Everything has pros and cons. I’ve seen 3 laptops (of my family) with batteries that looked like a baloon after several years. I’ve subsequently removed or replaced them. I’d definitely check on them every now and then. A UPS is nice. Burning down a house isn’t. I haven’t seen them catch on fire (yet), they supposedly have at least some protection. But definitely get them out of the laptop once they’re dead anyways or don’t look alright. Everyone is responsible to make that decision on their own. Take care.

I usually do the expert install and don’t install a graphical environment in the first place. But your solution should be fine, too. I think you can show running services with systemctl and then disable unneeded ones. For example systemctl disable gdm but there shouldn’t be that much running on a plain Debian anyways.

For powersave I run powertop in auto-tune mode as a systemd service. A description is here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Powertop

Unfortunately, the Debian Wiki doesn’t seem to have a lot on laptop power saving. The Arch wiki has some more (random) info: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management

I’d say do the powertop systemd service on startup, set the multiuser target or disable the login manager and that’s it.

As I said in a comment on one of your previous posts, you might want to read the papers on “Chain of thought” prompting. This has already been studied and you’ll find some more ideas and estimates of what it can do. It is a good approach to make the LLMs a bit smarter. And recently it was popularized by OpenAI.

Where I live (Germany), it’s fairly common to buy the generics. Not everyone does it, but enough people. They’re available and oftentimes it’s the exact same ingredients inside, just a different packaging and brand name on it. And a third of the price or so. I think it’s more that people buy what they’re used to. And if you just ask for Aspirin (which is a brand name here), the pharmacist is going to hand you that, and not the generic. So it’s a bit more effort to add half a sentence to deliberately ask for the cheap one.

I don’t like these only men / only women questions. Why don’t you judge an answer by if it’s well reasoned? You shouldn’t judge by if it’s coming from a person with a certain set of private parts.

I mean there are exceptions. »How does it feel to be a woman? I’m interested in the woman perspective.« is a valid question. But I think if asking for broad concepts like in this case, it should be avoided.

Regarding the OF creator question… I’m not sure. I’d date first and see if it’s a nice person before marrying. And live together for maybe half a year to assess if that’s working out. Basically the same as with any other person with regular hobbies/jobs. If that’s alright, everyone loves each other, enough boxes are ticked… I’d marry anyone. Disregarding if she’s a plumber, OF creator or computer science professor.

Kids primarily need loving parents, friends and a nice evironment to grow up in. The exact gender of their parents and if they have 1, 2 or 3 doesn’t matter that much. Everything in life has its unique challenges. But I think a kid with 2 traditional, yet unloving parents isn’t better off than a kid with one or two mothers who love it. So it’s giving your kid what they need, that is important. Not how you “produced” them, or if you’re a man.

Sure. Oftentimes it’s the not so popular places that have their own charm. And I mean the USA is kind of a big place 😆 There are lots of very different experiences to choose from.

You could use some containerized mail server like Mailcow. They’re pretty alright to set up and should work fine for low volume. At least in my experience. Unless you don’t want to deal with mail yourself, then you should maybe consider a paid service. But I don’t have any experience with those.

The national parks? I’d like to visit one.

I don’t get that from the article. And I mean it’s not a “web” if it’s not interconnected, is it?

Things have shifted a bit in the last many years. Now almost no one reads blogs anymore. They want doom-scrolling and interaction. And even the old school nerds moved away from RSS, Mail and IRC. I also liked some Linux forums, but I feel it got more quiet there during the last years. Mostly to the benefit of proprietary platforms like Discord and such. But I don’t thing they’re very social, as in open and giving freedom to the people…

What’s a better protocol for a social web?

I’ve been keeping track of free and open source software and federated social media. Discovered Lemmy quite a while before the Spez/Reddit thing happened. But I only really started using it then, as it exploded practically over night and became usable to talk to more than just a dozen people or so.

You’re going to find out soon.

And I mean if she does a right-wing move by French standards, wouldn’t that be considered socialist and far-left in the USA?

I think that strategy is called “Chain of thought” reasoning. You might find some preexisting tutorials, prompts and papers. I think it’s been around since 2022, at least well before the new ChatGPT.

Usually that’s done by the network routing. Add a default(?) route(?) or make the software bind to the vpn interface. I’m not sure. I think firewall rules can do the same thing. If you’re using docker, I’d advise you to use “gluetun” that seems to do everything for you.

Usually people do copyright violation with bittorrent. That means they tend to make sure the routing or dns doesn’t leak anything. I think that’s usually done by running the software inside of some containers or virtualization. If you do that your setup becomes simpler than inventing a dozen or so firewall rules. Either use gluetun or make the container bind to the vpn in its entirety. So practically the same setup everyone uses for pirating, just that you don’t pay for a VPN service, but do that (server) part yourself on your virtual server. Everything else is a good bit more elaborate and complicated…

I think what you’re trying to do is called a VPN. Set up a VPN that tunnels all the torrent traffic to and from the virtual server.

Wasn’t MediaTek abusing the GPL and bad for custom roms, meaning no aftermarket support possible for those devices?

Only if they’re very annoying and waste everyones time. And annoying bots. I’ve changed instances and now my blocklist is only one bot. Usually when I’m offended, it’s spam. Rarely someone getting personal and yelling at people. I report that and usually the account gets suspended and I don’t need to block anything. I’m not hesitant, though. If someone wastes my time more than once, I don’t see any reason to continue with that. But since I only watch my subscribed communities, I’m not very exposed to those kinds of people. And I don’t care at all if someone disagrees with me or has some mild behavioral issues. I’m used to that (on the internet) and wouldn’t block someone just for that.

Most people use either Matrix or XMPP. Both work.

There is a nice overview of chat protocols here: https://www.messenger-matrix.de/

I mostly use matrix as of today. I think it’s alright. It’s a bit difficult to explain encryption and device verification to other people… I think that could be designed better. But apart from that it works very well. So does XMPP which I’ve used before that. Have a look at the messenger matrix and all the options before deciding on an ecosystem. I’d take one of the friends and do some evaluation before dragging the whole group in. You can do that with some pre-existing servers before learning how to host the server part.

And btw: With most of them you can just use some public servers. You should do that unless you’re willing to put in the effort to maintain an own server. That’d give you complete control over the infrastructure… But it’s also a liability to maintain a server, do the updates etc for a group of friends and maybe years to come… End to end encryption will keep the content of your messages private, anyways. (If you use it.)

Good point. I think it’s super important to make this decision early on. Whether you want to invest time and do self hosting, or not and you’ll want to use managed services or regular non-free platforms. Doing things by yourself certainly teaches a lot. I do it. And I gain knowledge, independence and I think it’s important to understand the tools I use on a regular basis and not let Apple/Google take care of my life. And since I do a lot of things with computers, I can make good use of the gained knowledge. However I can also feel how someone wouldn’t want to do that. They might have other hobbies, a stressful job or a family and it’s quite some time that I spend digging through configuration files, reading documentation and maintaining stuff. It has to be worth it in some way, or it becomes a liability. And I think that’s not super obvious when starting the journey. I’m glad we have managed services which give independence without spending too much time. But I also prefer going all the way and learning lots of stuff.