I think you’re mistaken there.

Wine is a vanilla Linux executable that runs as the user who launched it. The Windows program it runs thus also runs under that user. That’s possible because Wine doesn’t do anything system-wide (like intercepting calls or anything), it already gave the process its own version of i.e. LoadLibrary() (the Windows API function to load a DLL) and can happily remap any loaded DLL to Wine’s reimplementation of said DLL as needed.

Here are, for example, the processes created when I run Paint Shop Pro on my system (the leftmost column indicates the user each process is running as):

Also, some advice from WineHQ:

After reading, the gist of it seems to be:

• Vanilla far-right indoctrinated dumbo (his vision: “Reds” welcome, “Blues” not, “Anti-Blue Propaganda” on public view screens)
• Wants exploitative capitalism on steroids with companies controlling everyone’s lives completely
• Claims current capitalism is only bad because it’s “woke capitalism” which he claims the “ruling class” is pushing
• Wants tech bros to butter up police and give security staff jobs to their children as a favor, i.e. intentional social classism

.

In short, just another out of touch entrepreneur who sells snake oil cures to people suffering in the current system, so that they may invite in the boot that stomps them down for good.

I love that example. Microsoft’s Copilot (based on GTP-4) immediately doesn’t disappoint:

It’s annoying that for many things, like basic programming tasks, it manages to generate reasonable output that is good enough to goat people into trusting it, yet hallucinates very obviously wrong stuff or follows completely insane approaches on anything off the beaten path. Every other day, I have to spend an hour to justify to a coworker why I wrote code this way when the AI has given him another “great” suggestion, like opening a hidden window with an UI control to query a database instead of going through our ORM.

I assume that Twitter still has tons of managers and team leads that allowed this and have their own part of the responsibility. However, Musk is known to be a choleric with a mercurial temper, someone who makes grand public announcements and then pushes his companies to release stuff that isn’t nearly ready for production. Often it’s “do or get fired”.

So… an unshackled AI generating official posts, no human hired to curate the front page, headlines controlled through up-voting by trolls and foreign influence campaigns, all running unchecked in the name of “free speech” – that’s very much on brand for a Musk-run business, I’d say.

Vox is a reputable and very thorough news source, though, usually worth the read.

This two-pager, for example, highlights false Twitter journalists popping in Baltimore to politically spin the recent bridge collapse.

Considering the teams tasked with containing political opinion manipulation campaigns were the first to go, I think that is exactly what the acquisition boils down to. A license to manipulate and meddle in public discussion for anyone rich or powerful enough (and of a political disposition agreeable to Musk’s increasingly GOP/Russia-indoctrinated mind).

It’s a “public town square” where the major approvingly smiles as groups of paid shills and remote-controlled opinion pushers insert themselves into discussions and roughen up people they notice going against the opinions they push.

I have a Windows VM that runs Visual Studio and a small number of developer tools so I can test my code on Windows. And another windows VM that runs Daz3D, Clip Studio Paint and the Epic Launcher (to download stuff from the Unreal Engine Marketplace).

Sometimes I misuse either VM by creating a snapshot and installing Garmin Connect so I can update the music library on my watch :)

SuSE Linux (a German distribution), some niche, single CD distrubution, Debian for a while and, finally, since ~2006, Gentoo on my servers and since ~2015 Gentoo as my desktop.

Debian and its derivatives never felt right for me. I find too many drawbacks with binary packages (non-configurable build options, therefore dependencies that can’t be disabled, relying on humans to keep ABI compatiblity, trouble integrating my own packages or unstable versions) and I just don’t like systemd.

It’s weird, I’ve seen more than enough of those “Install Gentoo” memes, but I find it the most pleasant system to run in the long term.

I’m a little put off by the inconvenient command line and the mandatory bells and whistles (flathub is nice and all, but must it be baked into the main executable rather than having the package manager as an optional thing on top?).

So far, AppImage just looks superior to me. Works without installing a runtime into my system, no need to become root and integrate an app into a system-wide managed package repository, I can just run it.

For my taste, framing CCC as a “Washington/Brussels” project is a far too close to what Russian smearbots do (link everything unpopular back to their current hate objects, i.e. foster resentment against the EU, liberals, etc.).

It looks very much like the CCC is an international organization funded and controlled by the far right.

Their website states:

Which countries is CCC active in?

The CCC works currently with tens of thousands of consumers and partner organizations in North America, Europe, South America, South Africa, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and many more.

Their colorful funding history:

Big Tobacco and right-wing US billionaires funding anti-regulation hardliners in the EU

Oh my, thank you very much for pointing that out!

I might have to give it another chance, then, perhaps I’ll shift my games partition back to NTFS once I can free up enough space.

I’m in the same boat. I’ve ended up using Paragon’s commercial ext4 drivers ($20) and while they absolutely work, they’re case sensitive and many Windows apps (especially Bethesda games) open their files with random upper/lowercase spellings that don’t match the files.

I’ve done this (shared 3 NTFS partition in a dual boot setup) from 2017 to the end of 2023 without issues.

The trick was to disable “fast startup” and hibernation. Otherwise Windows happily shuts down with the file systems in an inconsistent state. It’s just a question whether one can live with that in their Windows install.

I’ve used the old ‘ntfs’ driver that supposedly can’t write to… write files ranging from 100,000+ small files in folders to individual 200+ GiB files on NTFS partitions. It works pretty well and I have used it for video editing (few huge files), software development (many tiny files), Unreal Engine + Unity, Linux Gaming w/Steam and more. Rock solid.

After hearing that the ‘ntfs’ driver is supposed to be read-only, I switched to ‘ntfs3’ instead of using ‘ntfs3g’ (same code, but compiled into the kernel instead of running outside via ‘fuse’). From that point onwards, I’ve had major file system corruption nearly every day:

• Copying files into folders suddenly made 90% of other files in the folder disappear. Could be fixed by copying about 1000 random files into the folder and deleting them, then the missing files would come back into existence.
• Files that suddenly go bad. Can’t be written to, moved or anything. Often happened in software development when compiling my project, suddenly the intermediate build directory was bust due to undeletable files.
• Folders that suddenly contain themselves or one of their parent folders as sub-folders.
• Folders that contain a specific file infinity times. This way, I found out that even a harmless file manager like KDE’s Dolphin can become a behemoth that eats 100+ GiB of RAM and keeps trying to read the “list” of files in a directory without limit.

Personally, I’ll never use ‘ntfs3’ for serious work again. But ‘ntfs3g’ is generally considered very stable, maybe my issues are specific to ‘ntfs3’ or my RAID setup (weird nested mdraid thanks to Intel) is to blame.

My final ‘fix’ was to move everything to ext4 and buy Paragon’s $20 ext4 drivers for the dual boot Windows install. It’s only seeing any use once every 2 months. Sadly, these drivers are case sensitive even on Windows, rendering Bethesda games unplayable when installed on those partitions, for example.

A perfect demonstration of how Russian indoctrination works right here.

Original reporting: A major disinfo attack against Europe being prepared by Russia is uncovered through diligent investigation and published and reported on.

The response:

• 1. divert to farmer’s dissatisfaction with several policies
• 2. cast disinfo reports as underhanded attempts (by politician Russia wants gone) to arrogantly brush off farmer’s concerns (which the report never even related to)
• 3. claim Macron is selling out to EU (here, have a serving of anti-EU sentiment, too)
• 4. vaccinate reader against the disinfo being countered (“everyone who tells you otherwise belittles you and hates you, join us in our righteous anger”)

Emotional framing:

Nationalists, agricultural owner-operators, and farmers exposed to rising interest rates

“truckloads of exported Ukranian agricultural salvage” vs. “fresh French produce”

we’re getting an earful about how all these local yokels are hoodwinked by anti-EU Russian Propaganda

Macron for selling out the agg sector to financial interests in Brussels

“If you’re not in favor of (insert supposed evil acts described in lurid way), then you’re a secret spy for Putin and a traitor.”

Result: The reader comes out the other end an angry person, outraged about the plight of farmers, outraged again at disinfo reports supposedly serving to silence them, outraged once more at a France politician selling them out to the EU, EU painted as high-and-mighty villain, automatic anger against anyone who tells them a different viewpoint ready to trigger.

I’m expecting a really nasty autumn this year. A big chunk of Russia’s campaign against Europe is held up by Ukraine and they badly need a stooge US president again.

Musk also opened Twitter’s doors wide for state-sponsored manipulation and agitation campaigns. All protections are offline and the teams are gone, under the guise of free speech.

Considering that…

• The Republicans encouraged him multiple times to buy it
• He quickly stopped blocking (mainly Russian) state-sponsored social manipulation campaigns
• He allowed right wing agitators back on the platform
• He almost immediately banned droves of journalists that weren’t blindly Pro-Russia and Pro-GOP.
• He censored / banned all kinds of activists that pushed back against authoritarian (Russia-backed) regimes in other countries

…I have a hunch that he also served the interests of certain political actors with the acquisition. Public town square my lower backside.

I agree that a lot of human behavior (on the micro as well as macro level) is just following learned patterns. On the other hand, I also think we’re far ahead - for now - in that we (can) have a meta context - a goal and an awareness of our own intent.

For example, when we solve a math problem, we don’t just let intuitive patterns run and blurt out numbers, we know that this is a rigid, deterministic discipline that needs to be followed. We observe and guide our own thought processes.

That requires at least a recurrent network and at higher levels, some form of self awareness. And any LLM is, when it runs (rather than being trained), completely static, feed-forward (it gets some 2000 words (or 32000+ as of GPT-4 Turbo) fed to its input synapses, each neuron layer gets to fire once and then the final neuron layer contains the likelihoods for each possible next word.)

Indeed.

Perhaps I can sell them my new “ADE-651 Mark II” with advanced AI analysis? (Search “ADE-651” if you lack context and want to have a laugh).

Is this a case of “here, LLM trained on millions of lines of text from cold war novels, fictional alien invasions, nuclear apocalypses and the like, please assume there is a tense diplomatic situation and write the next actions taken by either party” ?

But it’s good that the researchers made explicit what should be clear: these LLMs aren’t thinking/reasoning “AI” that is being consulted, they just serve up a remix of likely sentences that might reasonably follow the gist of the provided prior text (“context”). A corrupted hive mind of fiction authors and actions that served their ends of telling a story.

That being said, I could imagine /some/ use if an LLM was trained/retrained on exclusively verified information describing real actions and outcomes in 20th century military history. It could serve as brainstorming aid, to point out possible actions or possible responses of the opponent which decision makers might not have thought of.