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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 19th, 2023

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  • Debian is generalist, with it’s strongest strength being it’s stability. That said, I’m not sure who I would recommend it to. Zorin or Mint would be better for new linux users, and Debian’s slower updates mean it will fall behind other distros for anyone wanting games. Also the rise of immutable distros means that it’s stability isn’t as much of a selling point as it used to be, if I’m worried about a kid messing up the install an immutable distro would be better than Debian probably.

    I have a lot of respect for Debian, but the main people I hear using it these days are more experienced linux users who want to settle down (done distro hopping) and just have a reliable computer for non-gaming stuff.



  • There’s multiple parts.

    First there was a massive pandemic relief fraud. A bunch of people exploited programs meant to feed kids, because those programs had relaxed checks during the pandemic. The main organization here is “Feeding our Future” who helped various individuals fraud the government.

    Basically they claimed to be serving millions of meals to kids, with fabricated invoices/etc.

    In exchange for Feeding our Future helping individuals with the fraud, they required kickbacks from the individuals. A lot of this money was used to buy real estate, especially in Kenya and Turkey (which makes it very difficult to recover the money).

    Not everyone involved was Somali, be the majority of the people charged were part of the same Somali-american community.

    Recently it was found out that some similar fraud was happening with Somali run daycares. They were getting millions in subsides, while having few to no children present at the daycares.

    Tim Walz and the Department of Education are being criticized over various parts of how they handled it. The Minnesota Department of Education had warnings about the fraud as early as 2018, but ignored them. Later on they asked the Feeding Our Future to investigate themselves for fraud (which obviously didn’t work).

    When the pandemic meal fraud was discovered in 2021, the MDE decided to continue payments to the fraudsters because they claimed they didn’t have enough evidence to win in court. Tim Walz later claimed a judge forced them to continue payments, but the Judge released a statement saying that was a lie. There’s some speculation that Walz was originally trying to avoid it going to court to avoid it being a big scandal.

    Finally when Walz did announce the fraud, he framed it as a success that they caught these people, even though it had gone on for years and huge amounts of money had already been stolen.



  • Wine is a compatibility layer, it works as a translator to let windows programs run on linux. You can think of it like having a translator who allows two people with different languages to talk to each other and work together.

    WinBoat is completely different, this is actually running full windows in the background, and then only displaying the apps you want from it. There will be significantly more system resources used, and you won’t be able to run windows apps until the windows VM has started in the background, adding a startup delay. However the advantage is that it will support more software than wine does, with fewer issues.

    Wine will always be the better option when it works, but for stuff that doesn’t work this is a decent option.



  • WinBoat or WinApps might work for you. They’re very similar in function afaik, they both run a windows vm hidden in the background and integrate the windows apps alongside your Linux programs. It’s supposed to be fully compatible with all windows program except kernel anti-cheat.

    WinBoat is newer and I think offers a nicer interface and a lot easier setup, WinApps is older so may be easier to find support/documentation on. I’d probably recommend starting with WinBoat first.


  • They were considering blocking Google from paying Mozilla to be the default search engine, which is almost all of Firefox 's revenue.

    It kinda makes sense, chome being the dominant browser gives Google a search advantage, and the other alternatives (like safari and Firefox) both make deals with Google to have it be the default as well.

    But removing those deals would be more disastrous for Firefox than for Google.





  • Definitely agree. Most printers are sold at a loss with the plan to milk the buyer long term through ink and other services. EcoTank printers are more expensive, but Epson makes their money at the time of purchase. The ink is extremely cheap, and there’s no way for them to tell if you use 3rd party ink at all. We’ve been printing out textbooks with ours, which would be financially disastrous with a traditional inkjet printer.

    Overall I’ve bought two, one for home and one for the office at work. The cheaper ink has paid for the printers several times over now.



  • I wasn’t sure from the title if it was “Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than [the US adults] are.” or “Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than [the LLMs actually] are.” It’s the former, although you could probably argue the latter is true too.

    Either way, I’m not surprised that people rate LLMs intelligence highly. They obviously have limited scope in what they can do, and hallucinating false info is a serious issue, but you can ask them a lot of questions that your typical person couldn’t answer and get a decent answer. I feel like they’re generally good at meeting what people’s expectations are of a “smart person”, even if they have major shortcomings in other areas.