KubeRoot

Apertus was developed with due consideration to Swiss data protection laws, Swiss copyright laws, and the transparency obligations under the EU AI Act. Particular attention has been paid to data integrity and ethical standards: the training corpus builds only on data which is publicly available. It is filtered to respect machine-readable opt-out requests from websites, even retroactively, and to remove personal data, and other undesired content before training begins.

We probably won’t get better, but sounds like it’s still being trained on scraped data unless you explicitly opt out, including anything that may be getting mirrored by third parties that don’t opt out. Also, they can remove data from the training material retroactively… But presumably won’t be retraining the model from scratch, which means it will still have that in their weights, and the official weights will still have a potential advantage on models trained later on their training data.

From the license:

SNAI will regularly provide a file with hash values for download which you can apply as an output filter to your use of our Apertus LLM. The file reflects data protection deletion requests which have been addressed to SNAI as the developer of the Apertus LLM. It allows you to remove Personal Data contained in the model output.

Oof, so they’re basically passing on data protection deletion requests to the users and telling them all to respectfully account for them.

They also claim “open data”, but I’m having trouble finding the actual training data, only the “Training data reconstruction scripts”…

That is kind of the issue - sure, there’s janky workarounds, using an outdated version of proprietary software to try to block parts of the system from working when you don’t want them to… But in the end, that’s just one problem of many, so I kinda just never came back to windows after the incident. I just responsibly regularly update my system, and probably have a better experience and lose less time just updating manually.

I do mind that it forces updates, in the sense that it decides when it’s going to start downloading them, even if I’m in the middle of things, and also it takes too long while blocking any ability to use the machine while installing. Let me pause the download without waiting an actual minute for the update screen to load, and figure out a way to install them without completely blocking my computer, dammit!

Literally the last two RSS items right now are about how splitting packages will require intervention for some users (plasma and Linux firmware).

Maybe a nitpick, but the linux-firmware situation is different, it’s not about needing to install extra packages (they turned the existing package into a meta package or whatever it’s called), but about that coinciding with some changes that can break the upgrade process and require you to force uninstall a package before proceeding.

But yeah, good point about plasma, the only differences I can even think of are that plasma is probably more popular, and definitely more important to have working.

While I agree with the rest, does Lutris have backup options? I never actually checked, but don’t remember seeing any of that

It’s not being made “as painful as possible”, it’s just manual. Arch isn’t a distro that’ll preconfigure things for you so everything’s plug’n’play, it’s a distro that’ll give you access to everything and the power to use it however you like, but with that comes the expectation and responsibility to manage those things.

Installing arch manually is simply a good lesson in how your system is set up, what parts it’s made up of, in part because you’re free to remove and switch out those parts.

And sure, there’s no magic bullet to make sure a new user understands everything they did, but I think in the end, if you’re not willing to read, learn and troubleshoot, you might just want a different distro.

Isn’t installing extensions in it also a pain, since the Google webstore doesn’t let you install from it?

I guess to answer my own question, I looked it up - there’s an extension to let you do that alongside some flag changes, so I guess not too bad… But it’s another step on the list of things you’d want to do as a user

I had the impression cloud was about the opposite - detaching your server software from physical machines you manage, instead paying a company to provide more abstracted services, with the ideal being high scalability by having images that can be deployed en masse independent of the specifics of where they’re hosted and on what hardware. Pay for “storage”, instead of renting a machine with specific hardware and software, for example.

I think the trick might be that nothing is stopping you from using more than one 32-bit integer to represent addresses and the kernel maps memory for processes in the first place, so as long as each process individually can work within the 32-bit address space, it’s possible for the kernel to allocate that extra memory to processes.

I do suppose on some level the architecture, as in the CPU and/or motherboard need to support retrieving memory using more than 32 bits of address space, which would also be what somebody else replied, and seems to be available since 1999 on both AMD and Intel.

I got the impression that the PolyMC situation was quite different, with that developer masking it and doing a minority of the work, but after one change made by the rest of the developers they snapped, used their control over the repository to remove the rest of the maintainers and take sole control over the repository.

I was aware of some shenanigans and hostility from PolyMC and never used it, but I got the impression there were no major outward signs before that happened?

Eh, I’ve previously fucked up my bootloader, all you need to do to fix it is boot up a live image, mount your root partition, arch-chroot into it, then follow normal steps to set the bootloader back up - it’s not scary if you know what you’re doing, just time-consuming

I’m tempted, though I use rEFInd not grub, but fixing any damage should be easy with a live image handy…

I might be wrong, but I think that actually wouldn’t do anything, because grub is installed by the tooling from the package, not the package itself?

I do want to clarify: it’s not Linux itself, but specific distributions (or rather their package managers). As far as I know, Arch’s pacman would do nothing to stop me 🥰

I’m not sure if this is what you mean, but I do want to clarify - the drivers in the repository are still proprietary drivers from Nvidia, just tested and packaged by the distribution maintainers, dkms is just some magic that lets them work with arbitrary kernels with minimal compilation. Unless you’re using nouveau, which I don’t think is ready for most uses.

I’d definitely recommend against using drivers downloaded from a website, on general principles.

custom kernels don’t work with the drivers from apt

Check if there’s a dkms version - I know that’s the way it’s set up on Arch, if using a non-standard kernel you install the kernel headers, and dkms lets you build just the module for your kernel.

Funnily enough, I’ve seen opinions that Windows has awful HDR handling and Plasma is much better, but I don’t have a proper HDR display to check. I’ve also had some success with VR, though I haven’t played much on Linux. That said, support from software for those things for Linux is still widely lacking, so it’s not much consolation.

So like telling people to ride a bike, or use public transport, with the obstacle being that the city is built with car-friendly infrastructure that’s hostile to pedestrians and bikes? Yeah, sounds like an analogy alright ;D

…Brave is just chromium by techbros, right?

Archlinux is good if you accept that you’ll need to spend time to learn it, and that those moments might be frequent and unavoidable early on. Definitely wouldn’t recommend it to somebody who needs their computer to work, since a new user with no experience might find themselves breaking their boot images and spending hours trying to figure out how to fix their computer not booting.

So yeah, I think that’s an important caveat: if you don’t know Linux already, and you can’t afford to spend time learning and fixing your system, don’t use Arch.