The costs for responses are overblown, but the costs for training are not.

This is a wild take. You can get chatbots to vomit out entire paragraphs of published works verbatim. There is functionally no mechanism to a chatbot other than looking at a bunch existing texts, picking one randomly, and copying the next word from it. There’s no internal processing or logic that you could call creative, it’s just sticking one Lego at a time onto a tower, and every Lego is someone’s unpaid intellectual property.

There is no definition of plagiarism or copyright that LLMs don’t bite extremely hard. They’re just getting away with it because of the billions of dollars of capital pushing the tech. I am hypothetically very much for the complete abolition of copyright and free usage of information, but a) that means everyone can copy stuff freely, instead of just AI companies, and b) it first requires an actually functional society that provides for the needs of its citizens so they can have the time to do stuff like create art without needing to make a livable profit at it. And even if that were the case, I would still think the current implementation of AI is pretty shitty if it’s burning the same ludicrous amounts of energy to do its parlor tricks.

Okay so you could have just looked up one of dozens of resources on regex. The images you “need” are likely bad copies of images that already exist, or they’re weird collages of copied subject matter.

My point isn’t that there’s nothing they can do at all, it’s that nothing they can do is worth the energy cost. You’re spending tons of energy to effectively chew up information already on the web and have it vomited back to you in a slightly different form, when you could have just looked up the information directly. It doesn’t save time, because you have to double check everything. The images are also plagiarized, and you could be paying an artist if they’re something important, or improving your artistic abilities if they aren’t. I struggle to think of many cases where one of those options is unfeasible, it’s just the “easy” way out (because the energy costs are obfuscated) to have a machine crunch up some existing art to get a approximation of what you want.

Okay sure but in many cases the tech in question is actually useful for lots of other stuff besides repression. I don’t think that’s the case with LLMs. They have a tiny bit of actually usefulness that’s completely overshadowed by the insane skyscrapers of hype and lies that have been built up around their “capabilities”.

With “AI” I don’t see any reason to go through such gymnastics separating bad actors from neutral tech. The value in the tech is non-existent for anyone who isn’t either a researcher dealing with impractically large and unwieldy datasets, or of course a grifter looking to profit off of bigger idiots than themselves. It has never and will never be a useful tool for the average person, so why defend it?

I hate how fully leapfrogged the conversation about surveillance was. It’s so disgusting that it’s just assumed that all of your communications should be read by your teachers, parents, and school administration just because you’re a minor. Kids deserve privacy too.

You seem to be handwaving all concerns about the actual tech, but I think the fact that “training” is literally just plagiarism, and the absolutely bonkers energy costs for doing so, do squarely position LLMs as doing more harm than good in most cases.

The innocent tech here is the concept of the neural net itself, but unless they’re being trained on a constrained corpus of data and then used to analyze that or analogous data in a responsible and limited fashion then I think it’s somewhere on a spectrum between “irresponsible” and “actually evil”.

There’s a big overhaul update that got teased after over a year of radio silence, fingers crossed that it comes out soon!

The vast majority of dotfiles can be split into multiple documents. If you want to share but also put sensitive/personal information in some of them, just part the personal bits out into separate documents and maybe give them all an easy to filter suffix/prefix. Then just only publicly share the other files.

If you don’t plan to expand the swap partition, I would recommend just deleting the swap partition – you could either make it a new ext4 and use LVM to combine it with the shared storage, or if you’re going to combine your EFI partitions you could grow your Mint partition to include both the SUSE EFI and the swap partition – and using a swap file instead, as another commenter mentioned. You honestly really don’t need swap space regardless with 16gb of RAM if you’re really just using this to run a web browser, but you can easily set up a swap file if you want one.

Tax software is basically all in browser at this point.

Is there any reason? You’re effectively wasting half the drive by using that space for OSes you almost never use.

If you ever happen to need Windows, which I don’t see happening as you yourself can’t imagine an actual use case, you can just go to the library or borrow a friend’s computer or maybe use your phone.

As for Mint, do you just have it to experiment with? If you’re just trying to try out other distros, a virtual machine or even live USBs are much easier ways to quickly try out new systems without having to clear actual partitions.

If you had much more storage then sure, waste some of it, but you’re really gonna be missing that 120gb if you use your computer for… basically anything.

The order of the partitions basically doesn’t matter at this point – I think having a boot partition first used to be important for MBR schemes but I’m pretty sure in the UEFI era you can have them in whatever order. As others have mentioned, you could combine your EFI partitions, but doing so to an already installed system is slightly complex. You also could shrink some of your EFI and boot partitions, I’m not sure of the recommended sizes off the top of my head but I think they could be smaller. On the other hand, your swap partition should probably be bigger – making it the same size as your RAM is a good rule of thumb and will enable hibernation (I think).

Oh it almost certainly won’t save you time unless you already know Nix and how the ecosystem works. But it does make rolling back to previous configurations basically effortless, which seems like it would obviate your need for a full staging drive.

Sounds like you could benefit from NixOS ;)

Note: the growing the partition from a live USB thing is only necessary if you want it all to be one partition. If it’s a separate drive, or even if it’s not, you can just format the old Windows partition/drive and mount it as a new storage volume.

Advertising should be illegal. Huge waste of money and everyone’s time.

The GPU is using your RAM? Maybe you should post a screenshot of that page

Try running an incognito window only, which should run without extensions (unless you manually enable each for private browsing). Check your usage then to see if the extensions are actually the problem.

Honestly 1.7gb of RAM for a modern browser is not that unexpected. Outlook is not a low-cost web service, first of all, but also the first tab is by far the most costly – most of the RAM is for the browser itself. Even with ten or twenty tabs I wouldn’t expect your RAM usage to balloon much, and if they’re “background” tabs, i.e. tabs you’ve kept open from previous sessions but haven’t actually looked at yet, they basically take no resources – actually one of the areas that Firefox does a lot better than Chrome.

I know that and you know that, but have you seen the sort of thing Trump and those who have his ear think is a good idea?

I don’t think they’d just ban using all open source software, it’d be something ridiculous like asserting that all FOSS licenses are null and void and those projects are now the intellectual property of the US. Likely propped up by the classic “security” justification.

I’m less worried about any specific targeting of Linux than I am about some random tech bro whispering in Trump’s ear and suddenly he bans Open Source or something similarly unenforceable and insane.

I have dailied Arch and Debian unstable and they both took about as much effort. Arch is really not that complex, it just gives you access to some potential footguns. Also, Arch absolutely makes it clear that it’s a more advanced distro – that’s the entire reason for the meme, although these days it’s a lot simpler thanks mostly to the installers.