I’m generally more of a Debian user, when I use Linux at least, so anything red hat based doesn’t even occur to me to recommend. I generally don’t get involved in distro discussions though.

My main interaction with Linux is Ubuntu server, and that’s where my knowledge generally is. I can’t really fix issues in redhat, so if someone is using it, I’m mostly lost on how to fix it.

There’s enough difference in how redhat works compared to Debian distributions that I would need to do a lot of work to understand what’s happening and fix any problems.

I dunno if I’d say any distro of Linux is really beginner friendly.

It takes quite a bit of learning the ins and outs of operating systems before Linux makes sense in any capacity.

If you’re just looking to run a few basic apps like discord/slack/teams/zoom, and run a browser, then sure, just about every distro can do that without trouble, and can be configured to be as “friendly” as Windows, with a few exceptions.

But anybody who wants to do intermediate/advanced stuff with little to no prior Linux knowledge? I’m not sure any distro is much easier than others. Again, with a few exceptions.

The exceptions are distros that are almost intentionally difficult to use, or that require a high level of competency with Linux before you can attempt to use it.

There’s always a learning curve, that learning curve is pretty much always pretty steep.

I’ve been using Linux for dedicated servers for a while and I don’t use Linux as a desktop environment, in no small part because despite having a fairly high level of competency with Linux, I don’t feel like I know enough to make Linux work for me instead of the other way around.

And I’ll do it again.

But if the scammer is using a bot too, then it becomes a null sum, since the bot can have thousands of conversations at a time.

Spam bots should be taken down more than engaged with. If there’s a real scammer on the other end, yes, absolutely, waste that person’s time as much as you can, and as much as you like. People have made entire careers out of trolling them and I endorse it. Scammers are the worst people, taking the hard earned money of his people to try to convince them of a lie just to get their money. This is sometimes true with normal sales, caveat emptor and all that, but when the entire premise of the interaction is based on deception, then to me, it crosses over into scam territory (looking at you, entire duct cleaning industry).

Wasting time making a bot to talk to spam bots is not very helpful. If you can identify that they are not properly filtering their inputs, I would invite you to use an SQL injection and talk to them about little Bobby tables. But by using a bot of your own to talk to spam bots will have such a negligible impact on the harm that scammers have that it’s basically not worth doing. Unless you can scale up your bot to the point of overwhelming the scammers bot into disfunction, it’s not going to provide any real help to those currently being scammed by the bot. Scaling up to the point of getting the bot to malfunction, is also something I would approach with caution, since you have no way of knowing what that limit is, and in the case of cloud systems, the capabilities of the bot may scale far and above what any attack against them could reasonably produce.

If they’re using cloud resources and you can verify that, then there’s a good chance you can hit them financially if you push their bot to its limits since cloud compute resources are not cheap. If you can generate enough traffic for them that the bot scales up significantly, then yeah, you may be successful in forcing the scammer paying for that to shut it down. The trick is doing so without incurring significant costs yourself. It’s still likely, however, that the scammer will simply abandon it (and not pay their bill), and restart the whole thing again later with a new telegram/whatever chat system account later that you won’t be able to track down in a reasonable timeframe.

So it’s somewhat insane to try, it’s easy for them to change the bot to avoid your usage attack and difficult for you to keep track of them and which account they’re using now.

We need to make it globally illegal to run these kinds of remote scam operations, and strongly prosecute anyone doing it. Their ill gotten gains need to be confiscated and sent back to their victims (as much of it as possible), and they should be imprisoned for a very long time.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the way. This is the only way. Legal reprocussions with strong penalties and strong law enforcement of those legalities is the only way to ensure that we crush this trend permanently. Most countries, even those where we see a lot of scamming coming from, have laws that enforce against scams; but the enforcement is very spotty, and IMO, the ramifications of being caught are far too light.

Right now, most civilians don’t really have any good recourse beyond ignoring it. Scambaiters are pretty common and they’re doing good work, even working with law enforcement to get these scammers behind bars, but even that falls far short of the action required to stop such things from continuing to happen. We need strong legislation agreed upon across international boundaries with full task forces to find and prosecute these assholes; we don’t have that, and so it continues.

If you’ve thought of it, they’ve thought of it. Plainly, there are already scam bots floating around, most of the time engaging with them makes it quite clear that they are not actual people, as long as you’re paying attention. Their side oftentimes is completely automated. Get paid send info. The “lifelike” messages they send are canned and only vary slightly from message to message.

I swear, we’ll implement bots to “combat” this stuff and it won’t do anything because it will largely just be bots talking to bots forever. There’s already a nontrivial amount of internet bandwidth consumed by spam email that just gets thrown away as it arrives, now, more and more resources are going to be poured into having bots talk at eachother for centuries without getting anywhere.

We may experience some turbulence then explode.

May your filament be strong and plentiful and may all your beds be level.

This comment made me smile, thanks!

Imagine, if you will, being so boring that you have to pick fights about how people word things.

Listen, he said “refugees” and maybe that wasn’t the right word. But you know what? Both you and I both understood what they meant by that.

The point of language… any language is to portray ideas between different people. In that context, OP did a fantastic job of that. we understood. Job done.

Instead of providing any discussion of any value or merit, and apparently having the personality of wet cardboard, you chose to critique his word choice on how to describe those displaced by the issue.

Nobody was confused. Nobody is going to conflate the struggles of actual refugees with the inconvenience of feddit being unavailable. There’s no confusion here. Fighting to reclaim the word “refugee” when nobody gives any removeds about it (except you apparently), is certainly not going to win you any awards. I promise that refugees care less about what they’re called, or who appropriates the term for inappropriate uses, and they care more about migrating to a country where they will be safe from harm.

Nobody is standing up and being proud of their refugee status, demanding that we treat their term with more respect… I know refugees, and I would think that all of them would have preferred to not have been forced to become one. Nobody chooses to be a refugee, you do it because you’re scared for your life. Scared of your neighbors, government, and national authorities. Nobody wants that.

I know that refugees are proud of the fact that they now live in a place that’s not like the place that they left, but I have yet to meet one that’s proud that they had to flee.

I’m pretty sure they couldn’t possibly give less of a removed about someone misusing the term “refugee”.

The joys of federation.

If you’re logged in on kbin, looking at a community on feddit while feddit is down, then in all likelihood, kbin simply holds the most recent copy of feddit, and it’s only showing you what it already has.

This is kind of the root of federation. Different, but the same.

There’s a lot of people in this discussion taking about how raspberry Pi and the pi foundation isn’t worth your money, whether on principle, or just dollars per unit of compute.

I get it, but I have a question. Is there a competing SBC that has official PoE support? I know there’s half baked ways to sort that out separate from the device, but I have a few edge cases where the last viable option was the pi 3B+. The official pi 4 case is horrendous for airflow, and third party cases usually either assume you want no protection (and all the airflow) or you want to handle thermals by contact pads passively (making it difficult or impossible to use the PoE hat), or are just as bad as the stock case for airflow, but they have enough room inside to add a hat, in which case, why go third party when the official case is equally terrible?

The pi 3 had a PoE hat, and a case you could take the top off and get decent airflow. Too bad the fans in the first gen PoE hat are unicorns in terms of power draw, with no way to adjust the power curve for the fan connector to suit a different fan, and since they’re unicorns, you can’t find them for purchase, and if you find something remarkably similar, they’re still slightly different enough that they don’t work (I’ve tried). So the fans burn out and IDK, good removeding luck I guess. Buy a new PoE hat?

Then there was the gen 2 PoE+ hat which released alongside the pi 4, which supposedly works with the 3 as well, which I haven’t tried yet, but I’m planning to.

In every case, I have done network monitoring and service nodes that aren’t exactly local to a power receptacle and they need PoE. The pi 4 eliminated itself because of the garbage case design of the official case and the lack of thought by those doing the third party cases… so I’m looking at the 5 like, finally, they got it right.

Now everyone is talking removed about the pi foundation, which I can completely understand, but for the application I need these for (and my pi 3’s have been in service for like ~5 years and probably need to be refreshed), what other option do I have? What’s decent with a good case and PoE input? PoE or PoE+ doesn’t matter, I just need to be able to package it up into a relatively small footprint for the application.

Anyone have any suggestions? I’m all ears. I’ve googled till I’m blue in the face and I can’t even find an SBC that has an option for PoE, I never got to looking into whether it has a decent case or if it will run my software…

I tried to watch this, and I kept shipping forward until he said something on topic… after 15 minutes, he got to the title of the video.

That’s 15 minutes of random anecdotes, intro, discussion with the crowd, and just general chatter that didn’t have anything to do with RISC-V, before he even said the title of the talk.

I just quit at that point because I don’t care about what places he recommends to go visit or eat at in whatever city he’s in that I am not, and might never be. I finally got into something resembling content and my brain was so taxed trying to figure out how someone can speak so many words, yet say absolutely nothing, that I could not go on.

I like RISC-V. I want to see more RISC-V stuff on the market. I don’t want to sit through an episode of diners, drive-ins and dives just to get info about it.

IDK about anyone else, but I first heard this story in the form of a song, and I still enjoy listening to it.

https://youtu.be/oHNKTlz1lps

I installed Gentoo once. ever. I use Ubuntu now.

This was in the mid 2000’s and I went so far as to compile the kernel myself and build out all the packages. I was so exhausted at the end of it all, that I’m pretty sure I put away that system and never looked back. It’s quite the achievement, but I don’t wish to repeat that experience.