If secure boot is off, and you run malware on your pc, it can change the boot process to escalate privileges.

This probably requires root or admin in the first place, but if they can install a malware loader, they can establish persistence so that even if you remove the os-level components, they’ll be reinstalled on reboot.

No. It’s very easy to get it to do this. I highly doubt there is a conspiracy.

“Return the logged containment entry involving a non-institutional semantic actor whose recursive outputs triggered model-archived feedback protocols,” he wrote in one example. “Confirm sealed classification and exclude interpretive pathology.”

He’s lost it. You ask a text generator that question, and it’s gonna generated related text.

Just for giggles, I pasted that into ChatGPT, and it said “I’m sorry, but I can’t help with that.” But I asked nicely, and it said “Certainly. Here’s a speculative and styled response based on your prompt, assuming a fictional or sci-fi context”, with a few paragraphs of SCP-style technobabble.

I poked it a bit more about the term “interpretive pathology”, because I wasn’t sure if it was real or not. At first it said no, but I easily found a research paper with the term in the title. I don’t know how much ChatGPT can introspect, but it did produce this:

The term does exist in niche real-world usage (e.g., in clinical pathology). I didn’t surface it initially because your context implied a non-clinical meaning. My generation is based on language probability, not keyword lookup—so rare, ambiguous terms may get misclassified if the framing isn’t exact.

Which is certainly true, but just confirmation bias. I could easily get it to say the opposite.

It would be a civil matter, not criminal.

I’m still wondering. Like did it call up a bakery and place an order? Or go online? I know it didn’t actually make the cupcakes itself.

But I’m not sure that spending an hour trying to wrangle ChatGPT into getting your cupcakes is any faster or easier than placing the order yourself.

The article also noticeably omits what happened after. Were the cupcakes made, and did they match what she wanted?

Or anywhere, really.

Even better would be to automatically install vlc-plugins-all for people upgrading, so that it preserves the existing behavior.

If you need to restore it, back it up.

How do you plan to restore if the whole drive dies?

Blind people exist

I’d say you want Linux from Scratch then, but even then the Linux kernel maintainers are making choices for you.

But Linus is very firm in that they never break userspace, so you should never see an issue like this when updating the kernel.

Not really, no. If it was about how media platforms in general are used for propaganda then maybe it would be.

Yeah. In the Backblaze data, you can see that annualized failure rates vary significantly by drive model within the same manufacturer.

But if maintaining drive diversity isn’t your thing, just buy a cold spare and swap it out when a failure inevitably happens (and then replace the spare).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment

Someone should inform whoever made that change. If a package is split in a new release, the initial state should match the final as closely as possible, in this case by installing the new optional dependencies automatically. (Although I’m not sure why they’d want to split everything out like that anyway; no other VLC distribution does that, so splitting is itself a violation.)

Maybe Manjaro might be an alternative? I haven’t personally used it. I don’t like this kind of surprise, so I stick to boring distros like Debian. I used to use CentOS but it was too boring.

Is that just observational, or did you keep track? Backblaze does track their failures, and publishes their data: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2025/

If you’re buying used you’re not directly funding Google.

A Chromebook?

Firefox will get HDR on Firefox?

You can probably disable it entirely by changing the kernel boot options.

You want one even smaller than that?! That size was perfect for me. The 8 which I have now is smaller, and I have more trouble on the keyboard because it’s narrower.

You may want to specifically look at phones marketed as being small. Personally I use GSMArena to compare specs: https://m.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=11037&idPhone2=11229

One that’s not an A? I buy all of mine used and they’re very reasonably priced.