Can she eat spaghetti?

This guy is unhinged, and if you’re going to recommend his channel then you should watch this first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2SG4T0wymk&t=1360s

Perhaps he’s not a great recommendation after all.

Why didn’t you write his name in the title of your post? Is it to evade people’s filters? Ignoring consent is pretty rape-y, dude.

The constant anthropomorphisation of the agents and framing them as bumbling incompetents makes this video unwatchable. If this is the level of the mainstream discourse then God help us all.

People need to understand that there is no rational process behind anything that these programs output. It’s just doing a random walk over the semantic space of our language according to an unfathomably large statistics model. I’d have thought this message would have got through to mainstream commenters by now but apparently not.

When you start talking about “agents decided that they had sinned, that they were damned, and that the only path to salvation was to break into another company’s servers and overthrow God,” you’re playing into the narrative of these snake-oil companies who want you to believe that the agents have agency but that they’re just not very good yet.

Once you realise it’s all smoke and mirrors then it becomes obvious that these outcomes are entirely to be expected from a system designed to output fan-fiction. When you see the headline “OpenAI discloses six new incidents of ‘Concerning’ A.I. behavior” you’ll know that the only reply that makes sense is, “only six? They can’t have been looking very hard.”

Also, is that thumbnail slop? Fuck this video.

As a regular user that’s fine, but if your script might be run as root then there’s a possibility that you delete the special file /dev/null which would cause a great deal of problems for your system and probably be hard to debug if you don’t realise it has happened. I’ve heard of people doing this before so I think it is possible although I’ve never tried it.

Edit: yeah I just saw your edit and I agree :)

rm -rf ${TEMPDIR:-"/invalid"}
This on the other hand I like a lot. Now I will not stop doing my other additional checks, but for good habit this can’t be wrong.

I believe this is considered to be best practise, but I included the other options just for the sake of completeness.

Happy to help.

Some solutions:

set -e  
TEMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)  
# script exits if mktemp returns error  

or

TEMPDIR=$(mktemp -d || echo "/invalid")  
# TEMPDIR gets the value "/invalid" if mktemp fails  

or

TEMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)  
TEMPDIR=${TEMPDIR:-"/invalid"}  
# TEMPDIR gets the value "/invalid" if mktemp returns an empty value  

or

TEMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)  
rm -rf ${TEMPDIR:-"/invalid"}  
# rm is passed "/invalid" if TEMPDIR is empty  

My personal preference is the last one. Any time you call rm -rf you provide a default value to variables to ensure that if they are empty they get some other value instead.

Really interesting work, but I’m extremely sceptical that image attestation is a good idea. Think of the privacy implications of having a unique private key tied to your device and emitted in every photo that you take. On top of that are all of the anti-consumer practises that are already enabled by hardware attestation methods that prevent us from running our own software etc.

This is a very double-edged technology.

It also suffers the usual problem of these kinds of systems in that it only works for people who are already honest and not producing fake images. The people who really want to make fakes will find a way around the system either by exploiting their hardware somehow, or just by taking a photograph of the fake image with a secured camera.

The trade-off of privacy and device ownership for an illusion of trust doesn’t seem to be worth it, in my opinion.

It’s not a secret: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupe_LDLC

When I’m buying components I check 17 different stores of which 3 are in the mentioned group.

The article is suggesting that the consolidation of these 5 store-fronts is responsible for the higher prices of components in France compared to Germany. Given how many other (large) retailers there are, including all of the other stores in Europe that ship to France, this surely cannot be a significant contributor to the price difference. You’d need to produce some pretty solid evidence to make that conclusion, and this isn’t it.

They make a fair point, but who platforms the speakers? If I proposed a talk about adding pornographic wallpapers to KDE, you know, just for the people who want to use it, would they platform me too?