You can do quite a bit with 4GB RAM. A lot of people use VPSes with 4GB (or less) RAM for web hosting, small database servers, backups, etc. Big providers like DigitalOcean tend to have 1GB RAM in their lowest plans.

Just keep an eye on the power usage, depending on how expensive electricity is in your area. I live in California which has very expensive electricity, and buying newer, more power efficient hardware works out cheaper than 10+ year old Xeons over the long run, even if you get the Xeon system for free.

Microsoft are going to significantly limit what can run in the kernel (including anti cheat) after the Crowdstrike issue. A side-effect of that should (hopefully) be better Linux compatibility.

Neither my wife nor I own any Apple devices, but living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’m surrounded by people that do. There’s no need for other companies to copy Apple’s questionable decisions.

SearX is dead; you should use SearXNG now.

“Ultra96” sounds like it could have been a codename for the Nintendo 64.

simplified naming scheme with labels like ‘Pro’ and ‘Max.’

How is that “simplified”? Which one is better, Pro or Max?

Actual simplified naming would probably be names like “Basic”, “Business”, “Gaming”, or numbers like what Intel does with Core 3/5/7/9.

How though? Is “pro” better than “max”?

Except the Nvidia support. I need the actual proprietary driver for cuda

As far as I know, the open-source driver supports CUDA now, as long as you’re using version 560 or above and the latest CUDA packages. https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-transitions-fully-towards-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/

We’ve been using the open-source driver with workstation-grade cards at my employer for a while. The open-source driver didn’t get full support for consumer-grade cards until version 560 which was only released around 6 months ago.

No worries - it’s a pretty common misconception that tech companies sell data. I’ve worked on ads systems at big tech companies so I’ve seen some parts of how it works. The companies are very protective of their data as it’s essentially their highest-value asset. Employees can’t see any of your data either - it’s very tightly locked down, with strict ACLs and audit logging.

Large advertisers generally don’t get any special access either - the tools/apps that large advertisers use are mostly the same as what small advertisers / individuals can see and use.

less interest than Google in selling data for advertising

Google don’t sell data. The data is what makes them valuable, so it wouldn’t make sense. If they did sell data, the other big tech companies would just buy their data to remove their competitive advantage.

What Google actually sells is your attention. Advertisers can target people based on demographic data, things you like, etc, but the advertiser never sees the data used for targeting.

You can use Google and Facebook’s Ads Manager sites yourself and see exactly what advertisers see.

On the other hand, Apple mostly keep their collected data for their own ad network. Yes, they have one - it’s mostly just used for ads for “recommended” apps in the app store, but last I heard, they have plans to expand it.

I’m curious as to whether the industry will start moving from last-touch attribution to first-touch (or multi-touch) attribution instead.

The only reason last-touch (last affiliate link gets all the credit) is commonplace now is because it’s easy to implement. No need for long-term tracking. What the industry really wants is either first-touch (first affiliate link or ad you click gets the credit) or multi-touch (the payment is split between every affiliate), depending on who you ask.

They’d replace affiliate link cookies with their own

Practically every coupon site does this too though, as do other coupon extensions.

The fact that BugMeNot and RetailMeNot grew so huge is interesting. They were created by two Australians, and for a while were only popular in Australia.

but please don’t hard-code ~/.config or $HOME/.config. Use the XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable, with $HOME/.config as a fallback if it’s not set.

Many programming languages have a cross-platform implementation of this built in to their standard library. C# has Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData) which uses XDG_CONFIG_HOME on Linux, local AppData on Windows, and whatever is the correct thing on MacOS (not very familiar with how things work on MacOS)

I switched back to Linux on the desktop earlier in the year. I hadn’t used it on a desktop/laptop since 2008 so I was pleasantly surprised how much better things are these days (except suspending a laptop which seems to still be kinda broken). I’m glad we don’t have to deal with AMD proprietary drivers (fglrx) any more.

Something that wasn’t immediately obvious to me, coming from the BIOS era, was that if you want to install multiple Linux distros, you just need a single EFI partition and they can all use it.

I also share my /home partition between Debian testing and Fedora, but that might be risky. I’m planning to remove Debian soon anyways. I love it on servers (and have used it for over 20 years for that purpose) and it’s what I was trying out initially, but on a desktop, Fedora has newer packages and a better out of the box experience. I’m also forced to use Fedora at work (I can choose Windows 11, MacOS, or Fedora) so I may as well use it on my personal computers too.

it’s not going to be accidentally hit

How often do you accidentally press a power button on a desktop computer? I don’t even do that on my laptop, where the power button is close to the keyboard.

This is the best post I’ve read about it so far: https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoor