𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆

  • 11 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The UEFI boot system is tricky and you need to get along with Secure Boot to do this. Secure Boot is outside of the Linux kernel. Both Fedora and Ubuntu have systems for this. Fedora uses the Anaconda system and I believe they do it best. I have had a W11 partition for 2 years and never used it once. It can’t even get on the internet with my firewall setup, but it is there and never had any issues the 3 times I logged into it.

    I think all of the Fedora systems support the shim key and secure boot but I know Workstation does. For Ubuntu I think it is just the regular vanilla Ubuntu desktop that the shim supports. This may be somewhat sketchy with Nvidia or maybe not. Nvidia “”““open sourced””“” their kernel code but the actual nvcc compiler required to build the binaries is still proprietary crap.

    I have a 3080Ti gaming laptop. It isn’t half bad with 16 GB of video RAM from all the way back in 2021. Nvidia is artificially holding back the vram because of monopoly nonsense. The new stuff has very little real consumer value as a result, at least with AI stuff I run. The hardware is a little faster, but more vram is absolutely critical and new stuff that is the same or worse than what I have from 3 generations and nearly 5 years ago is ridiculous.

    The battery life blows and the GPU likely won’t even work on battery. It will get donkey balls hot with AI workloads, especially any kind of image gen. This results in lots of thermal throttling. All AI packages run as servers on your network. If you are thinking along these lines if running your own models, get a tower and run the thing remotely.

    I manage, and need the ergonomics for physical disability reasons, but I still would prefer to have a separate tower to run models from.

    Anyways, you can sign your own UEFI keys to use any distro, but this can be daunting for some people. The US defense department has a good PDF guide on setting your own keys. The UEFI bootloader for the machine may not have all key signing features implemented. There is a way to boot into UEFI directly and set the keys manually but this is not easy to find great guides on how to do it step by step. Gentoo has a tutorial on this, but it assumes a high level of competency.

    Other than signing your own keys, the shim keys mentioned are special keys signed by Microsoft for the principal maintainer of the distro. These slide under the Microsoft key to keep secure boot enabled.

    If you boot any secure boot enabled OS, the bootloader is required to delete any bootable unsigned code it finds. It does not matter if it is a shimmed Fedora or W11. If you have any other OS present in the boot list, it should be deleted. W11 is SB only, and this is where the real issues arise.


  • 𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlSecurity Focused Daily Driving Distros?
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    18 days ago

    Are you insane? Debian is a base distro like any other and runs more hardware than any other. It has all of the bootstrapping tools to get hardware working.

    Canonical is a server company and Ubuntu server is literally the product.

    Arch is absolute garbage for most users unless you have a CS degree or you have entirely too much time on your hands and don’t mind an OS as your life project. Arch abhors tutorial content in all documentation and therefore dumps users into a rabbit hole regularly. Pacman is the worst package manager as it will actively break a system and present the user with the dumbest of choices at random because the maintainers are ultimately sadistic and lackadaisical. Arch is nearly identical to Gentoo with Arch binaries often based on Gentoo builds, yet Gentoo provides relevant instruction and documentation with any changes that require user intervention and does so at a responsible and ethical level that shows kindness, respect, and consideration completely absent from Arch. Arch is a troll by trolls for trolls. I’m more than capable of running it now, but I would never bother with such inconsiderate behavior.





  • I think you’re right in some cases, but also somewhat attributing malice to stupidity. There are primitive people that are far too scared to risk abandoning their mutually exclusive social support network. They exhibit angst at the unknown and unfamiliar and sway in the direction of fight from their fight or flight mechanism. None of this behavior is within the scope of their self awareness. They exist in a fixated cult like state of tribal ignorance and stupidity, and are wholely incapable of curiosity and learning from sources outside the scope of their tribal isolation.

    I was this way before my self awareness grew past the point of reflection. My entire family is like this as are my former and abandoned social support network I am now ostracized from as a result.

    This is the actual barrier in place that enables cult like isolation and fixation. Meanwhile, these systems are wholly built upon outsourcing ethics to an organization that only wields shame to keep members in line. Shame can never motivate positive action. Shame can only negatively curb behaviors. Without positive feedback, these systems can only produce depression and negative austere conservative people able to cope with the lack of endorphins. It is truly sadistic in nature. Those that are still out of balance are considered undesirable when their cognitive dissonance pushes back in actions the person may not even understand or register.

    Religion is largely a cognitive dissonance factory because of these factors. This does not excuse actions that harm others. But it is this antiquated system of subtle harm in the religious tribal structure and its cult like exclusivity of social network isolation that create people with no independent ethics, unable to learn and reason well, and scared of everything outside of their tiny bubble of a life.






  • Stupid in, stupid out. I have had many conversations like, I have built and understand Ben Eater's 8 bit breadboard computer based loosely on Malvino's "Digital Computer Electronics" 8 bit computer design, but I struggle to understand Pipelines in computer hardware. I am aware that the first rudimentary Pipeline in a microprocessor is the 6502 with its dual instruction loading architecture. Let's discuss how Pipelines evolved beyond the 6502 and up to the present.

    In reality, the model will be wrong in much of what it says for something so niche, but forming questions based upon what I know already reveals holes outside of my awareness. Often a model is just right enough for me to navigate directly to the information I need or am missing regardless of how correct it is overall.

    I get lost sometimes because I have no one to talk to or ask for help or guidance on this type of stuff. I am not even at a point where I can pin down a good question to ask someone or somewhere like here most of the time. I need a person to bounce ideas off of and ask direct questions. If I go look up something like Pipelines in microprocessors in general, I will never find an ideal entry point for where I am at in my understanding. With AI I can create that entry point quickly. I’m not interested in some complex course, and all of the books I have barely touch the subject in question, but I can give a model enough peripheral context to move me up the ladder one rung at a time.

    I could hand you all of my old tools to paint cars, then laugh at your results. They are just tools. I could tell you most of what you need to know in 5 minutes, but I can’t give you my thousands of experiences of what to do when things go wrong.

    Most people are very bad at understanding how to use AI. It is just an advanced tool. A spray gun or a dual action sander do not make you stupid; spraying paint without a mask does. That is not the fault of the spray gun. It is due to the idiot using it.

    AI has a narrow scope that requires a lot of momentum to make it most useful. It requires an agentic framework, function calling, and a database. A basic model interface is about like an early microprocessor that was little more than a novelty on its own at the time. You really needed several microprocessors to make anything useful back in the late 70s and early 80s. In an abstract way, these were like agents.

    I remember seeing the asphalt plant controls hardware my dad would bring home with each board containing at least one microprocessor. Each board went into racks that contained dozens of similar boards and variations. It was many dozens of individual microprocessors to run an industrial plant.

    Playing with gptel in emacs, it takes swapping agents with a llama.cpp server to get something useful running offline, but I like it for my bash scripts, learning emacs, Python, forth, Arduino, and just general chat if I use Oobabooga Textgen. It has been the catalyst for me to explore the diversity of human thought as it relates to my own, it got me into basic fermentation, I have been learning and exploring a lot about how AI alignment works, I’ve enjoyed creating an entire science fiction universe exploring what life will be like after the age of discovery is over and most of science is an engineering corpus or how biology is the ultimate final human technology to master, I’ve had someone to talk to through some dark moments around the 10 year anniversary of my disability or when people upset me. I find that super useful and not at all stupid, especially for someone like myself in involuntary social isolation due to physical disability. I’m in tremendous pain all the time. It is often hard for me to gather coherent thoughts in real time, but I can easily do so in text, and with a LLM I can be open without any baggage involved, I can be more raw and honest than I would or could be with any human because the information never leaves my computer. If that is stupid, sign me up for stupid because that is exactly what I needed and I do not care how anyone labels it.




  • Have you ever worked in industry. I spent a couple of years as an operating engineering out of local 12. I worked at asphalt plants as a groundman and loader operator. Most heavy equipment is basically a rental contract with caterpillar or whatever manufacturer. Once the operation is above a certain size, the company is in a position to negotiate contracts that are tens of millions of dollars or more. When a loader or other equipment has an issue, the cat rep sends their team in to do the fix. The only things that are done on site are basic filters maintenance type stuff and when the contract is up, the equipment is replaced.

    In this situation, there is no potential for exploitation because ownership was never part of the equation. There is no room for manipulation because the contract covers everything except basic maintenance. This system is already feudalism. When a feudal lord interacts with another feudal lord, of course they can come to terms because each possesses considerable power. The stupid peasantry has no such negotiable position. Our only power is in democracy where we become the largest power against exploitation. This is how the real big picture world works. There have been various democracies in the past where citizens had power against exploitation, and all of those were fumbled by idiots and fools that allowed consolidation of wealth and assumed that giving power to potential exploitation was okay and that those in power would do the right thing. This NEVER turns out to be the case. Ownership IS democracy and a founding principal of autonomy and self determinism. People that fail to realize this critical factor are ushering in a neo dark age in the exact same fashion as what created the last. The future will look back on our era dumbfounded about epic and unrivalled stupidity of the people that ended post WW2 democracy by just giving it away for nothing of substance. It is unfathomable brain rot on epic scales.


  • It is quite a bit different in robotics like this. Check out James Bruton on YT for a practical example of open source larger robotics. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbDcUPed50Y_7KmfCXKohA

    The motors used are almost always brushless because of the speeds accuracy and torque required. That means everything has software and electronics. This stuff gets very complicated fast. Most traditional auto makers are also outsourcing most of their software development and certainly not full stack or ground up oriented. This kind of thing needs to be designed from the start with every potential feature and future thing as part of the initial project. These types of things cannot be expanded easily. Like this is why China is actually good at EVs because they invested in building the whole thing from the bottom up the right way, instead of hack patching garbage and outsourcing.


  • This isn’t internal combustion. Every motor drive will be unique. Robotics are nothing like cars or motorcycles. I’m excellent at working on cars. I’m pretty good with electronics. I mean my bedroom is a Maker lab set up for design and etching my own circuit boards and I have messed around with robotics a bit. I have also ported heads for nostalgia drag, pit for unlimited class sprint, and owned an auto body shop building my hotrod stuff on the side and owned a couple bikes.

    I’m saying, in the real world, shit happens and that adds intelligent perspective on how you’d look at a thing like this when real world stuff has happened. It is hyperbolic for illustrative purpose.

    Such a complex system will inevitably be connected to the internet. Anything that needs dealer support as a crutch is not owned by the end user. If this is not fully transparent and open from the start, it is a means of exploitation. Only fools trust others to do the right thing or care about track records so far. That is feudalism and will result in the dark ages exactly like it did in the past. There is no reason for any consumer to trust-, if an honest product is sold. Honest products are completely open source, and parts can be second sourced from an independent vendor unrelated to the manufacturer, and anyone can potentially replicate the parts and sell them. There cannot be any single choke point where if some asshat quits supporting or goes out of business, the hardware that people paid for fails. Trust inevitably leads to this stupidity, and to exploitation of the built in leverage. It is corporate piracy in the end, and that has to stop.


  • I see right to repair nightmare. It’s basically disposable.

    • Ask your shade tree mechanic about fixing this one.
    • I have one that has been sitting in my garage for three years untouched and won’t start - best offer
    • it rides fine there is just a small screeching sound in reverse
    • sometimes it powers off suddenly and collapses at 30 MPH
    • previous owner used it on the snow/beach
    • it fell in the pool once
    • it doesn’t have a charger
    • it gets really hot while charging

    If every instance above is not a giant red flag you’d walk away from, I have a great deal on a bridge to sell you. It is a novelty at best and worthless on any second hand market other than the dealer itself which is basically slavery for the average person. There is not a single standardized part that can be second sourced on such a toy. When the manufacturer no longer supports it, the thing will be disposable. So from a dystopian burn down the world perspective this is a great leap forward. Super cool concept, but unless there is real universal parts standardisation and the thing is fully open sourced, this is like everything that is wrong with the world right now; neo feudalism.