That’s surprising. I have an older version of coreutils (9.7 from Debian 13) that doesn’t produce the links and formatting. I’m running bash and the behaviour you’re experiencing isn’t reproduced.

Aliases aside, I wouldn’t expect the shell to be the cause. None the less, I installed version 4.0.2 of the fish shell and ran the same command in it and didn’t see any control characters. But that’s not really surprising - my old version of ls doesn’t produce them. So I ran ls | less because even with my version ls colour highlights files by type, but in the pipeline to less, there were no codes.

If I run ls --color=always | less then I do see codes in the less output.

You might check your environment variables to see if CLICOLOR_FORCE is set.

Otherwise, I am out of ideas.

I would say your ls shouldn’t be working that way: when it detects that it’s standard output isn’t a terminal, it shouldn’t be outputting the control codes. Which makes me wonder what version of ls you are running.

edit: what is the output from alias ls and what happens if you run \ls --help | less?

I’m quite surprised he doesn’t have American Intelligence on the list.

Today I was looking at the Intel IME issue.

Intel has the following advisory: Intel® Management Engine Critical Firmware Update (Intel-SA-00086)

Intel does not provide updates to the software in their IME. They claim they cannot do so due to the system manufacturers possibly having customized parts of the system.

Lenovo no longer supports this model. The last IME update from Lenovo was to version 12.0.95.2489, release by Lenovo 2025/02/13.

This predates to latest vulnerability discoveries in the Intel IME. Neither Intel nor Lenovo will provide any further updates for this model. So it will remain vulnerable.

You should consider this, when you consider any older laptop with an Intel CPU.

Otherwise, I am quite happy with it. It is physically more robust than my previous laptops and it works very well with Debian. But it isn’t a perfect solution.

I am happy with the refurbished ThinkPad T590 that I purchased earlier this year. It works well with Debian. The primary reason I purchased it is because I couldn’t get a replacement keyboard for my not so old Dynabook. No such problem with this one - parts are readily available.

True enough. Maybe in an ideal world, they would both lose.

I think the way they are operating now is commonly called predatory pricing.

I don’t know if there is a potential for a profitable business that covers all the costs. Possibly the direct costs, but I think not if they had to fairly compensate those who created the intellectual property they consumed to train their models, and much less likely if they had to pay the indirect costs. They might, some day, compensate creators a little, like Google shares a pittance of their ad revenue with some creators. But it is unlikely to be anything near a living wage.

That’s because, thus far, they get away with choosing not to distribute any of their trillions of dollars to the suppliers of the information they consume - money has only gone to the suppliers of hardware and power, and to influencing politicians and rewarding investors. That’s their choice, and they should not be allowed to continue to make that choice. Good luck to the NYT.

I agree. The whole situation seems wrong. Whatever the truth, something is wrong. If I had done what they did, I would be in prison by now, pending my trial in 10 or 15 years. But for them, it’s at best gross negligence but it seems more like willful hacking to me, and no consequences. Swap ‘delete the production database’ with ‘commit criminal hacking and wire fraud’ and you have more like what happened. And then train and reward the intern for being ruthlessly aggressive and persistent, with complete disregard for law and morality and what little internal rules, policy and monitoring remains. And then act all surprised that the intern did something they shouldn’t have, as if there was no way to know what would happen. It’s beyond belief. And even if they are exaggerating what the LLMs achieved for the sake of marketing, I don’t see anyone saying that huggingface wasn’t hacked. The lack of morality is sickening. I think the LLMs themselves are problematic and a risk, but the people developing and using them are far worse. They’re just evil.

You wouldn’t want to waste good money on things like buildings and roads for those pesky humans on the reservations, would you? I mean, you could, but think of the losses.

If it’s not taxpayers it will be pensioners and people with insurance, when the institutional investors lose their investments in AI. Either way, the wealthy won’t lose.

I think the essence of it was that to continue to improve the quality of the content he needed help. He hired help, including full time, part time and freelance / contract people. But then he was spending time managing the team. As the team grew, his sense of responsibility to the team grew. He was spending less time on the content but more time in total. He learned that he wasn’t a very good business manager and he didn’t enjoy it like he enjoyed producing the content. He didn’t need capital. The cash flow was good. But he was exhausted, he needed help to run the business well and he wanted to spend more time with his family and that is what the investors offered: to manage and grow the business, allowing him to spend less time and focus on what he most enjoyed.

I don’t know about Fern but I just this week saw an interview with Derek: The Real Reason Veritasium Sold His Channel. It’s really interesting review of the history of Veritasium, from the beginning. He still has some ownership, but less than 50%. Maybe I missed it, but I don’t recall him saying who the investors were.

It’s not one lake. It’s now two lakes, divided by an international border. Canada’s Lake Ontario, north of the border and Trumps Lake America south of the border. Trump and Apple can keep their petty political maneuvers to themselves. As if it makes America great again and wins the trade wars or the war with Iran, as that seems to be the delusion.

The map in the article shows the American name for the lake on the Canadian side of the border and doesn’t show the Canadian name for the lake at all. Thus far, I’m not favorably impressed with John’s performance. But then, the people using his maps aren’t his customers.

First challenge is to find ones worth following. Sometimes when you search for something in particular, a blog will appear in the results. Sometimes when you watch or read something else, a blog will be mentioned. Link aggregator sites like lemmy, hacker news (I like brutalist hacker news), lobste.rs and similar often have links to blog posts. If you look up interesting people, you may find their own blogs or blogs by people who write about them. Interviews often include links or references to the guests presence online, including their websites or blogs, if they have them. Keep your eyes open. Watch and read what is interesting to you. You will find them.

Once you find an interesting blog, they almost always have a way to subscribe. Usually, you provide your email address and get an email when there is new content or some have an RSS feed. Sometimes you have to create an account. Sometimes content is free. Sometimes a paid subscription. Often a combination: some free teasers and a subscription for full or more interesting or in-depth posts.

I don’t know him. What’s a Q?

As has been pointed out, books used to be the primary sources. Magazines also, but most of them are gone now, or full of slop. Be cautious of newer books: many of them are slop. There are some very good blogs, forums and personal websites still, but finding them is more difficult, given the degradation of search engines and pervasiveness of slop. None the less, you can still find them and keep your own curated list of the ones you find relevant and helpful.

At college, you can focus on learning, rather than just getting the grades by whatever means possible. It will be hard. It always has been. Cheating isn’t new, even if the means have changed with the advent of LLMs. But what others do doesn’t stop you from actually learning. Talk to your professors. Most of them probably want to help you learn.

Most important is to understand and verify everything for yourself. Do your own research. Compare multiple sources. Learn to think critically and carefully. And practice. Put your ideas to the test. Many just want the grades, but there are others who want to learn. Find them and discuss with them.

LLMs are unreliable and fraught with legal, ethical, environmental and social problems, but they are not useless. Maybe it is best for you to avoid them entirely for a while, until you get yourself sorted and learning for yourself. But then you might consider using them, skeptically: always reading, understanding and verifying or correcting what they produce. There is misinformation everywhere. LLMs produce it more profusely and sometimes more convincingly than people, but you must learn to evaluate and exercise your own understanding and judgement, no matter the source.

It’s true, but we’re all conflicted and imperfect. Give him credit for being open to other ideas, despite the conflict.

While unusual and on the face of it perhaps not very relevant to a project to develop an operating system, in the context of freely and generously sharing the project, explicitly open to all, including all religions, and a meritocracy, I don’t find sharing one’s sincere beliefs offensive. While the focus might be on computers and software, the open source community is, first and foremost, a community of people with values that lead them to share their work. As long as he is sincere in his beliefs, I respect his promotion of them, even if I don’t entirely agree with them. Better that than the likes of Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk and so many others.