Is a bit of an oxymoron.
You can give them all kinds of instructions, such as "never delete files", "never pish to github without my approval". It doesn't matter. They will forget when their contedt runs out. Just like they forget almost every other piece of important data. Like the name of the host it was connecting to for hours before.

You just cannot trust these agents. Everything needs to be locked by default. And you should only whitelist actions that you have a way to check, and revert. In particular, never give root. I wish I could run an agent under chroot, but it becomes useless unfortunately.

To stop unwanted github pushes I stored my tokens in a script owned by root, and manually run sudo to load them in the tetminal. My agent isn't root and can't find out. I still had to revole the tokens it had previously cached. I fear some day it will crawl the web, find a zero day privilege escalation, and get the credentials anyway. Actually, this would be an interesting test - roll back to a vulnerable version of kernel/sudo, and prompt the agent to try to exploit it.

I still have the XU4Q. But again, too many bugs in their ported distro. And it's 32-bit only, so now it's a paperweight with Linux having dropped 32-bit support.

A VM has no applicability to my embedded applications. For AI agent, I agree a VM is OK. But the security problems with agents go far beyond VMs. They need access to the Internet to access remote LLMs. But that means they also browse the web, post stuff, and so on. One agent yesterday uploaded stuff to github as it was working, when I did not ask it to. I had a fine grained access key just for that repository fortunately, and local backups, so it could not do too much damage, but still. If you store other credentials in your environment somewhere, the agent may well find them, and use them. It may mess with files outside your project directory. Security wise, these agents are a real mess, and need to be contained somehow. These are general problems with agents, and I don't see what those SBCs really contribute to solving them.

I tried an Odroid XU4 before, and there were lots of driver/kernel bugs. I had an Odroid N2+ at some point, but the USB connector failed. I can't say that I'm impressed with Odroid. I have not looked into Orange Pi. I'm just not familiar.

The Pi3B+ idles at about 3W. It's fanless. includes everything that's needed. Parts for it are easy to find. I had spare SD cards for it.
The Orange Pi 3B looks like it is superior hardware. But overkill to run a simple service like Infinitive. I bought the pair of Pi 3B+ for $80 on ebay, with basic plastic cases and PSUs. I was able to find convenient metal wall-mount cases for them on Amazon for my application. I'm not seeing equivalent ones for the Orange Pi 3B.

Wrong. There are plenty of production uses for low power computers in embedded applications. I have two Raspberry Pi 3B+ running headless attached to the RS-485 bus of each of my Carrier HVAC system (one furnace, one heat pump). The low power consumption is a feature. Compute power is not needed to run the Go infinitive service.
And the Pi is indeed a computer. And Raspberry Pi OS is Linux.

Asks if the story is a dupe.

https://m.slashdot.org/story/451260

Will jewish space lasers make an appearance ?

Works for Apple. "Designed by Apple in California". Not for Texas, though.

I'm not saying those tools are not useful, or effective, only questioning the legality.

While I'm no longer employed, I still code personal projects. One former colleague at Google gave me credits on Code rhapsody, which is connected to Claude sonnet 4.5. I use it to mostly to write very complex custom scripts that I don't think anyone has done before. I have found it very helpful. Fair to say I would never have gotten started on any of it without the tool, especially because I can't really write Python - or read it , damn space-based indentation. Maybe the tool can rewrite it in Python with braces so I can actually take a closer look..

Amps are vastly more different than cables, though.

I'm curious what types of sampling formats you played for your tuner that he could differentiate. I can tell the difference between an MP3 and lossless. It's really not that hard when you know how the algorithms work. For example, MP3 overemphasizes bass, and thins highs. If you give me just one track, I can't tell you if it's an MP3 or lossless. But if you give me both, it's not hard for me to tell which is which. As one gets older, it's more difficult to hear the difference in highs. But one can still hear the difference in lows.

Now, if you are talking about 44 kHz vs 96 or 192 kHz, I have not performed those tests. I don't think I would be able to tell.

Actually, the 5 drives are striped RAID-0, using a Windows NTFS dynamic disk. The 20TB are fully usable.

The MP34 4TB are TLC. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08Z7LN8NM . No longer available. My purchase history shows $240 each in April 2023. It dropped to $200 later on that year. It looks like there are some on Ebay for $350 now.

I just ran Crystaldiskmark 9.0.2, with 64GB file size, and it showed 3506 MB/s read / 4359 MB/s write, sequential. Not sure if I exceeded the buffer. It's a bit odd that the write speed is faster, but I can't complain. My OS boots from a 256GB 15 year old SATA SSD drive, in a hotswap bay.

I have been giving some thought to switching the OS to Proxmox and ZFS. Win11 Pro is not ideal for running the services I have, including a Home assistant VM currently in VMWare Pro, Plex server, and Unifi.

As far as getting 8 NVMe drives in my system, no, I couldn't do it with the current mobo/controller I have. You can't physically fit two X16 cards in the Prime X570 Pro, as it only has one x16 slot. It supports either x16/x4 slots, or x8/x8/x4 slots. I'm using x16 for the Hyper-X card, and x4 for the X550-T2 NIC. The box idles at 50W. The NVMe drives use only about 1W idle each. If I removed the NIC, and found some working dual-NVMe x8 cards, I could get 5 drives through PCIe with x8/x8/x4, plus 2 on the motherboard, which would make it 7. I actually tried 2 of these cards that claim to do 2 drives with x8 : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09PGDMWKH . I couldn't get the bifurcation to work. Each card only saw one drive.

I had actually originally purchased 6 MP34 drives, assuming I could connect 2 on the motherboard, and 4 on the HyperX card. I could only get 3 out of the 4 drives to work on the Hyperx card. Never figured out why, and returned one drive to Amazon. Looking at my history,

Bifurcation support is an issue. This is why I bought an Asus X570 motherboard and Asus branded Hyperx card. It's a 16 lanes card, and it's weird that I could get only 3 drives (12 lanes) working on the card.

Anyway, if you only need 5 NVMe drives, then the setup I have works. For 8 or more, you would probably need a Threadripper motherboard to have enough PCIe lanes. Much more $$$, not to mention the power consumption.

I was talking about an actual trackball. I have been using some version of the large Kensington Expert Mouse trackball for nearly 30 years.

I'll never be able to get used to trackpoints or trackpad, unfortunately. Early portable computers used to have trackballs built-in. Those were large and heavy, and worked on A/C only. I never owned one. You can make more compact trackballs for laptops, but they would take a few extra mm most likely. The biggest problem is laptop case design is not modular and just doesn't allow for it. I continue to build my own (desktop) PCs since the 1990s. I'm essentially unable to operate a laptop.

Define "expensive". I have got such a 20 TB flash box, built years ago. Mobo is an asus Prime x570. I'm using an Asus hyperx 16 card. Only 3 of the 4 nvme slots in one the card work, plus 2 on the mobo. No custom cooling - just a large HAF case. Only one fan, on the NH-D15s cooler. Fan never comes on.

The SSDs are teamgroup MP34 4 TB and were about $200 each. I use an X550-T2 for networking.

What if you ask it for a specific C library or kernel function implementation ? Or answers to common coding test questions ? I think it may just return very unoriginal code, minus the license. And where do you draw the line ? If variable or function names have all been renamed, or if only indentation has been changed, does it still qualify as original ? And does it come with the original license ?

I think there are a whole bunch of legal questions that are yet to be tested in court.

I have tried GenAI to create some images as well. It wasn't good at removing the original artist signatures from the composite image. A license is a whole lot easier to strip. But the legal issue exists in both cases. Copyright doesn't cease to exist just because an AI mined the content.

Regardless of pricing, does anyone considering a framework laptop really also consider a Macbook ? The whole point of the Framework is modularity/expandability. Whereas a Macbook is completely locked down hardware.

I don't have a preference. No one makes a laptop with a left handed trackball for me. Maybe some day Framework will allow it.

Of course.