Everything has pros and cons. I’ve seen 3 laptops (of my family) with batteries that looked like a baloon after several years. I’ve subsequently removed or replaced them. I’d definitely check on them every now and then. A UPS is nice. Burning down a house isn’t. I haven’t seen them catch on fire (yet), they supposedly have at least some protection. But definitely get them out of the laptop once they’re dead anyways or don’t look alright. Everyone is responsible to make that decision on their own. Take care.

I usually do the expert install and don’t install a graphical environment in the first place. But your solution should be fine, too. I think you can show running services with systemctl and then disable unneeded ones. For example systemctl disable gdm but there shouldn’t be that much running on a plain Debian anyways.

For powersave I run powertop in auto-tune mode as a systemd service. A description is here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Powertop

Unfortunately, the Debian Wiki doesn’t seem to have a lot on laptop power saving. The Arch wiki has some more (random) info: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management

I’d say do the powertop systemd service on startup, set the multiuser target or disable the login manager and that’s it.

Yeah, as I said it’s clickbait and not “proper” doxing. What I’ve been annoyed with are old newspaper articles. Sometimes you’ll find some articles with a picture and a full name citing some sports achievements from when you were 17 or did some public activity with the boy scouts or some other club. Usually including pictures, full name and location. Which isn’t great and you have less control over that than over a facebook or linkedin profile…

Sometimes an employer also has a “the team” page on their website with mugshots of everyone. That can be used to annoy people, stalk them or call the employer and so some nasty stuff.

I usually don’t tell people my last name. Or I write pseudonomously on the internet, to make doxing a bit more complicated. And I don’t post pictures of myself. That’s all I can do. And quite some years ago I tried contacting some reverse image search providers. But it was difficult to get them to get rid of the pictures.

It’s not necessarily just the information out there. Being able to connect it also makes people more vulnerable. I wouldn’t call it doxing, though. That term has a meaning. Usually it has to include at least an address or an employer or some private information that isn’t readily available.

they do some reverse image search on the internet and find your facebook profile or similar things.

Yeah, they mention that it’s unsuspicious glasses by the look. We’ll have to see what this comes to… When google introduced their Google glasses, people got yelled at on the streets, at least as far as I remember.

Clickbait warning. This has nothing to do with the Meta smart glasses. They’re just a means of taking pictures of people without them noticing. But you could do the same with any internet connected camera / phone etc.

wtf?

You could use some containerized mail server like Mailcow. They’re pretty alright to set up and should work fine for low volume. At least in my experience. Unless you don’t want to deal with mail yourself, then you should maybe consider a paid service. But I don’t have any experience with those.

Most people use either Matrix or XMPP. Both work.

There is a nice overview of chat protocols here: https://www.messenger-matrix.de/

I mostly use matrix as of today. I think it’s alright. It’s a bit difficult to explain encryption and device verification to other people… I think that could be designed better. But apart from that it works very well. So does XMPP which I’ve used before that. Have a look at the messenger matrix and all the options before deciding on an ecosystem. I’d take one of the friends and do some evaluation before dragging the whole group in. You can do that with some pre-existing servers before learning how to host the server part.

And btw: With most of them you can just use some public servers. You should do that unless you’re willing to put in the effort to maintain an own server. That’d give you complete control over the infrastructure… But it’s also a liability to maintain a server, do the updates etc for a group of friends and maybe years to come… End to end encryption will keep the content of your messages private, anyways. (If you use it.)

Add some googly eyes if it “lives” in the living room. They fit right above the switch which would then become the nose.

Yeah back when I needed storage (quite some years ago) the mini pcs were less capable and more pricey, so I ended up building a NAS myself. It’s a regular, yet very power efficient PC. But due to size, it doesn’t fit next to the TV. If I’d do the same thing today, I’d certainly consider a machine like this. And $200 doesn’t sound much for a 2-bay NAS.

Uuhh, that’s a cute little trash can. Now fit that with the maximum of RAM it supports and two 12TB harddrives… And it’ll do more media center and NAS than the average person needs.

Someone linked a list of Mini-PCs here: https://lemmy.world/post/19837516

I think the N100 sounds good. But I can’t comment on buying a cheap chinesium one versus a refurbished Fujitsu/Lenovo or an Intel NUC.

But going a level deeper, the whole position only exists because a company wants to get some job done. Describing it is just a means to achieve that. Not a thing in itself. I think we’re circling about what I consider being the main point: What matters is if a job get’s done. If you do it with a description and it gets the job done, it gets the job done. If you manage to go without and it also gets the job done, it also gets the job done. If you manage people by people and that gets the job done or if AI does it and also gets the job done… Delivering some goods is how a company makes profit. They don’t really care how it’s done because that’s not what it’s about. It just needs to fulfill a few criteria. Be profitable (have a good price/performance ratio) and be sustainable/reliable… It doesn’t matter to them if it’s AI, a human, with a description or without…

And I already had jobs where there wasn’t any proper job description (just something on the paper). That usually leads to severe issues if there is any dispute. But nonetheless it worked out well for me and my employer. I know people who are in similar situations. Or had their job descriptions updated because things changed. So I don’t welcome that as it will result in issues. And it shouldn’t be like that. But speaking from experience, a job can be done without a description if circumstances are right. I also regularly see people organize their old stuff when retiring, read their old job description from decades ago for fun and that’s not really what they’ve been doing the last 20 years.

I think our fundamental disagreement is, you say it’s currently usually done like this and therefore that’s the only way to do it. That might be a conservative perspective. But by logic, that doesn’t follow. Just because something works some way, that doesn’t exclude there being other possibilities or ways to achieve the same thing.

I think the question then becomes: What’s more important (and to whom?) Doing what’s in the job description? Or actually getting the job done? These are two separate things. And I see arguments for both, depending on context.

And you have a point with the algorithms. They follow the goals that they’re given by their masters. Exactly to the outcome you’ve outlined. But the goal is configurable. You could as well give it the goal to maximise team efficiency. Or employer satisfaction. Or company revenue. Practically anything that you can obtain some metric.

I get what you’re saying. I think we’re getting a bit philosophical here with the empathy. My point was: Sometimes, what matters is if something get’s a job done. And I see some reason to believe it might become capable, despite doing it differently and having shortcomings.

I think it’s true that empathy get’s the job done. But I think it’s a logical flaw to say, because empathy can do it, it’s ONLY empathy that can do it. It might very well be the case that it’s not like that. I think we don’t know yet. I’m not set on one side or the other. I just want to see some research done and get a definitive answer instead of speculating.

And I see some reason to believe it’s more complicated than that. What I outlined earlier is that it can apply something loosely resembling a theory of mind and get some use out of that. But we can also log every interaction of someone. Do sentiment analysis and find out with great accuracy if someone sitting at a computer is happy, angry, resignating or frustrated. AI can do that all day for each employer and outperform any human manager. On the flipside it can’t do other things. And we already have “algorithms” for example on TikTok, Youtube etc that can tell a lot about someone and predict things about them. That works quite well as we all know. All of that makes me believe there is some potential to do things like what we’re currently discussing.

Yeah. I mean the fundamental issue is: ChatGPT isn’t human. It just mimics things. That’s the way it generates text, audio and images. And it’s also the way it handles “empathy”. It mimicks what it’s learned from human interactions during training.

But in the end: Does it really matter where it comes from and why? I mean the goal of a venture is to produce or achieve something. And that isn’t measured in where it comes from. But in actual output. I don’t want to speculate too much. But despite not having real empathy, it could theoretically achieve the same thing by faking it well enough. And that has been proven in some narrow tasks already. We have customer satisfaction rates. And quite some people saying it helps them with different things. We need to measure that and do some more studies of what’s the actual outcome of replacing something with AI. It could very well be that our perspective is wrong.

And with that said: I tried roleplaying with AI. It seems to have some theory of mind. Not really of course. But it get’s what I’m hinting at. The desires and behaviour of characters. And so on. Lot’s of models are very agreeable. Some can role play conflict. I think the current capabilities of these kinds of AI are enough to fake some things well enough to get somewhere and be actually useful. I don’t say it has or hasn’t people skills. I think it’s somewhere on the spectrum between the two. I can’t really tell where because I havent yet read any research considering this context.

And of course there is a big difference between everyday tasks and handling a situation that went completely haywire. We have to factor that in. But in reality there are ways to handle that. For example AI and humans could split up the tasks amongst them. And things can get escalated and humans make difficult decisions. But that could already mean 80% of the labor gets replaced.

I’m not even sure about the “people skills” of ChapGPT. Maybe it’s good at that. It always says …you have to consider this side but also the other side… …This is like that, however it might… It can weasel itself out of situations (as it did in this video). It makes a big effort to keep a very friendly tone in all circumstances. I think OpenAI has put a lot of effort in ChatGPT having something that resembles a portion of people skills.

I’ve used those capabilities to rephrase emails that needed to tell some uncomfortable truths but at the same time not scare someone away. And it did a halfway decent job. Better than I could do. And we already see those people skills in use by the companies who replace their first level support with AI. I read somewhere it has a better customer satisfaction rate than a human powered callcenter. It’s good at pacifying people, being nice to them and answering the most common 90% of questions over and over again.

So I’m not sure what to make of this. I think my point still remains valid. AI (at least ChatGPT) is orders of magnitude better at people skills than at programming. I’m not sure what kind of counterexamples we have… Sure, it can’t come to your desk, look you in the eyes and see if you’re happy or need something. Because it doesn’t have any eyes. But at the same time that’s a thing I rarely see with average human managers in big offices, either…

Sure. There are lots of tedious tasks in a programmers life that don’t require a great amount of intelligence. I suppose writing some comments, docstrings, unit tests, “glue” and boilerplate code that connects things and probably several other things that now escape my mind are good tasks for an AI to assist a proper programmer and make them more effective and get things done faster.

I just wouldn’t call that programming software. I think assisting with some narrow tasks is more exact.

Maybe I should try doing some backend stuff. Or give it an API definition and see what it does 😅 Maybe I was a bit blinded by ChatGPT having read the Wikipedia and claiming it understands robotics concepts. But it really doesn’t seem to have any proper knowledge. Same probably applies to engineering and other nighboring fields that might need software.

I don’t think so. I’ve had success letting it write boilerplate code. And simple stuff that I could have copied from stack overflow. Or a beginners programming book. With every task from my real life it failed miserably. I’m not sure if I did anything wrong. And it’s been half a year since I last tried. Maybe things have changed substantially in the last few months. But I don’t think so.

Last thing I tried was some hobby microcontroller code to do some robotics calculations. And ChatGPT didn’t really get what it was supposed to do. And additionally instead of doing the maths, it would just invent some library functions, call them with some input values and imagine the maths to be miraculously be done in the background, by that nonexistent library.

If anything. AI could be used to replace managers 😆 I mean lots of management seems to be just pushing paper to me. Ideal to be handled by AI. But I think we still need people to do the real work for quite some time to come. Especially software architecture and coding (complex) stuff ain’t easy. Neither is project management. So I guess even some managers can stay.