Umm… Yes? What’s that got to do with anything?

aggressively pushed an AI service that, you guessed it, tries to read all the emails you write (…) (this article only covers the early portion of the debacle)

Did you actually read it, though?

1. They claim to respect privacy and - to date - have done nothing to suggest that they don’t.

2. It’s running on European-run Mistral.ai, which is subject to all the standard GDPR rules.

3. IT’S OPTIONAL (there goes the “aggressive push” bit)

4. NOTHING EXCEPT FOR THE PROMPT IS SENT TO MISTRAL (there goes the “reads all emails” bit)

I get it. People see “AI” and immediately panic. But it doesn’t seem like the panic HERE makes any sense at all.

quitting mastodon “because it’s too expensive to maintain”

I’d say having to either pay a guy to maintain the account or pay for software that allows cross-posting to both Twitter and Mastodon (with both having different limitations) gets expensive if you realise that they were getting minuscule engagement on Mastodon. It’s a shit move, but I get where they’re coming from. Same reason why Garuda Linux has a subreddit, but not a Lemmy Community.

but they’ve made a lot of other highly questionable decisions in a relatively short timespan

Nothing you’ve shown me so far is anywhere near the point where I’d be suspicious of them.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying they’re the end-all-be-all of privacy oriented services. There’s a bunch of stuff they do wrong (especially with how they farm engagement on their TT account), but as far as privacy and security themselves? I’ve yet to see an issue.

Yeah, if you cut up his Tweet into single sentences and then read each one completely outside of any context, then you could argue that Andy Yen got brainwashed into being MAGA.

But that’s not how language works.

HERE’S the full Tweet. For your convenience, I’ll quote it in full:

Great pick by @realDonaldTrump. 10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned. People forget that the current antitrust actions against Big Tech were started under the first Trump admin.

Nothing he wrote here are lies. The antitrust actions against Big Tech were started by Trump’s administration. The whole thing about banning Tik-Tok was their idea.

Appointing someone who’s known to be “anti-Big Tech” to the second highest position in the Antitrust Division at the DOJ objectively sounds great and is a good move.

So, with the Dems fighting to stop Trump admin’s moves against Big Tech, the tables were turned at the point in time the Tweet was written - in 2024, before the inauguration and the swearing-in of Trump!

I’m assuming that if you asked Yen today what he thinks about Trump and his administration, he’d have a vastly different opinion. But calling him a “Trump supporter” based off of that tweet is just… either ignorance, or some silly form of fundamentalism.

The whole “scandal” is bullshit.

Look at the linked tweet, mate. Trump appointed Gil Slater as Assistant Attorney General or the Antitrust Division.

Slater was known for being anti-Big Tech.

Yen is famously anti-Big Tech.

He calls the appointment a good choice.

That’s it. He doesn’t say “Trump is great”, he doesn’t say ANYTHING about Trump himself, he just comments that “appointing this person (who we know is anti-Big Tech) to a high position in the Antitrust Division is a good choice”.

But since we live in the world where saying “Trump, maybe, potentially, accidentally did something good” means you’re in a cult because you didn’t call to hang him for everything he does, we are where we are.

Alright, have you actually read his tweet?

I know you just linked it, but have you actually read it, the context, and given it some thought?

proton CEO starting spewing politcal BS

Context, please?

Hmm… There’s a connector from the card to 3-pin connector on the motherboard, but the description in the manual suggests that it only allows me to control RGB through it. As in: if I don’t connect it, they’ll just be on in whatever default state they’re in and that’s that.

I’ll look into this, thanks!

Oh, nice! Thanks for the info!

In general, I’d suggest being a bit more curious and playing around with stuff

Man, I’m 40, my 9-5 job is being curious, testing and retesting stuff. When I’m home, I just want to play some games…

Like you said you didn’t understand the options for OpenRGB and it sounds like you didn’t try installing it at all to eliminate it as an option before posting

Yeah. I’ve learned (through curiosity and testing, btw) that it’s super easy to break stuff in Linux, so I was a bit weary of installing third party software that does “something” to control the LEDs on a graphics card.

I did test it out yesterday, though. Sadly, does not recognise the GPU. It did recognise my mouse, though, which is neat.

It’s not like an app like OpenRGB is going to break your GPU or anything.

That’s the thing - I’m in a state where stuff works and is fine. That came after five reinstalls and three distros. Linux is not Windows - it’s fairly easy to do some unrecoverable* damage if you don’t know what you’re doing.

* yes, I know, technically everything is recoverable, but that requires knowledge and time, neither of which I have for this kind of stuff.

I would rather disable it on the OS level because I’m slightly paranoid that the dGPU dies at some point and then I can’t even access UEFI, because the iGPU is disabled.

Ooh, nice one! I’ll need to have a look for some detailed manuals/design diagrams of the Sapphire Pure, see if it’s mentioned.

Huh, a Windows VM might be a brilliant solution to this.

And now I’m wondering - could I maybe use something like Bottles or Wine to install the Windows software that handles Sapphire LEDs? Or would these apps not see the dGPU when virtualised like that?

someone suggested disconnecting the LEDs themselves, which is not something I’m willing to do with my 2-day old card

Sapphire Pure RX 9070 XT.

Sapphire Pure RX 9070 XT.

Ah, good to hear there’s hope! Thanks for that!

You can’t really disable rgb but you can set brightness with openrgb to 0.

I guess that’s good enough.

Do you speak from experience with 9070, or just in general as a “thing that OpenRGB does”?

Well, to be fair, there was A LOT of weird stuff happening. Steam wouldn’t open at all (unless called from the terminal), or would open with just a black screen (GPU acceleration issue). At some point, I’m pretty sure, I had three instances of Steam installed. It was chaos.

I have been using Steam and Heroic as flatpaks for a long time, and never had any issues.

I have two NVMe drives - 1TB and 2TB. I keep the OS and “regular apps” on the first one, games go on the second one. Moving the libraries was DIFFICULT on Flatpak. Had to use external software (Flatsomething, can’t remember right now) to give permissions and even then, for some reason, sometimes installation would just fail with a “drive error”. Oh, and I had to search online to provide the appropriate Steam path for Heroic because, by default, it doesn’t see Flatpak Steam.

I’m pretty happy with the state of the OS and GUI as it is right now. Just moved a couple of things around, basically.

I do have a problem with Flathub, though - in theory, it’s great. But I’m going to be playing games on this PC and Flathub causes MASSIVE problems for Steam and Heroic Launcher, their libraries and Proton compatibility. Love the idea, don’t like the execution.

Garuda (or maybe it’s an Arch thing?) does a phenomenal thing with AppImage files - when I launched the first one it asked me if I want to add shortcuts to Application Laucher and tuck the AppImage away in a safe spot, so that it doesn’t sit in Downloads. LOVE that feature.