’t represent real people

I think that this is more of a matter of worldview than where we’re from, given that some people in Brazil spam flags in a way that strongly resembles how they do it in USA.

I get what you’re saying; Lemmy is not Reddit, Lemmy is Lemmy.

However, I think that this mostly misses the point. The issue is not to copy neutral-to-positive features from Reddit; it’s to copy the negatives, or to fail to implement other positives.

I’m already preparing some simple art to do in the canvas. Nothing fancy, just a few (30px)² pictures. And if people make some Tux or distro logos I’m happy to help, too.

I just wish that people didn’t waste SO MUCH FUCKING SPACE with government flags in this sort of online game.

Yeah, it’s actually good. People use it even for trivial stuff nowadays; and you don’t need a pix key to send stuff, only to receive it. (And as long as your bank allows you to check the account through an actual computer, you don’t need a cell phone either.)

Perhaps the only flaw is shared with the Asian QR codes - scams are a bit of a problem, you could for example tell someone that the transaction will be a value and generate a code demanding a bigger one. But I feel like that’s less of an issue with the system and more with the customer, given that the system shows you who you’re sending money to, and how much, before confirmation.

I’m not informed on Tikkie and Klarna, besides one being Dutch and another Swedish. How do they work?

Brazil ended with a third system: Pix. It boils down to the following:

• The money receiver sends the payer either a “key” or a QR code.
• The payer opens their bank’s app and use it to either paste the key or scan the QR code.
• The payer defines the value, if the code is not dynamic (more on that later).
• Confirm the transaction. An electronic voucher is emitted.

The “key” in question can be your cell phone number, physical/juridical person registre number, e-mail, or even a random number. You can have up to five of them.

Regarding dynamic codes, it’s also possible to generate a key or QR code that applies to a single transaction. Then the value to be paid is already included.

Frankly the system surprised me. It’s actually good and practical; and that’s coming from someone who’s highly suspicious of anything coming from the federal government, and who hates cell phones. [insert old man screaming at clouds meme]