InfoSec Person | Alt-Account#2

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 28th, 2023

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  • Also fuck off with this attitude man. I’m not attacking you, learn how to speak to people.

    Sorry. I get quite triggered when people add pseudo-labels to distributions, mainly Debian being outdated. Looking back, I was quite harsh and I apologize.

    However, you’re actively spreading the false narrative by saying Debian’s not good for “general computing” - this is what triggers me. A distribution is nothing but its package manager and some defaults. Some have different defaults and package managers.

    Older packages can be difficult for new users who want a computer to “just work”.

    The only place this makes a difference is with the latest hardware which OP does not have. I have more recent hardware than OP and Debian 13 + KDE Plasma 6 works out of the box.

    It’s fine for general computing, but not great.

    Again, I really hate this sentence. I will tone down the rudeness this time in explaining why. I have daily-driven Debian for years with AMD + Intel CPUs, Nvidia GPUs (1070, 3060) with use cases ranging wildly through the years. I cannot fathom what kind of general computing cannot work. If you say specialized computing, I would still disagree as there are always ways to make things work.

    Just off the top of my head where things are iffy with Debian: bat cannot be installed via a package manager, but not on most distros anyway. There’s a deb package though which works. Similar with dust, although more distros have it in their package manager.

    Debian, like you said, is rock-solid stable. In my many years of developing code, university courses, daily work (research), maintaining servers with wildly different usages, Debian’s “outdated” packages have only let me down once and that was with a LaTeX package which could be installed via ctan anyway.


  • A Basil Plant@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.worldHelp me ditch windows?
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    18 days ago

    Debian is rock-solid stable, but lacks newer packages. It’s great for a server, not so great for […] general computing.

    What the fuck??? I’ve been daily driving Debian for years now on my personal laptops, desktop, mini PC, and mutliple servers. I’ve found and reported Linux kernel vulnerabilities on my trusty Debian systems.

    What do you mean it’s not so great for general computing? What can’t you do with Debian computing-wise that you can do with other distros? The only issues I’ve ever had was with some LaTeX packages being older versions. You just get that from CTAN and install that manually.

    This is such a ridiculous comment. What do you do on a server that’s not general computing? You’re doing a subset of general computing??? How does a fucking distro actively prevent you from doing general computing???



  • Installed it on my desktop and the process was painful (my fault) because I ran out of space on my boot ssd (128Gigs) while doing the upgrades.

    I don’t really have much on my boot ssd and all my important data is on my laptop, backed up to my servers, or on my desktop’s HDD. I did a fresh install with a kde live usb stick and that went smooth, until something with the nvidia drivers prevented the display server from launching.

    Thankfully, I’ve been through this charade multiple times in the past, and I’m significantly more experienced in dealing with the kernel these days. Adding the nvidia-drm modeset kernel command line launch param worked, and my system is running deb 13. I’m so happy I have KDE plasma 6.

    Overall, a one hour process. Could have been faster if I had free space on my system lol. I’m a bit more reluctant to upgrade my servers at the moment, but I may in the upcoming months.

    One minor thing: they updated their apt sources (https://repolib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/deb822-format.html, https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/498021/deb822-style-etc-apt-sources-list#583015). Idk why, but the installer didn’t create & populate the .sources file. After a quick check of the man page, I created the file and it worked.





  • That seems to be the consensus online. But thanks for that tidbit! It feels even more bizarre now knowing that.

    I wonder why a handful of people think the way I presented in the post. Perhaps American/British influences in certain places? Reading books by british authors and books by american authors at the same time? Feels unlikely.




  • My bachelor’s thesis was about comment amplifying/deamplifying on reddit using Graph Neural Networks (PyTorch-Geometric).

    Essentially: there used to be commenters who would constantly agree / disagree with a particular sentiment, and these would be used to amplify / deamplify opinions, respectively. Using a set of metrics [1], I fed it into a Graph Neural Network (GNN) and it produced reasonably well results back in the day. Since Pytorch-Geomteric has been out, there’s been numerous advancements to GNN research as a whole, and I suspect it would be significantly more developed now.

    Since upvotes are known to the instance administrator (for brevity, not getting into the fediverse aspect of this), and since their email addresses are known too, I believe that these two pieces of information can be accounted for in order to detect patterns. This would lead to much better results.

    In the beginning, such a solution needs to look for patterns first and these patterns need to be flagged as true (bots) or false (users) by the instance administrator - maybe 200 manual flaggings. Afterwards, the GNN could possibly decide to act based on confidence of previous pattern matching.

    This may be an interesting bachelor’s / master’s thesis (or a side project in general) for anyone looking for one. Of course, there’s a lot of nuances I’ve missed. Plus, I haven’t kept up with GNNs in a very long time, so that should be accounted for too.

    Edit: perhaps IP addresses could be used too? That’s one way reddit would detect vote manipulation.

    [1] account age, comment time, comment time difference with parent comment, sentiment agreement/disgareement with parent commenters, number of child comments after an hour, post karma, comment karma, number of comments, number of subreddits participated in, number of posts, and more I can’t remember.






  • A Basil Plant@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml33 years ago...
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    1 year ago

    https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10754

    MINIX originally was developed in 1987 by Andrew S. Tanenbaum as a teaching tool for his textbook Operating Systems Design and Implementation. Today, it is a text-oriented operating system with a kernel of less than 6,000 lines of code. MINIX’s largest claim to fame is as an example of a microkernel, in which each device driver runs as an isolated user-mode process—a structure that not only increases security but also reliability, because it means a bug in a driver cannot bring down the entire system.

    In its heyday during the early 1990s, MINIX was popular among hobbyists and developers because of its inexpensive proprietary license. However, by the time it was licensed under a BSD-style license in 2000, MINIX had been overshadowed by other free-licensed operating systems.

    Today, MINIX is best known as a footnote in GNU/Linux history. It inspired Linus Torvalds to develop Linux, and some of his early work was written on MINIX. Probably too, Torvalds’ early decision to support the MINIX filesystem is responsible for the Linux kernel’s support of almost every filesystem imaginable.

    Later, Torvalds and Tanenbaum had a frank e-mail debate about the relative merits of macrokernels (sic) and microkernels. This early history resurfaced in 2004 when Kenneth Brown of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution prepared a book alleging that Torvalds borrowed code from MINIX—a charge that Tanenbaum, among others, so comprehensively debunked, and the book was never actually published (see Resources).

    See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum–Torvalds_debate