No need to use a whole distribution with 1000 other poor decisions made for you.

Also beside that they use ancient package alongside Archlinux. One of those being Chromium. It also used to use Chaotic AUR but now they just automate packages (every 6 hours) in their own repository without any maintainer intervention so it's still open for supply chain issues.

Just use a git repo and the templating function if you have secrets. If you want the entire thing to be secret then use a private repo, or self host it.

Ask yourself, would you like to receive a christmas or birthday card with a personalized message or something produced you know was 100% produced by AI bot - even better when it has a hallucination in there.

I do use AI myself and don't believe its worthless, but I believe its only useful when you ask it fairly specific questions, with data it can consume publicly like "whats the rules for XYZ in this standard and if i do this problem like this in this way would that comply with those rules?" Type of thing.

I've also found it useful for programming (but often does miss things or do things a long-handed way) you have to be very careful about the results and not simply accept it because it appears to work, so it still requires a human to have a brain.

I'm not at all surprised that consumers dislike AI in this way because of the way its used, eg to replace help desk support, and create further distance between consumers and the companies they do business with. That's generally 100% how those companies use it because that is how AI companies have marketed it to executives.

Only now are we seeing posts from those people saying "waahh tokens cost too much how long till we can build our own AI". Which is another point in itself business workflows should be resilient and not heavily dependent on the cost of openai or anthropic tokens to be competitive. If these two companies can simply turn up the money knob and make your business have a huge risk then that's bad.

Also 100% we need to have sovereignty. We cannot depend on a single country to provide AI infrastructure. They can just shut it off whenever they feel like it. Maybe this week it's Fable/Mythos, and next week it's an entire country because Donald is unhappy and wouldn't "make a deal" on some thing he wants.

Even large companies have adopted this crap and you don't know whether there's any digital signing going on or whether they're downright stealing anything you have of value.

It's not difficult to generate a rpm, deb, tgz and relevant detatched .asc PGP signature or if you hate PGP use openssh signatures or something.

Now it just costs them the data and development cost to maintain. Any remaining problems they'll throw some crappy AI moderator at to fix.

Also the thing about "surreptitiously giving melinda antibiotics" weren't actually written by Bill and he has since denied it.

> It’s unclear who the Boris referenced in the emails is, or if the messages were ever sent to anyone. Only Epstein is listed in the to and from fields.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/871879/bill-gates-epstein-file...

So the emails were some emails in Epstein's draft folder he never sent to anyone. This is a dude who peddled in dirt and leverage against anyone and anything, probably how he got so wealthy and why he had his island parties in the first place. There is a reason why in the Kevin Rudd related mentions he is described as a "odious character in the extreme" basically stay clear from him.

That's why I've been thinking of paring my desktop-replacement 16" laptop with a Pocket Reform or something like that.

My HTPC is an old ATX desktop computer on its side in a Phanteks P400A case. On it's side it just looks like a black speaker grill front to back cooling it has three Noctua NF-A12x25 fans that are barely even visible.

The good thing about using standard parts is if the GPU died I could buy another cheap one to replace it.

But I guess that case is a cool idea if you didn't have those things.

I tend to upgrade my laptop every 6-8 years and by then there is nothing to upgrade well, frankly the technology has moved on, new PCIe standards DDR screen tech etc. One of the reasons I did not buy a framework (was very close to it) is the screen. I value having a decent screen attached to my laptop. I think some of these newer laptops with Tandem OLEDs will be a real improvement over what was out there previously.

I thought about the port configuration as well, and that's all cool you can have 6 ports that can be anything you like, but really they are just two USB controllers controlling all that. One on either side. What would be my ultimate port configuration? Well probably like some USB-C and an audio port and a HDMI port. The network adapter sticks out so that's going to be super annoying. The newer Lenovo and Dell laptops have replaceable USB ports, which means if I wear one out I can replace it easily.

What I also realized is you can do some really cool things like PCIe passthrough with Thunderbolt that of course you don't get on a Framework. Want to have an awesome GPU? Well you can use an eGPU or perhaps an flash a firmware to your NVMe (you can't do that over USB), but you can over PCIe passthrough where the device shows up as /dev/nvme0. I've always had problems with disks over USB, sometimes they'll drop from the system, and things like eSATAp were always more reliable for 3.5" disks, but that's only available on desktop with a special bracket.

One of the other reasons I ended up not going for the Framework was that it uses Insyde BIOS and they were a bit slow on their Logofail firmware updates. Prompt security updates are important to me. None of them also have vPro or Ryzen Pro models, (so no encrypted RAM) https://fwupd.github.io/libfwupdplugin/hsi.html#dram-memory-... if you want to achieve higher HSI 4 levels. https://fwupd.github.io/libfwupdplugin/hsi.html#hsi4-secure-...

In the end I'm just going to spend a little on a T1g Gen8 probably. I can upgrade the RAM in that because it's CAMM2. It may cost a little more than the framework but on special I should be able to get it for a nice price.

If I had less money I'd probably just go for previous gen.

The solution to not being poor is being rich. You could apply that logic to a lot of things. Have this thing instead of that thing. Using your example above of "differential privacy scanning"

Differential privacy is a property of a dataset meaning you can’t tell an individual was part of a dataset. If it’s traceable back to the individual device it’s not differentially private.

I think at this point you're just trying to say "don't have this thing have that thing instead" as a response to anything.