Well,

If the goal is stability, I would have likely started with an immutable OS. This creates certain assurances for the base OS to be in a known good state.
With that base, I’d tend towards:
Flatpak > Container > AppImage

My reasoning for this being:

1. Installing software should not effect the base OS (nor can it with an immutable OS). Changes to the base OS and system libraries are a major source of instability and dependency hell. So, everything should be self contained.
2. Installing one software package should not effect another software package. This is basically pushing software towards being immutable as well. The install of Software Package 1, should have no way to bork Software Package 2. Hence the need for isolating those packages as flatpaks, AppImages or containers.
3. Software should be updated (even on Linux, install your fucking updates). This is why I have Flatpak at the top of the list, it has a built in mechanism for updating. Container images can be made to update reasonably automatically, but have risks. By using something like docker-compose and having services tied to the “:latest” tag, images would auto-update. However, its possible to have stacks where a breaking change is made in one service before another service is able to deal with it. So, I tend to tag things to specific versions and update those manually. Finally, while I really like AppImages, updating them is 100% manual.

This leaves the question of apt packages or doing installs via make. And the answer is: don’t do that. If there is not a flatpak, appimage, or pre-made container, make your own container. Docker files are really simple. Sure, they can get super complex and do some amazing stuff. You don’t need that for a single software package. Make simple, reasonable choices and keep all the craziness of that software package walled off from everything else.

An economy is really just a way to distribute finite resources in a world with infinite wants. Even the most egalitarian of systems is going to require deciding who gets something and who doesn’t (winner and losers). It’s perfectly valid to be frustrated by being on the “doesn’t” end of that equation. And we (US and other Western Democracies) could certainly do a lot more to shift some of the resources away from the few who are hording a lot of them, even without a radical “tear the system down” approach. The difficulty is the political will to do so.

Unfortunately, mustering political will for a collective good, which may come with some individual losses can be a tough sell. Especially when large parts of a population are comfortable. Not only do you have to convince people that the collective good is an overall good for them, you also have to convince them that the individual losses either won’t effect them or will be mitigated by the upsides of the collective good. And given peoples’ tendency to over emphasize the short term risks over the long term risks, this can be especially hard. But, that doesn’t mean you should give up, just that you need to sharpen your arguments and find ways to convince more people that things can be better for them, if they are willing to take that step.

Traditions exist to pass on learned knowledge and for social cohesion. Prior to widespread education, many local groups had to learn the same lessons and find a way to pass those on from person to person and generation to generation. Given that this also tended to coincide with societies not having the best grasp on reality (germ theory is not that old), the knowledge being passed on was often specious. But, it might also contain useful bits which worked.

For example some early societies would pack honey into a wound. Why? Fuck if they knew, but that was what the wise men said to do. It turns out that honey is a natural anti-septic and helps to prevent infection. They had no knowledge of this, but had built up a tradition around it, probably because it seemed to work. And so that got passed on.

The other aspect of traditions is social. When people do a thing together, they tend to bond and become willing to engage in more pro-social behaviors. It isn’t all that important what the activity it, so long as people do it together. The more people feel like they are part of the in-group, the more they will work to protect and sacrifice for that in-group.

Sure, a lot of traditions are complete crap. They are superstition wrapped in a “that’s the way we’ve always done it” attitude. But it’s important not to overlook their significance to a population. The Christian Church ran headlong into this time and again through European history as they sought to convert various groups. Those groups tended to hold on to old traditions and just blended them into Christianity. This resulted in a fairly fractured religious landscape, but the Church generally tolerated it, because trying to quash it led to too many problems. While stories of various Easter and Christmas traditions being Pagan in origin are likely apocryphal, there are echos of older religious beliefs hanging about.

It’s best to be careful when looking at a particular group’s traditions and calling them “backwards” or some other epitaph. Yes, they almost certainly have no basis in the scientific method. But, the value of those traditions to a people are very real. And so long as they are not harmful to others, you’re likely to do more harm trying to remove them than by simply allowing folks to just enjoy them.

If everyone bought the dip, the dip would end. Stock prices are only loosely tied to reality. They are more strongly tied to the perception that a stock’s price will increase. So, if people started pouring money into stocks (or other assets) the price of those stocks would naturally rise as they become more scarce and sellers demand a higher price for them. Assuming the reasons for the dip remain, it would just result in the inflation of another bubble.

Take a look back at the whole GameStop (GME) rollercoster. Large investors expected the stock to crater and began taking short positions. Retail investors saw the dip this was causing and bought the stock in droves, forcing the price up beyond anything it had any business being. Eventually, that bubble popped and the stock has settled to a more reasonable (if still higher) level.

The AWS outage was primarily due to an “operational issue” related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in the US-EAST-1 region.

It’s not DNS
There’s no way it’s DNS
It was DNS.

Proving yet again that even large cloud butt providers have the same problems as everyone else.

It’s going to depend on what types of data you are looking to protect, how you have your wifi configured, what type of sites you are accessing and whom you are willing to trust.

To start with, if you are accessing unencypted websites (HTTP) at least part of the communications will be in the clear and open to inspection. You can mitigate this somewhat with a VPN. However, this means that you need to implicitly trust the VPN provider with a lot of data. Your communications to the VPN provider would be encrypted, though anyone observing your connection (e.g. your ISP) would be able to see that you are communicating with that VPN provider. And any communications from the VPN provider to/from the unencrypted website would also be in the clear and could be read by someone sniffing the VPN exit node’s traffic (e.g. the ISP used by the VPN exit node) Lastly, the VPN provider would have a very clear view of the traffic and be able to associate it with you.

For encrypted websites (HTTPS), the data portion of the communications will usually be well encrypted and safe from spying (more on this in a sec). However, it may be possible for someone (e.g. your ISP) to snoop on what domains you are visiting. There are two common ways to do this. The first is via DNS requests. Any time you visit a website, your browser will need to translate the domain name to an IP address. This is what DNS does and it is not encrypted by default. Also, unless you have taken steps to avoid it, it likely your ISP is providing DNS for you. This means that they can just log all your requests, giving them a good view of the domains you are visiting. You can use something like DNS Over Https (DOH), which does encrypt DNS requests and goes to specific servers; but, this usually requires extra setup and will work regardless of using your local WiFi or a 5g/4g network. The second way to track HTTPS connections is via a process called Server Name Identification (SNI). In short, when you first connect to a web server your browser needs to tell that server which domain it wants to connect to, so that the server can send back the correct TLS certificate. This is all unencrypted and anyone inbetween (e.g. your ISP) can simply read that SNI request to know what domains you are connecting to. There are mitigations for this, specifically Encrypted Server Name Identification (ESNI), but that requires the web server to implement it, and it’s not widely used. This is also where a VPN can be useful, as the SNI request is encrypted between your system and the VPN exit node. Though again, it puts a lot of trust in the VPN provider and the VPN provider’s ISP could still see the SNI request as it leaves the VPN network. Though, associating it with you specifically might be hard.

As for the encrypted data of an HTTPS connection, it is generally safe. So, someone might know you are visiting lemmy.ml, but they wouldn’t be able to see what communities you are reading or what you are posting. That is, unless either your device or the server are compromised. This is why mobile device malware is a common attack vector for the State level threat actors. If they have malware on your device, then all the encryption in the world ain’t helping you. There are also some attacks around forcing your browser to use weaker encryption or even the attacker compromising the server’s certificate. Though these are likely in the realm of targeted attacks and unlikely to be used on a mass scale.

So ya, not exactly an ELI5 answer, as there isn’t a simple answer. To try and simplify, if you are visiting encrypted websites (HTTPS) and you don’t mind your mobile carrier knowing what domains you are visiting, and your device isn’t compromised, then mobile data is fine. If you would prefer your home ISP being the one tracking you, then use your home wifi. If you don’t like either of them tracking you, then you’ll need to pick a VPN provider you feel comfortable with knowing what sites you are visiting and use their software on your device. And if your device is compromised, well you’re fucked anyway and it doesn’t matter what network you are using.

Because languages change over time and every once in a while someone comes along who insists they can “fix” the language by making a bunch of changes. They are probably right and the changes, if widely adopted, will probably make the language more sensible. However, since one of the common features of a living language is that it changes over time due to usage, oddities will start creeping back in. And the whole thing will need to start all over again.

Why can’t the U.S do the same, if Donald Trump is so bad?

We don’t have a legal mechanism for it. In the US Constitution, the people do not have a direct power of impeachment. As a Federalist system, the US Federal Government was designed as a government of governments. So, the power to impeaching the US President is given to Congress, not the people.

Impeachment is a two step process in the US. The House of Representatives (the larger of the two houses) is required to pass Articles of Impeachment which list the reasons for removal. Those are then taken up by the Senate (the smaller house) which tries the President and requires a 2/3 majority to convict the President.

While it’s easy to get a sense that everyone hates the US President, especially here on Lemmy, his popularity isn’t all that far behind previous US Presidents. Yes, he is net unpopular, but not so much that his removal is politically possible. His own party (Republicans) still supports him, and they hold majorities in both houses. As such, they are neither going to pass Articles of Impeachment, nor would they convict him (and most certainly not at the 2/3 level needed in the Senate).

Why are some Americans even supporting him?

The US is rather starkly divided, politically speaking, at the moment. And people will overlook a lot from the leaders of their own party, if it means keeping the other party out of power. Trump is the latest, and one of the more extreme examples of this. His claims that he could shoot someone and not lose any votes may be close to true. There was a special election in 2017 where the Republican candidate had credible allegations of sexual misconduct with a minor. This was for a Senate seat from Alabama, which one would normally expect to vote overwhelmingly Republican. Moore did end up losing, but is was closer than one would expect, when one of the candidates is likely a pedophile.

Again, if your only source of information about US politics comes from Lemmy, you’re getting a very skewed view. Yes, he’s not popular at the moment, but there is a large segment of the US population which agrees with him. And that means we’re kinda stuck with him until 2018.

Ultimately, it’s going to be down to your risk profile. What do you have on your machine which would wouldn’t want to lose or have released publicly? For many folks, we have things like pictures and personal documents which we would be rather upset about if they ended up ransomed. And sadly, ransomware exists for Linux. Lockbit, for example is known to have a Linux variant. And this is something which does not require root access to do damage. Most of the stuff you care about as a user exists in user space and is therefore susceptible to malware running in a user context.

The upshot is that due care can prevent a lot of malware. Don’t download pirated software, don’t run random scripts/binaries you find on the internet, watch for scam sites trying to convince you to paste random bash commands into the console (Clickfix is after Linux now). But, people make mistakes and it’s entirely possible you’ll make one and get nailed. If you feel the need to pull stuff down from the internet regularly, you might want to have something running as a last line of defense.

That said, ClamAV is probably sufficient. It has a real-time scanning daemon and you can run regular, scheduled scans. For most home users, that’s enough. It won’t catch anything truly novel, but most people don’t get hit by the truly novel stuff. It’s more likely you’ll be browsing for porn/pirated movies and either get served a Clickfix/Fake AV page or you’ll get tricked into running a binary you thought was a movie. Most of these will be known attacks and should be caught by A/V. Of course, nothing is perfect. So, have good backups as well.

Oh look, it’s an air mouse. But, you can’t change the battery, the licensing is all kinds of “fuck you”, and with all those gestures, I’m expecting a frustrating experience with the device constantly interpreting unrelated motions into inputs.

A number of years ago, the cybersecurity office I worked for had a case come through where a 3.5" floppy was found in a drawer in an area which should not have contained any writable media. The investigator on the case had a hell of a time tracking down a drive to read the disk. He got lucky that someone in the organization just happened to have a USB based 3.5" floppy drive which worked. I can’t imagine what we would have done with a 5.25" or 8" floppy. And such disks were known to exist at the site.

The other thing they don’t mention in the article is tapes. A couple decades back I was a sysadmin at a site where we were required to store data archives for 10 years. Given the age of some of the data, it had been archived to DAT tapes and put in storage. The problem was the drive to read those tapes was just as old and had a SCSI interface from about the same time period. So, we also had a vintage SCSI controller for the drive. That controller was for an ISA bus slot. And this was at a time where ISA was just about fully phased out. By the time I left, I don’t think we had a motherboard which could have accepted the controller. We might have been able to source a SCSI controller which used PCI and was the right generation of SCSI to interface with the drive. Then we would have had to hope that Symantec’s Backup Exec would still be able to read the tapes. Given Backup Exec’s propensity to just silently declare, “fuck your backups” this was not something I was hopeful for.

It’s really cool that these folks are doing this work. There are a lot of hidden difficulties but saving that data can be very important.

immediately lost my $20, never entered a casino again.

You didn’t lose it, you paid $20 for an education in why gambling in a casino is a bad idea. It could have been much, much worse.

As a species, homo sapiens have managed to adapt to every environment on Earth. We are the first species to have any measure of control over the natural forces which have wiped out countless other species. Diseases which once ravaged our populations are now gone or minor inconveniences and we continue to find new ways to mitigate the worst effect of many diseases. Should a large asteroid be heading our way, we are the only species which may stand any chance of diverting it or mitigating the long term impacts when it does hit us. While it was certainly not a “choice”, the evolution of higher cognition, problem solving and intra-species communications has put our species in a unique position of having a high degree of control over out fate. Sure, it has its downsides (we are the only species which might be able to end all life on Earth), but it’s been a pretty amazing run for us. On the balance, I think we’re in a much better position to keep going as a species than our ancestors or cousins (homo erectus, homo hablis, neanderthal, great apes, chimpanzees, etc).

So, was it a “mistake”, I think the current state of evidence is against that. While it may result in a really shit deal for individuals of the species from time to time, as a species I think it would be silly to consider it a mistake.

I really liked Primal, but part of that was the fact that they had the balls to kill the main character. I’m assuming season 3 is going to start with Zombie Spear jumping over a megalodon.

Short answer, no.

Long answer: We are a long way off from having anything close to the movie villain level of AI. Maybe we’re getting close to the paperclip manufacturing AI problem, but I’d argue that even that is often way overblown. The reason I say this is that such arguments are quite hand-wavy about leaps in capability which would be required for those things to become a problem. The most obvious of which is making the leap from controlling the devices an AI is intentionally hooked up to, to devices it’s not. And it also needs to make that jump without anyone noticing and asking, “hey, what’s all this then?” As someone who works in cybersecurity for a company which does physical manufacturing, I can see how it would get missed for a while (companies love to under-spend on cybersecurity). But eventually enough odd behavior gets picked up. And the routers and firewalls between manufacturing and anything else do tend to be the one place companies actually spend on cybersecurity. When your manufacturing downtime losses are measured in millions per hour, getting a few million a year for NDR tends to go over much better. And no, I don’t expect the AI to hack the cybersecurity, it first needs to develop that capability. AI training processes require a lot of time failing at doing something, that training is going to get noticed. AI isn’t magically good at anything, and while the learning process can be much faster, that speed is going to lead to a shit-ton of noise on the network. And guess what, we have AI and automation running on our behalf as well. And those are trained to shutdown rogue devices attacking the cybersecurity infrastructure.

“Oh wait, but the AI would be sneaky, slow and stealty!” Why would it? What would it have in it’s currently existing model which would say “be slow and sneaky”? It wouldn’t, you don’t train AI models to do things which you don’t need them to do. A paperclip optimizing AI wouldn’t be trained on using network penetration tools. That’s so far outside the need of the model that the only thing it could introduce is more hallucinations and problems. And given all the Frankenstein’s Monster stories we have built and are going to build around AI, as soon as we see anything resembling an AI reaching out for abilities we consider dangerous, it’s going to get turned off. And that will happen long before it has a chance to learn about alternative power sources. It’s much like zombie outbreaks in movies, for them to move much beyond patient zero requires either something really, really special about the “disease” or comically bad management of the outbreak. Sure, we’re going to have problems as we learn what guardrails to put around AI, but the doom and gloom version of only needing one mistake is way overblown. There are so many stopping points along the way from single function AI to world dominating AI that it’s kinda funny. And many of those stopping points are the same, “the attacker (humans) only need to get lucky once” situation. So no, I don’t believe that the paperclip optimizer AI problem is all that real.

That does take us to the question of a real general purpose AI being let loose on the internet to consume all human knowledge and become good at everything, which then decides to control everything. And maybe this might be a problem, if we ever get there. Right now, that sort of thing is so firmly in the realm of sci-fi that I don’t think we can meaningfully analyze it. What we have today, fancy neural networks, LLMs and classifiers, puts us in the same ballpark as Jules Verne writing about space travel. Sure, he might have nailed one or two of the details; but, the whole this was so much more fantastically complex and difficult than he had any ability to conceive. Once we are closer to it, I expect we’re going to see that it’s not anything like we currently expect it to be. The computing power requirements may also limit it’s early deployment to only large universities and government projects, keeping it’s processing power well centralized. General purpose AI may well have the same decapitation problems humans do. They can have fantastical abilities, but they need really powerful data centers to run it. And those bring all the power, cooling and not getting blown the fuck up with a JDAM problems of current AI data centers. Again, we could go back and forth making up ways for AI to techno-magic it’s way around those problems, but it’s all just baseless speculation at this point. And that speculation will also inform the guardrails we build in at the time. It would boil down to the same game children play where they shoot each other with imaginary guns, and have imaginary shields. And they each keep re-imagining their guns and shields to defeat the other’s. So ya, it might be fun for a while, but it’s ultimately pointless.

For someone who spends a lot of time alone and on a computer this will seem anathema, but go find some sort of physical activity (sport) and start engaging in it a few times a week. Not only does this get you out of the house, it creates opportunities to engage with people socially and it is good for your health.

I am very much a stay at home, be in front of my computer type hermit. I was this way most of my life and even being married didn’t help much as my wife is the same. A good Friday night for us currently involves playing Baldur’s Gate 3 until much too late. We have a very small circle of friends and don’t get out much at all. However, now in my late 40’s I am having some health issues and that finally gave me the push to get out of my gaming chair and get my body moving. I took up climbing at an indoor rock climbing gym and I really enjoy it. The regularly changing routes on the walls mean that I get to engage the puzzle solving part of my brain, and I am pushed physically as I try to get better. In between climbs I’m near other people with an obvious shared interest and can practice talking to other people by discussing the routes (social skills are like all skills, they take practice). And the exercise has made my doctor visits a lot less “you’re going to die horribly” and more “we’ve got things pretty well controlled”. I also just feel better.

So ya, go out and find some sort of physical activity you enjoy. Don’t be afraid to try new things, you’ll suck at them but that’s to be expected. The first step in being good at anything is sucking at it. Use that suckage to engage with other people and learn how to suck less. This will help you suck less at socializing. I won’t say that any of this is easy, it’s not. I know there is the hermit piece if me which always wants to fall back into just hiding out in my basement (literally, my office is in my basement). But, I’ve also made a habit of climbing 2-3 times a week and 3 years into doing that I am now looking forward to that time. I get excited when I walk into the gym and see one of the walls changed and now get to solve a new set of climbing routes. I still kinda suck, but not anywhere near as much as I did on my first day.

I can’t say there was any one person, book or thing which made me veer left, but it was a long process of my experiences and examining my self, my beliefs and the world around me. I started off pretty far right politically. I was raised in a Lutheran home, with parents who were mostly conservative. Like most children, my religion and politics started off following that of my parents and in my early adulthood I was enamored with libertarianism. One thing I do have to credit my parents with is a willingness to question my beliefs. When I would raise opinions, they would take the time to discuss and dissect those opinions. My father especially, was great at calmly and carefully pulling apart an argument and I sought to emulate that. My parents really instilled in me a willingness to ask questions. I also have an independent streak a mile wide, which has been both helpful and a source of several issues in my life. I think it also helped that my parents never enforced religion and accepted the Christian Bible as more allegory than history.

My move away from religion started first, and that one does have a catalyst from pretty early in my life. During elementary school I attended the “Gifted And Talented Education” (GATE) program. The GATE program was supposed to be an accelerated learning program for children who were good at math, reading and solving puzzles (this was well before the STEM buzzword). During those classes, we did a bit where we studied religion as a subject and one of the projects was for us to pair off and come up with a creation myth. My partner and I came up with a myth around a great wizard creating the earth in a crystal ball. It was nonsensical, as one might expect of 9 year old kids; but, it kicked off the spark of me thinking, “hey wait, if I can just make this stuff up, how do I know that other religions didn’t just make stuff up?”

Later as a teenager, I attended Luther’s Catechism (completed the whole thing and went through Confirmation, too). And that was actually detrimental to my belief in the whole thing. The more I learned about the Christian Bible the less it seemed to make any logical sense. The questions I would ask seemed to cause the pastor to fall back on “faith” as an answer far too often. And that was something I was coming to identify as a fancy way of saying, “it’s bullshit, but I won’t admit it”. By early adulthood, I rejected Christianity and shifted to Deism. It would take a few more years for me to give up the security blanket of religion altogether. The world is a pretty terrifying place if you don’t have that convenient lie of some all-powerful being watching out for you. My parents were pretty accepting about my shift to atheism and it made for some interesting conversations about it.

My political shift leftward is even fuzzier. As I said, I started off conservative due to being raised that way. When it came to Christian morality as politics, a lot of it just wasn’t a conscious thing. It’s amazing how much of it was “out of sight, out of mind”. The caricature of right-wing families sitting around the dinner table, talking about the evils of the left is just that, a caricature. We discussed mundane things, like school or work. Also, even before I gave up Christianity, I felt that George Carlin was pretty spot on about the Ten Commandments. I viewed the separation of Church and State as very important. Any reasonably reading of European history should leave one with an understanding of just how fucked things get when religion gets control of the state. Not that state control of religion has worked out any better. Let people believe as they wish, so long as they keep it to themselves.

On Economics, Communism was a dirty word and the distinction between Communism and Socialism wasn’t really something we paid attention to. My father being an Economics major, this has baffled me in later years. But, he’s dead now and has been unresponsive to questions about it. I’m likely still further to the right on economics than much of Lemmy. My view on Communism is that it’s unworkable in practice and will tend to devolve into authoritarianism. Also, that a centralized command economy is unable to effectively manage an economy at scale. While this isn’t much changed from anti-Communism bent of my parents, it’s now more based on my own views rather than learned views.

Where I have diverged is on my views on Socialism, taxation and wealth redistribution. Picking apart the knot of “Socialism == Communism” which I learned from a young age took a lot of work. To me, this is the most effective bit of propaganda the Right has ever rolled out. Communism, as put into practice, does not have a lot of good examples in history. If one is stuck in the mindset of “Socialism == Communism”, then this translates into Socialism having the same problem. Once you disconnect them though, it becomes much easier to recognize how many of the good things about our society (the US in my case) really are Socialism in action. And also that Socialism does not require the central command economy which Communism tends towards. It’s also easy to look at other liberal societies and recognize the advantages that certain social programs provide over their free market equivalents. Breaking through that bit of propaganda, that “Socialism == Communism”, likely did more to move me to the left than anything else.

One last thing I’ll mention, which is kinda a long answer to the original question, “who is an influential person or thing that shaped your progressive / left leaning views?” is watching the US’s foreign military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. I was in my mid 20’s when the World Trade Center was destroyed. I was driving to work when the radio show hosts announced the first airplane hitting. The radio show was a morning comedy trio type show and the announcement was really out of character for them. Once I got to work, the whole office was in the conference room watching the TV. We watched the towers fall live. This has an effect on you which is hard to describe. It’s also a good subject lesson in why terror as a political tactic is a bad plan. While there is certainly a fear response, that fear gives way to anger. And the US as a society when fucking nuts with anger. The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was an incredibly easy sell to the American people. And had Dubya been willing to focus on just that and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, I think the first decade of the 21st century would have played out very differently. But, he wasn’t content to hunt Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. And certainly not willing to hold the Saudi’s dictator to account for providing material support to the terrorists in the attack, Dubya decided to try his hand at nation building in the middle east. A lesson we should have learned from the UK/French fuck ups in the region and the US’s time in Vietnam.

I had a close friend in the US Army at the time. And I watched him be ground up emotionally over a 20 year career. Most of which was spent in Afghanistan and Iraq. I also recognized in him traits I had seen in my father, who had been in the Vietnam war. It made me realize how sadistically evil the GOP was. It’s willingness to send young men and women off on pointless foreign military adventures, all for oil and money. The constant drip-drip-drip of jingoism and greed just soured me on them entirely. Not that the DNC was all that much better, but it was a matter of degree. While some voices in the DNC called for an end to the wars, the GOP was busy purging any unbelievers. The more I saw behind the mask, the more I recognized the evil behind it at the GOP. I also remember voting for Obama specifically because I wanted to see an end to the wars in the middle east. Despite 8 years to get that done, he instead just piled more lives and money into nation building and death.

So, here I am now. I consider myself a liberal in much the same mold as Teddy Roosevelt, sans the sexism/racism which was prevalent in his day. I’d be glad to see the return of anti-trust laws, the re-expansion of social programs we lost in the mid 20th century. Seriously, we need the Public Works Administration back up and running. It’d be really nice to have it running before the AI bubble bursts. But, that ain’t happening under Trump. And once that bubble does burst, we’re going to need a robust social safety net to prevent mass unrest as we face another “once in a lifetime” financial crisis. I’m not hopeful about the next decade. Though, I do think the US system will pull though. We’ve been through some really rough stuff before and I believe we still have people willing to put things back together in the aftermath of the Poo Flinger in Chief.

They actually did replace the CEO which seemed like the least they could do. Whether or not the culture of “eh, who needs all these bolts?” has changed is still an open question. I for one still feel a bit better when I see an Airbus or Embraer jet roll up to the gate I’m boarding at.

With intermittent errors like that, I’d take the following test plan:

1. Check for disk errors - You already did this with the SMART tools.
2. Check for memory errors - Boot a USB drive to memtest86 and test.
3. Check for overheating issues - Thermal paste does wear out, check your logs for overheating warnings.
4. Power issues - Is the system powered straight from the wall or a surge protector? While it’s less of an issue these days, AC power coming from the wall should have a consistent sine wave. If that wave isn’t consistent, it can cause a voltage ripple on the DC side of the power supply. This can lead to all kinds of weird fuckery. A good surge protector (or UPS) will usually filter out most of the AC inconsistencies.
5. Power Supply - Similar to above, if the power supply is having a marginal failure it can cause issues. If you have a spare one, try swapping it out and seeing if the errors continue.
6. Processor failure - If you have a space processor which will fit the motherboard, you could try swapping that and looking for errors to continue.
7. Motherboard failure - Same type of thing. If you have a spare, swap and look for errors.

At this point, you’ll have tested basically everything and likely found the error. For most errors like this, I’ve rarely seen it go past the first two tests (drive/RAM failure), with the third (heat) picking up the majority of the rest. Power issues I’ve only ever seen in old buildings with electrical systems which probably wouldn’t pass an inspection. Though, bad power can cause other hardware failures. It’s one reason to have a surge protector in line at all times anyway.