I think that’s possible. Some people regularly do their work in virtualized environments. Some developers, some people do this for security. And some companies have their employees run everything over network via a thin client / VNC.

It’ll be more complex, and you’ll probably spend some time setting it up and dealing with some edge cases and unforeseen annoyances. You’ll spread your data over several (virtual) computers and probably need some network share or file sync. And whether dynamic assigning of GPUs works, depends on the exact circumstances. Linux has a few tricks available to reset GPUs, mess with the firmware and reassign devices, or pass through things. But last time I tried, that was a lot of manual work. So does audio production if you need real time. And I think the “ease of updates” will be overshadowed a bit by now five times as many operating systems to keep up to date. And I don’t know much about anti-cheat. I usually skip those games altogether and the rest runs fine on my main distro.

Other possibilities: You could just use one main operating system and install some virtualization software there. And for development and ML you could also use something like Distrobox.

I don’t think Microsoft are that clever or malicious in that way. There are third party drivers available and I don’t know what all the Linux parts in Windows these days are able to do… So it’s definitely possible. But I think you’re looking more for a targeted attack with this. Like an agency or a hacker singling you out because they know you have valuable data on that filesystem. But Microsoft’s business model is more fishing for the easy targets and funneling data en masse, not the niche stuff… That might change at some point one day once the Linux subsystem automounts filesystems or something like that.

I’d agree with the: come preinstalled. Most people buy a device and never change the operating system. So it needs to be the preinstalled operating system on the average computer or laptop, wherever people buy those.

(And mind that Linux completely dominates the market on servers. So technically, a lot of people use Linux in a way… Just not on desktop computers.)

Usually a library is curated, while the internet isn’t. Idk I usually have a good time there. It’s an amount of books on the shelf I can still manage. If it’s multiple, I grab the 5-10 or so books, walk to a table and skim the table of content and a few pages, see which one has the info I was looking for and has a style of writing I like. (And isn’t outdated.) I regularly find Linux or programming books that way. And they all have some minimum standard in the library so I’ll find something within 5-10minutes.

I had a dualboot on my last laptop for a long time and seems they’ve toned the overwriting of the bootloader way down since the invention of EFI. For the last 8 years or so it occasionally changes the boot order to default to Windows, every time these larger updates come in. But it doesn’t seem to overwrite anything any more.

Other than that, I’d also recommend Backups. Windows doesn’t come with drivers for these filesystems, so it can’t read Linux files. But theoretically things could happen to the data on a harddisk nonetheless.

I’m fairly sure Peertube is a bit more distributed due to the storage requirements that come with video. And while we can all chip in a few hundred Gigabytes and add lots of smaller instances, it’d be hard for an entity to finance something like a default instance. I’d expect it to be a few hundred bucks per month and 10,000 users. So that becomes less of a hobby and a proper job. And it needs to be paid or someone needs to make sure a lot of donations come in and manage all of that more like a business.

Thank you very much for the info. I did the switch today, along with the overdue update to 25.05 and everything went smoothly ☺️

I’d say this is also a bit about extremism. I mean it’s not wrong to be entirely against AI. I don’t think I am. For example if we managed to do it ethically, I wouldn’t have much of an issue with assistance systems in cars, smart home voice assistants and machine translation. I’m more opposed the more it gets towards generative AI. And because we do it the opposite of ethical in practice. I’m not necessarily opposed because of the thing itself or towards the science behind it, but because of all the bad consequences it comes with. But people like me aren’t allowed a more nuanced opinion or to draw the line somewhere unless it’s a perfect 0% or 100% and I feel people expect me to take some super extreme position. I still consider myself part of the anti-AI community overall, but both sides frequently misunderstand me. So I’m still subscribed to your posts and put up with the personal hate.

(Edit: Of course the take in the screenshot is stupid, though. There are a lot of compelling arguments against AI. And whether it fixes your bike or computer code isn’t a matter of opinion, and it might benefit someone but that has nothing to do with justifying cost and side-effects of AI on other people.)

I think they have push notifications in XMPP these days. At least Prosody has modules like mod_unified_push and mod_cloud_notify and that seems to be supported for example by Conversations.im

To be honest, I didn’t have lots of battery drain, back when I used XMPP. And other old-school protocols like e-mail and sip voip don’t seem to be very bad either with whatever mechanisms they use. Or my phone isn’t reporting battery drain correctly… And with Matrix I also had to set up push notifications manually, or it’d just receive messages with a random delay per default.

I am graduating […]

Sorry, I read that after I replied and edited my comment, but a bit too late… That changes some things…

I agree. There’s roughly two options. Either a static archive as your heritage. Or some writable file storage which can be kept up to date. And yeah, that needs payment, maintenance…

And from my observation, finding people willing to maintain something, or clean up after someone did some annoying things or filled up storage or whatever, is harder than setting up the technology.

Obviously that option would be preferable, though.

[…] or set something local, but set it behind some proxy

Maybe Cloudflare is your friend. They dominate the market of free reverse proxies / tunnels.

But I’m really unsure if I have any good recommendation that fits your situation. Ideally find a successor, next best thing is a Nextcloud, Google Drive, OneDrive or some of the other ones. And if that can’t be done, split it into manageable chunks by course and dump it to some one click hoster or archive.org. That’s all I can come up with.

And by the way, I did appreciate such archives and made use of them. And there’s a lot of reasons (cheating aside) to share notes, PDFs, try old exams to prepare…

The main issue is, you graduate as well and life will move on for you. You might move far away, get a full-time job, maybe have new hobbies or a family and time will come and you’ll stop supporting it as well. I’ve seen that all the time and most privately run things vanish sooner than later.

Of course the entities have to abide by the rules. We also did that… officially… It just happened to be the case that some of the same individuals also did other things after hours, and not in their role as members of the entity… And while mingling you’d find similar-minded people and/or successors for the inofficial operations. It’s a bit trick to get it right. The official entity of course denies any involvement, they can’t take any blame.

And I’d say if you’re the main/sole contributor of content, it’s questionable if this even survives long term. Unless people upload recent exams and material, the content will become obsolete after a few years. Professors will have changed the questions and assignments or the entire course is done by a new professor and the archive will slowly become obsolete. So you kind of need some community anyways. Or skip the hassle and just upload the thing to archive.org or some one click hoster.

Another option would be to talk to the dev club. Maybe they’d like to revamp their solution and take yours, or they have some idea about tech infrastructure.

Seems things have gotten more complicated in the age of cloud computing. I think these archives have always been a thing. In the good old days sometimes on their infrastructure, buried several layers deep in some windows network share or on some specific computer in the computer lab or maintained by the student body of a faculty… And there was always some secret file stash somewhere.

If you’re concerned with a long-term solution. Are there any entities run by the students? Associations or clubs interested in maintaining such a thing long-term? I mean technology aside, the real issue is that this is done by random individuals and they’re gone after a while. Ideally this is done with some help of an entity that lasts longer than that and passed down to future generations.

I don’t think this is true. We have mechanisms in authentication systems to prevent that. For example make requests valid for one use only. And I’d say if an attacker can ask about age every single day until a user turns 18, and by that gaining knowledge about their exact birthday, it’s something like a side-channel attack and by definition not “zero” knowledge any more and needs to be handled/prevented by the implementation.

I believe some projects using OpenVino and ONNX can make use if the NPU. Maybe the generative AI plugins for GIMP and Audacity. But it’s not a lot.

In these cases I’ll do the same thing other people here seem to do as well. Do a backup (or snapshot) and then I’ll try to just do it. Obviously read the documentation on updates and major version upgrades first. I think that’s fine in the case of paperless-ngx.

Either it works or it doesn’t. In that case I’ll gather error logs and information for debugging and roll back to the backup. After a successful major upgrade, I often go through the settings and config and check about all the things that have been added or changed in the meantime and make sure they’re set to my liking.

It’d massively help if people just tag AI generated content reliably. That way we wouldn’t need to have the same conversation over and over again. I think we should just make this mandatory across the network, give everyone an option to filter and everyone can use the platform however they like.

Maybe ask for the studies? I mean if that’s phrased as a fact… Why not read up on it? Maybe they’re mistaken, or you are.

Just be warned that those two are relatively complicated pieces of tech. And they’re meant to set up a distributed storage network including things like replication and load-balancing. Clusters with failover to a different datacenter and such. If you just want access to the same storage on one server from different instances, that’s likely way to complicated for you. (And more complexity generally means more maintenance and more failure modes.)

Since both Debian and Arch aren’t atomic distros or offer rollback… The way I do it is connect my large external USB harddisk, do a backup and then upgrade. If there’s something wrong, I restore the backup, but in reality I was always able to resolve issues with the updates.

On my server I do LVM snapshots, that’s fairly easy to do. I avoid BTRFS since that messed up one of my filesystems a few years ago, but I heard it got better since and it’s not supposed to do that any more.

There are a bunch of options available. I think the exact layout depends on the exact use-case. From GlusterFS, Ceph, to (S3 compatible) block storage, to straightforward NFS, to database replication, that’s all for different use-cases like VM failover to decoupling storage from a service, to something like a Jellyfin sharing the media library with another service, to horizontal scaling of services… I don’t think there is a single answer to all of that.