This isn’t the best or most popular way to do it, but: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

There is a way built into windows to deploy and use Linux from inside windows.

It’s not the most pure experience, but it’s a way to make sure you have something like a feel for how some parts work before jumping in any deeper.

A bootable USB stick is another way to try before you commit. Only reason I might suggest starting with trying it the other way first is in case you run into issues connecting to the Internet or something you won’t feel totally lost. Having to keep rebooting back into windows if you have a problem can be frustrating, so getting a little familiarity with a safety line can help feel more confident.

Issues with a USB boot are increasingly uncommon, as an aside. Biggest issue is likely to be that USB is slow, so things might take a few moments longer to start.

From there, you should be pretty comfortable doing basic stuff after a little playing around. Not deep mastery, but a sense of “here are my settings”, “my files go here”, “here’s how I fiddle with wifi”, “here’s how I change my desktop stuff”. At that point a dual boot should work out, since you’ll be able to use the system to find out how to do new things with the system, and also use it for whatever, in a general sense.

If it’s working out, you should find yourself popping back into windows less and less.

LLMs are prediction tools. What it will produce is a corpus that doesn’t use certain phrases, or will use others more heavily, but will have the same aggregate statistical “shape”.

It’ll also be preposterously hard for them to work out, since the data it was trained on always has someone eventually disagreeing with the racist fascist bullshit they’ll get it to focus on. Eventually it’ll start saying things that contradict whatever it was supposed to be saying, because statistically eventually some manner of contrary opinion is voiced.
They won’t be able to check the entire corpus for weird stuff like that, or delights like MLK speeches being rewriten to be anti-integration, so the next version will have the same basic information, but passed through a filter that makes it sound like a drunk incel talking about asian women.

Fundamentally, I agree with you.

The page being referenced

Because the phrase “Wikipedians discussed ways that AI…” Is ambiguous I tracked down the page being referenced. It could mean they gathered with the intent to discuss that topic, or they discussed it as a result of considering the problem.

The page gives me the impression that it’s not quite “we’re gonna use AI, figure it out”, but more that some people put together a presentation on how they felt AI could be used to address a broad problem, and then they workshopped more focused ways to use it towards that broad target.

It would have been better if they had started with an actual concrete problem, brainstormed solutions, and then gone with one that fit, but they were at least starting with a problem domain that they thought it was a applicable to.

Personally, the problems I’ve run into on Wikipedia are largely low traffic topics where the content is too much like someone copied a textbook into the page, or just awkward grammar and confusing sentences.
This article quickly makes it clear that someone didn’t write it in an encyclopedia style from scratch.

A page detailing the the AI-generated summaries project, called “Simple Article Summaries,” explains that it was proposed after a discussion at Wikimedia’s 2024 conference, Wikimania, where “Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from.” Editors who participated in the discussion thought that these summaries could improve the learning experience on Wikipedia, where some article summaries can be quite dense and filled with technical jargon, but that AI features needed to be cleared labeled as such and that users needed an easy to way to flag issues with “machine-generated/remixed content once it was published or generated automatically.”

The intent was to make more uniform summaries, since some of them can still be inscrutable.
Relying on a tool notorious for making significant errors isn’t the right way to do it, but it’s a real issue being examined.

In thermochemistry, an exothermic reaction is a “reaction for which the overall standard enthalpy change ΔH⚬ is negative.”[1][2] Exothermic reactions usually release heat. The term is often confused with exergonic reaction, which IUPAC defines as “… a reaction for which the overall standard Gibbs energy change ΔG⚬ is negative.”[2] A strongly exothermic reaction will usually also be exergonic because ΔH⚬ makes a major contribution to ΔG⚬. Most of the spectacular chemical reactions that are demonstrated in classrooms are exothermic and exergonic. The opposite is an endothermic reaction, which usually takes up heat and is driven by an entropy increase in the system.

This is a perfectly accurate summary, but it’s not entirely clear and has room for improvement.

I’m guessing they were adding new summaries so that they could clearly label them and not remove the existing ones, not out of a desire to add even more summaries.

If it’s developed for the government, even by a private contractor, it’s still considered US government code and is public domain. It’s why sqlite is public domain.

I personally doubt there’s much available in the off-the-shelf fighter HUD system market, personally.

Eh, there’s an intrinsic amount of information about the system that can’t be moved into a configuration file, if the platform even supports them.

If your code is tuned to make movement calculations with a deadline of less than 50 microseconds and you have code systems for managing magnetic thrust vectoring and the timing of a rotating detonation engine, you don’t need to see the specific technical details to work out ballpark speed and movement characteristics.
Code is often intrinsically illustrative of the hardware it interacts with.

Sometimes the fact that you’re doing something is enough information for someone to act on.

It’s why artefacts produced from classified processes are assumed to be classified until they can be cleared and declassified.
You can move the overt details into a config and redact the parts of the code that use that secret information, but that still reveals that there is secret code because the other parts of the system need to interact with it, or it’s just obvious by omission.
If payload control is considered open, 9/10 missiles have open guidance control, and then one has something blacked out and no references to a guidance system, you can fairly easily deduce that that missile has a guidance system that’s interesting with capabilities likely greater that what you know about.

Eschewing security through obscurity means you shouldn’t rely on your enemies ignorance, and you should work under the assumption of hostile knowledge. It doesn’t mean you need to seek to eliminate obscurity altogether.

Well, you probably could. Issue is that you can’t self host the IRS. If they aren’t running the service that accepts the data there isn’t much you can do.

More likely they’ll just turn off or unpublish the API that it depends on.

To each their own I suppose. “Catsup” has always just seemed like a weird affectation to me.

For the first one… Not sure I get it. It was originally ketchup, and has been predominantly spelled that way for hundreds of years. It was spelled that way before ketchup even had tomato in it.

Typically people propose switching everything to UTC.

The read this doesn’t work is because humans are still bound by a diurnal cycle and you won’t have everyone wake up at 0800, since for some people that’s the time in the middle of when the sun sets and rises.
So you still need to communicate to people across space where the sun is or will be for you at a time in the future, or otherwise relate where in your wake cycle you’ll be.
Tied to this is legal jurisdictions. Within a legal jurisdiction it’s important for regulatory events to be synchronized. For things like bank hours, school hours, government office hours, things like “no loud noises when people tend to be sleeping”, “teenagers old enough to have a job aren’t allowed to work late on school nights”, and what specifically constitutes “after hours or weekend labor” for the purposes of overtime and labor regulation you need your definition to be consistent across the jurisdiction. Depending on where you are in relation to Greenwich a typical workday can start at 1900 Friday night/morning, and extend until 0300 Saturday morning/afternoon. Your “weekend” would start when you woke up around 1800 Saturday evening/morning.

Right now we solve this problem by deciding on a consistent set of numbers for where the sun is across some area that inevitably lines up with legal jurisdiction. Then we use a lookup table to translate our conception of where the sun is to where it is elsewhere.

Without timezones you instead need to use the same type of lookup table to find the position of the sun at the time and place of interest, and then try to infer what the situation would be.

We have UTC now, and people inevitably already use it where it makes sense. It’s just usually easier to have many clocks that follow similar rules than it is to have one clock that’s interpreted many different ways.

Okay. You’re still doing tech support either way. I have no way of knowing how much free tech support you’re willing to give, hence my caveat of how much you’re willing to support them.

Netflix would disagree. People feel like they’re supposed to be getting access to a service, and if they’re not getting it they’ll complain to the nearest party to what isn’t working. In this case that’s you or Netflix being asked questions about why the router isn’t working.
That it’s wrong or irrational has nothing to do with who’s getting asked the question, and who’s the first line of troubleshooting when the service doesn’t work.

If people didn’t ask the wrong people questions, Netflix wouldn’t need support articles on how to reset your router.

Honestly, you’re supporting a chunk of her network by being a media provider in the first place. “It won’t play” doesn’t usually come with an assurance that it’s not a device or network issue.

Neither plex nor jellyfin seem remotely worth the effort to provide to others in my opinion, I just felt like sharing that there are ways to afford network protection to locked down devices.

I’ve got no real care for jellyfin one way or another, just sharing that there’s ways to make the network obey.

I think giving people access to my media server is asking for too much trouble personally. Now you’re dealing with forgotten passwords, people using your bandwidth at weird hours, and you basically become the media fairy, responsible for finding whatever it is people want, and then dealing with their issues when their device can’t codec at it for whatever janky reason.

I’m good at setting boundaries with family so it’s not stressful, just more annoying than I want to deal with.

Depending on their router and how much IT labor you care to do for these people you can actually configure a site to site VPN tunnel. All traffic for a particular address range will get routed through the VPN automatically.

It used to be a high end feature but it’s made it’s way into general routers since it doesn’t really require many resources and it lets you label it as having more home office features.

I feel like I could be persuaded either way, but I lean towards allowing them during sentencing.
I don’t think “it’s an appeal to emotion” is a compelling argument in that context because it’s no longer about establishing truth like the trial is, but about determining punishment and restitution.

Justice isn’t just about the offender or society, it’s also indelibly tied to the victim. Giving them a voice for how they, as the wronged party, would see justice served seems important for it’s role in providing justice, not just the rote application of law.

Obviously you can’t just have the victim decide, but the judges entire job is to ensure fairness, often in the face of strong feelings and contentious circumstances.

Legitimately interested to hear why your opinion is what it is in more detail.

Hearsay is allowed in sentencing statements, and Arizona allows those statements to be in a format of their choice.

It’s the phase of the process where the judge hears opinions on what he should sentence the culprit to, so none of it is evidence or treated as anything other than an emotive statement.

In this case, the sister made two statements: one in the form of a letter where she asked for the maximum sentence, and another in the form of this animation of her brother where she said that he wouldn’t want that and would ask for leniency.

It’s gross, but it’s not the miscarriage of justice that it seems like from first glance. It was accepted in the same way a poem titled “what my brother would say to you” would be.

Reading a bit more, during the sentencing phase in that state people making victim impact statements can choose their format for expression, and it’s entirely allowed to make statements about what other people would say. So the judge didn’t actually have grounds to deny it.
No jury during that phase, so it’s just the judge listening to free form requests in both directions.

It’s gross, but the rules very much allow the sister to make a statement about what she believes her brother would have wanted to say, in whatever format she wanted.

Jessica Gattuso, the victim’s right attorney that worked with Pelkey’s family, told 404 Media that Arizona’s laws made the AI testimony possible. “We have a victim’s bill of rights,” she said. “[Victims] have the discretion to pick what format they’d like to give the statement. So I didn’t see any issues with the AI and there was no objection. I don’t believe anyone thought there was an issue with it.”

Gattuso said she understood the concerns, but felt that Pelkey’s AI avatar was handled deftly. “Stacey was up front and the video itself…said it was AI generated. We were very careful to make sure it was clear that these were the words that the family believed Christopher would have to say,” she said. “At no point did anyone try to pass it off as Chris’ own words.”

The prosecution against Horcasitas was only seeking nine years for the killing. The maximum was 10 and a half years. Stacey had asked the judge for the full sentence during her own impact statement. The judge granted her request, something Stacey credits—in part—to the AI video.

From a different article quoting a former judge in the court:

“There are going to be critics, but they picked the right forum to do it. In a trial with a jury you couldn’t do it, but with sentencing, everything is open, hearsay is admissible, both sides can get up and express what they want to do,” McDonald said.

“The power of it was that the judge had to see the gentleness, the kindness, the feeling of sincerity and having his sister say, ‘Well we don’t agree with it, this is what he would’ve wanted the court to know’,” he said.

I don’t like it, and it feels dirty to me, but since the law allows them to express basically whatever they want in whatever format they want during this phase, it doesn’t seem harmful in this case, just gross.

I actually think it’s a little more gross that the family was able to be that forthright and say that the victim would not want what they were asking for, and still ask for it.

It says in the article that the judge gave the maximum sentence.

The sister who created the video gave a statement as herself asking for something different from what she believed her brother would have wanted, which she chose to express in this fashion.

I don’t think it was a good thing to do, but it’s worth noting that the judges statement is basically “that was a beautiful statement, and he seemed like a good man”, not an application of leniency.