Full disclosure - my background is in operations (think IT) not AI research. So some of this might be wrong.

What’s marketed as AI is something called a large language model. This distinction is important because AI implies intelligence - where as a LLM is something else. At a high level LLMs are using something called “tokens” to break apart natural language into elements that a machine can understand, and then recombining those tokens to “create” something new. When a LLM is creating output it does not know what it is saying - it knows what token statistically comes after the token(s) it has generated already.

So to answer your question. An AI can hallucinate because it does not know the answer - its using advanced math to know that the period goes at the end of the sentence. and not in the middle.

Mint.

I’ll be very honest with you. It’s not fancy, it’s not snazzy computing. It’s simple, designed with a graphical interface in mind, and a good operating system for someone who A) does not know Linux, or B) does not want to fiddle.

Do you by chance live in a high CoL area?

Congratulations. Your a system admin. For real.

I’ve interviewed candidates for system admin jobs who had less exposure to managing Linux then this story.

Not dissimilar - my three steps.

1. Ran away from vista.
2. Get a job at Microsoft and figured I should learn how to use a core product again (Windows 10).
3. Dual boot for years (you never know when you will need to wake up the windows for some random task), until Win 11 and recall…

See you think that - but excel finds a way. We have what are lovingly called the “spreadsheets of doom” which accounting uses to manage all forecasts, and the bits that involve money flows. Did you know you can hook excel into Salesforce and pull all the sales records? A person who thinks her monitor is her computer (she has a Dell laptop) somehow found a way…

Can we just say anyone with a pulse?

The problem is not everyone who wants to can move. Picking up everything and moving to New England or the West Coast is not viable for people making minimum wage.

They randomly started turning up in my music recommendations (I mostly listen to metal). I was so confused and so happy about it…

That makes me wonder. Can you escape it with a non-us keyboard?

Switch to Linux but you have major paradigm you need to pick. Do you want your computer to be bleeding edge but it be a hobby? Or do you want slightly older and rock solid? Or do you have an enterprise support contract? You only pick Ubuntu/RHEL if you have the last one.

Can we take a moment to ask ourselves - how the hell did piping to shell become ok? We have all kinds of method’s for deploying stuff - from the age old tarball to the new shinny flat pack. But somehow we also became ok with

Curl foo | sh

Oftentimes as root.

I beg to differ. Wood phone cases hide the bump by increasing the total thickness of the phone and making the back nice and flat.

But that’s just it. To the megalomaniacal, psychotic, fascist person id assume the dream of having you own personal household slaves, or factory slaves that you can ln explort and abuse you heartless content would be the creme de la creme of goals.

You know what I’m always surprised is missing everytime I see this list? Repealing the 14th amendment. They are so wrong on all of it but somehow they don’t go for that one.

It’s software put on every machine so that the company can quickly isolate it if/when something bad happens (or it falls out of security compliance). To do this is requires a constant Internet connection, insanely high privileges on the machine and frequent updates to be appraised of risks.

That risk update went off the rails and into the next state.

Do you need the space? If not who cares.

Personally I run a media service for friends and family. I’m about to bring another 100tb online because we are running low on storage. Am I holding or just running a rack of servers in my basement?

Steal away. An old boss knew the person who maintains that page. If I remember correctly it’s entire reason for being is for that one question.

When in doubt I ask them what RAID 45 is.

I’ll be honest, unless you have been using Linux for…a long time, of your job requires you to manage servers, your probably not that last category.

If you enrolled in the windows insider/test doohickey then you might want look into the rolling release distros. If not, something with a standard release cadence will be better.

I my self? All of the servers I manage have no desktop environment (core infrastructure does not need graphics). But if I am on a workstation? LMDE - Because I care about the graphics getting out of my way so I can do my job.