It doesn’t even have to be only for known devices. Once you’ve compromised one device, you can just phone home to have a full powered LLM do your work.

The only real use cases for this would be on closed networks with no internet access, or networks where the traffic is closely monitored. Like, yeah, if I’m trying to hack the CIA, maybe I consider something like this. For the vast majority of devices and networks, this is inefficient and unnecessary.

I mean, it is kind of cool. But vanishingly few organizations have tight enough security that this is worth doing.

I think people are right that the solution here isn’t to try a different project.

Instead of being confrontational about it, though, I’d recommend a different aproach.

evelyn: .lol 😜

you: I know! I know. The branding is pretty silly. But this really is the right tool for the task. Unesco and Wikimedia use it. And we can do our own branding for $50/month. 🤷

A lot can be fixed by just acknowledging people. They’re trying to evaluate something they don’t understand, and having a reaction. It’s not even unreasonable. The right thing to do is just acknowledge and move on.

Usually that’s all it takes. Don’t let yourself be embarrassed when you’re being reasonable. If they won’t move on, that’s the point where I start thinking about job applications somewhere else.

Yeah. Once you spend an afternoon debugging a failing cron job, the 5 minutes needed to write the boilerplate starts to feel pretty ok though.

I’ve never had to spend an afternoon debugging a failing systemd timer in the years since I made the switch.

It’s not. But the systemd timer has more robust logging and monitoring, and much more explicit and readable syntax.

Once you get used to systemd timers, it’s really hard to see why you wouldn’t use them if your system has systemd. Unless writing crontabs by hand makes you feel like a hacker I guess. I’m not even being totally sarcastic about that - there is a fun retro feel to cron.

GPL (and copyleft generally) gets way more attention than it should. In the wild, MIT and similar permissive licenses are by far the most common. Linux is on GPL, but that may be a historical artifact as much as anything. I don’t know if Linus himself would choose it if he were making the choice today.

The wider FOSS community, in my experience, leans permissive rather than copyleft. The copyleft people are just loud.

EDIT: To be clear, when I say I don’t know what choice Linus would make today, I don’t mean that I’m skeptical he’d choose GPL. I literally just mean that I don’t know. He’s been quite clear that he’s not a principled believer in copyleft, but it does have real advantages for a project like the Linux kernel.