Blazkowicz [none/use name]

Yeah, but at that level of infiltration it’s likely that whatever hack has permeated through network devices and will reinject itself into new devices. Only way to have solid security against state level threats like that is an entire chain of hardware through to software ecosystem which is secure and audited to be secure, which most countries do not do.

Long time arch user, and I’ve recently switched to bazzite because maintaining an arch system reminds me too much of my actual job. Bazzite is great for daily use and has excellent support for gaming. I would recommend it as its update system makes it exceptionally hard to break your system and has built in stable rollbacks. As a new Linux user I would say just get stuck into either mint or bazzite. Try to learn more about how updating software works to decide between those, the, UI is entirely customizable and separate to the OS. The main Linux desktop UIs are gnome and KDE, both look nice and don’t really need strong resources. KDE used to be really hungry but they’ve made it a lot leaner in recent years.

They started out as a great option for kids from poor backgrounds to learn to code. Schools usually have really locked down PCs and a raspberry pi let them sidestep a lot of that.

I managed to (just about) run a home media server off one for a few years until I could afford a better setup. Now I have it running as a replacement for my ‘smart’ TV’s spyware riddled OS which even has HDMI passthrough for the remote control input.

They are useful, versatile, and still fairly cheap considering the cost of components now.

Liar’s Tale, Carnival, Occupied 6 off that same album are also all good stuff. Their older stuff is less politically developed but the same sentiments are still there.

This might work against Ansarallah given recent videos of the Saudis repeatedly airstriking their own mercenaries

It will be interesting to see how open source android distributions are treated. LineageOS is foss-ish but every distribution of it has non-free firmware binaries. I suppose it also will drive a push towards Ubuntu touch if it is forced into base android (which google probably will do regardless of legal requirement since it helps their core value proposition as a surveillance company).

There are different forms of hashing. The most common form that everyone thinks of is cryptographic hashing which by design produce completely separate outputs with a single small change in input. For image similarity a ‘perceptual hash’ is used which tries to instead minimise hash changes from inputs and has concepts of similarity between hash values. All reverse image searches do this.

A really basic example to think about this would be to ‘merge’ the colour values of all pixels in an image together into 1 colour, and now you can compare it with other results to find similarly coloured images. This has obvious drawbacks when you have really colourful images and a real algorithm would have to be more advanced but the general idea is the same.

Edit to add: All hash functions take a big input and convert it into a smaller output. This means you can have ‘collisions’ where 2 inputs make the same output. This is even more likely to happen when your algorithm tries to make similar inputs give similar outputs and is a major problem with supposedly benevolent attempts to put csam scanning into private messaging services, because suddenly you can be flagged to authorities when pictures of your dog coincidentally generate similar hashes to pictures of abuse.

Pop microg for lineageos on it and escape google entirely

The whole premise of this strip is making fun of Trump by calling him gay (derogatory). It’s fairly poor.

You might find your local state authority provides a lot of free/libre datasets for many things under some form of open data initiative. For currency conversion I’m not even sure you could claim proprietary rights to the underlying data. The APIs could be licensed but the underlying information is not really licensable. Currency conversion is so volatile that you will struggle to find user-sourced datasets in the same way as mapping is.

Have you tried ‘microg 4 lineageos’? I’ve been using most of my bank apps without any issue through it even with strong integrity failing. Not ideal but it works best for me while minimising google’s existence in my life better than stock android. It even has OTA updates much longer term than my oem. A major caveat for almost all phones is the firmware can basically never be free, and sim networks are designed for spying anyway.

None of them are a grift. They get used by financial traders for performing grifts, but the grift was and always has been stock market manipulation. AI is incredibly useful and many competent engineers now use it effectively. I expect the bubble of anthropic/openai will pop once local or on-prem models get better.