Remote assistance is not rdp, it’s Microsoft’s support hook over the Internet, which requires telemetry to function. It is distinctly separate from, and not a prerequisite for RDP.

The rest of that I’ll have to look into, but disabling remote assistance seems sane in that context.

I wonder if other parts of the shutdown dialog or hover context menu have phone home functions that can only be disabled in roundabout ways; it wouldn’t be the first time. It would not surprise me to learn that the “which apps are preventing shutdown” dialog would be something that triggers a call to phone that data home.

I must be really old then!

It’s almost certainly related to cloud-init, (the canonical tool for handling deployment automation) or Ubuntu pro (extra long support for backporting security packages to older distros, plus some conveniences). They’re pre installed as a convenience to paid users of those services, that’s the (IMHO, quite reasonable) model they use to fund the distro. I would expect that some or all of that traffic would disappear if you disable/remove those two services.

https://cloud-init.io/

https://ubuntu.com/pro

Was backtrack before or after whoppix?

I’d say that the ctt winutil does a pretty good job. I’ve been running installs cleaned by it for a good year now without major issues

Yes, minisforum makes many bespoke solutions that are nas sized. What requirements are you looking for that they don’t meet?

Something like truenas (or a more user-friendly fork like hexos) on basically any hardware would get you there. If you want something in a 2-4 bay + server form factor, look at the options from minisforum. Level1techs have done some pretty good videos on their various offerings over the years.

That said… once you go full rack you never go back :)

“simple majority” is a technical term in this context, it refers to any number >50%. In the context of the Senate, that’d be a 51/49 split, or a 50/50 split broken by the VP.

There are some procedural measures that explicitly only require this simple majority to pass; most bills require a 60/40 in practice because that’s the threshold required to bypass a procedural filibuster. They at the very least require a simple majority + 0 members of a body opting to invoke filibuster.

Say what you will about the people we’ve currently elected; I just stand by it being a sound procedural practice.

Yes they were, so I’m offering you an actual theory as to why this may actually be true, yet difficult to “prove”.

Smoking was bad for your health long before anyone sat down and took the time to prove it. Autoregressive LLM tokenizer are a very new field of computer science and it’s going to take a while for the community to collectively understand everything we’re currently doing by trial and error.

I try to keep my commentary as apolitical as possible, so what I’ll say is:

If you believe that the current ticket is the Cthulhu/Lucifer ticket, imagine what they could accomplish if every bill only required a simple majority.

Anecdotally, I use it a lot and I feel like my responses are better when I’m polite. I have a couple of theories as to why.

1. More tokens in the context window of your question, and a clear separator between ideas in a conversation make it easier for the inference tokenizer to recognize disparate ideas.

2. Higher quality datasets contain american boomer/millennial notions of “politeness” and when responses are structured in kind, they’re more likely to contain tokens from those higher quality datasets.

I haven’t mathematically proven any of this within the llama.cpp tokenizer, but I strongly suspect that I could at least prove a correlation between polite token input and dataset representation output tokens

There are a lot of moderates that are hesitant about AOC. She’s expressed ideas like getting rid of the filibuster, which would be great while “your” party is in charge, but is one of the very few checks available for a minority party to halt truly controversial legislation. The extra steps are kind of dumb, but the foundational idea that legislation should at least require a 60/40 majority most of the time enforces an idea of compromise and representation in almost every bill.

I would shudder to think what a bad president could put through if unchecked by the opposition party in an essentially 50/50 politically divided populace.

I run clusters of both LSI-based hwraid and zfs at work. I strongly recommend zfs over hwraid. The long and short of it is hwraid hasn’t kept up with software solutions, and software solutions are often both more performant and more resilient (at the cost of CPU/memory).

For homelab scale, zfs is definitely the way to go, especially for archive data.

Wendel wrote up a pretty good guide for those looking to understand what makes zfs so good if you want to dive deeper. https://forum.level1techs.com/t/zfs-guide-for-starters-and-advanced-users-concepts-pool-config-tuning-troubleshooting/196035

Of course it was published in the penis nexus journal XD

I think that holds true in this case… but I’ll be damned if the ltt screwdriver isn’t the best hand tool I’ve ever owned.

When ML training farms run out of new text to train on, “they” may very well want your original writing too…

Me too brother, but I disagree with your assessment on value

An non-blacklisted residential IP address with reasonable throughput is valuable in and of itself. DDOS botnets, proxies to bypass geo blocks or to obfuscate illicit traffic, etc. Also your gaming PC could be used for distributed compute workloads of compromised, usually crypto mining.

Any hardware/connection has value if it’s “free”. It’s just a numbers game beyond that.

For now, ctt winutil does a pretty good job at removing the cruft. I’ve long since switched to debian for my daily driver, but as a remote-access sunshine host for games that require kernel level anticheat, it’s surprisingly usable.

For anyone looking to keep windows around in some capacity, I strongly recommend it. https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

Every packet you send/receive relies on passive security. Your nic drivers, the driver kernel model, all of the userland applications that sit on top of it. I get that in practical terms, your firewall will do a lot of the heavy lifting but there are passive rce vulnerabilities in previous unsupported versions of Windows that are trivially exploitable today.

Even if you trust their intent to not misuse your data, there are now a lot of live rpc hooks into your operating system, controllable by anyone who can compromise their azure implementation, which has happened at least twice in recent memory. If the data never leaves your device, and they didn’t have a way in, they wouldn’t have those things to lose in the first place.

The interdependency itself, regardless of intent, is inherently more dangerous than the previous separate paradigm that used to exist.