What’s the security model and permission system like? Can I run this as my regular user, or can this nuke my projects directory or pull random code from the internet and execute it like most of the other agents?

As some general advice: If you don’t know the specifics, just go with your Linux distribution’s defaults. They probably have this figured out for you. Wayland is the more modern approach. We had a long transitioning period and some things didn’t work for a while or were missing. I’d say it’s ready by now. And if your distro maintainers also think it’s time to supersede the old X server, it probably is.

There will be a trace. First of all, the way the Fediverse it set up, the instances all cooperate from distributing posts and comments, to deleting them. There’s no guarantee every instance does it (correctly). And as the Fediverse is made up of different software, it also depends on the specific implementation.

And then we also have AI scrapers, the Wayback Machine and other internet archives. It’ll end up there as well.

So better treat everything as easily traceable which you post in public. And it’s notoriously difficult to really remove stuff from the internet anyway.

Plus the US has some absurdly large datacenters for surveillance. Idk if it’s clever to lie to them about your social media history. They certainly have the capacity to scrape posts and store them forever.

I think it’s basically that. There’s new commits in the conduit repo. But it’s like one minor thing each other month. While other projects have a lot if activity and added a ton of features and MSCs. At the same time they’re equally as stable and possibly easier to use. So… Why not use one of them? You’ll get more features, quicker fixes for annoyances in Matrix. And I always wondered why Matrix doesn’t come with threaded conversations by default. SSO/Authentication integrations. And clients which can do multiple accounts.

Bummer. Yeah I had issues with browser video playback myself. And both Firefox and Chromium-based browsers have so many hidden options, intransparent GPU blocklists… And then people do silly stuff and install third-party browsers which don’t come from the package repositories, so they haven’t been tuned for the specific distribution. And that adds yet another layer of complexity… Luckily it just works out of the box on my current laptop, and in the future I’m not going to install any Nvidia drivers on my machine, either. That has been just too many tweaks for my taste. Though I heard it got a bit better with them. Sorry to hear you can’t make it work. I don’t think watching YouTube should be as hard as it is for some people. (BTW, using Firefox has additional advantages, like a working ad blocker available as an addon, so I for example don’t have to watch any of the multiple 30s pre-roll ads on YouTube. On the downside, Firefox always sucked with graphics acceleration and it still does. Should be fine on Windows, though.)

Did you find out what’s causing this? I found some Reddit threads with people having similar issues with Brave and Chrome-based browsers…

Take care. Yeah, some things are really easy. But then at some point it always gets nasty, there’s a million details to learn and you can keep digging down pretty much forever 😆 If you’re at some time in the position to do it as a hobby, there’s ways to make it a bit less time consuming. We have some turnkey solutions. I sometimes recommend https://yunohost.org/ for people who just want to set up a server without dealing with all the low level stuff… But still, it’s an entire hobby.

If you don’t want to install anything, there’s also https://3d.kalidoface.com/ for the browser. And seems they shut it down but there was a 2D version as well: https://2d.kalidoface.com/ (both open source.)

And you might want to cross-check the OBS install instructions. I’m fairly sure it does game capture out of the box these days, so not sure if there’s a need to manually install plugins from source.

Yeah, a few years ago, most of that was Google Translate. To be fair it has some limited on-device features. All of this used to be proprietary technology, though.

Not sure if I need tools for business meetings, at least on a regular basis. We kind of all agreed to use either the local language or English as the universal language in software development. And people are expected to be somewhat fluent. And if you clients are abroad, you better hire a real translator at some point. Or you’ll end up like Microsoft with all the messed up translations in Windows 11. It’ll be handy at times, though. Or if you work on a construction site. And some other jobs.

Screw electronics. I’ll finally get time to play my 100 board games, pen and paper roleplay games and all the stuff I currently don’t do, because I’m doomscrolling all day. And I might have to ask the neighbour to bring their accordion and sing some Lady Gaga for me until Spotify comes back online. I think I’d be fine.

Just a word of caution, It’ll be dark in the supermarket at that time. The electronic cash terminals cease to work and half the food is going to spoil within a few hours. So get some cash, rice, noodles, oil, ketchup and canned food. And you’ll need some sort of water supply.

I recently learned about the Offline Translator app. That’s awesome. Allows to translate text, documents and what’s in front of the phone camera. Completely on device and no external services needed.

I’m also a regular user of Mozilla Firefox Translate. Allows me to read news articles from other European countries, occasionally visit some Japanese websites…

They’re all massively helpful. I like talking to people. Listen to perspectives beyond the standard American one (or German in my case). Or go shopping in an Asian supermarket. Sometimes I’ll read a datasheet of some obscure electronics and it’s in Chinese. And I live in one of the more multicultural regions, so it wouldn’t hurt to be able to give directions in other languages. People get lost here all the times because the Deutsche Bahn sucks. And all I can do is speak German, English and 50 words of French. Which sometimes isn’t enough. So I’m all for more translation helpers.

I think some tech can speak open protocols like MQTT. Other than that you’ll have to google whether they require some cloud, and if there’s HA support.

Sure, sorry, you’re in the selfhosted community, so I sent some self hosted options 😆 If you own one of the internet/wifi routers with Wireguard built in (FritzBox, MikroTik, etc…) that might be an option as well. Other than that, I never tried any of the more commercial options, so I don’t know much about it.

Google and/or the Arch Wiki should have you covered. For my Dell laptop I just clicked on Settings->Battery and set it to “Preserver Battery Health”. Done.

I’ll go ahead and remove the battery. At least check on it regularly. I’ve had the spicy pillow syndrome in some of my laptops and phones. Other ones were fine. But better not have that plugged in and trickle charged for half a year.

If Tailscale doesn’t suit you, maybe try one of the alternatives. There’s Pangolin or plain old Wireguard tunnels. I have no clue if authentication is better with Pangolin, though.

Yes, you can. Maybe look up Flatpak and AppImage files, that’s the a bit more clever way to do it. Mind, though, we all, including Windows people try to teach people to avoid installing and running random executables from the internet. As that might mess up the system. And in the Windows world you might catch some viruses. You can do it, though. You can even run random Windows software via Wine/Proton. Or to make it a bit easier, use Lutris or Bottles for Windows .EXEs and downloaded games.

Usually, try to leverage all the tens of thousands of programs packaged with your Linux distribution. Your Linux will come with all the major browsers, printer drivers and all the popular software. If you install that, it’s pretty much guaranteed to work because it’s tested and tied into the system. You’ll get automatic updates. They’ll have a look at security (and sometimes privacy). You’ll forfeit all of that if you run random stuff downloaded from the internet. So keep it to a minimum and do it just in case there’s no better way.

And speaking from own experience, I often had a hard time with things like the tools downloaded from some printer manufacturer’s website. Usually the stuff Linux comes with, works way better. So try that first.

I was talking about “Yundera”.

Is this a casaOS fork you need to sign up for, to get it installed? …Why?

Story writing is a bit difficult in my experience. I had more fun with older models like Mistral Nemo. I feel newer AI models are often way more tuned to fulfill the role as a “helpful assistant” / chatbot, which I think tends to make their style of writing worse. You could also try to use some of those “base models”. They’re not tuned in that way. They also won’t follow instructions, they’re more autocomplete. You’d provide them with something like a word problem, give the first few paragraphs and see where they take it.

And honestly, I don’t think AI is super clever, on a book-author level. It’ll always get the pacing wrong. Push for story tropes like sudden plot twists. Introduce random characters to make something happen. And brush over / summarize other parts which would be interesting to tell in detail.

What could help is an elaborate (strict) process. Something like the computer programming / coding agents do. Make it first come up with a story idea. Make a plan, a todo list of the framework story, side stories and arcs, devise chapter names and a short summary of what needs to happen in those chapters. Write short character cards. And only then feed that plan back to the AI and make it begin writing the actual text.