The real lesson is believing you actually own what you buy online. You don't. Anything digital can be revoked instantly, without explanation, and often without meaningful recourse or support.

It's only when you get enough publicity that you could be noticed and get back your marbles but sadly it will not work for the vast majority of us.

Ultimately we need better laws or lawmakers to protect our digital goods.

The lesson here is not "avoid Apple gift cards"
Its "avoid Apple"

The real lesson is believing you own what you buy online. You don't. Anything digital can be revoked instantly, without explanation, and often without meaningful recourse or support.

I recently read the research on this exact topic, and the error rate I'm getting (one bit flip per week) is consistent with the expected rate caused by cosmic rays. However, you might be right, and I could be overlooking something, like my microwave oven, which is placed in the adjacent room just behind the wall. I never thought about it, but timing-wise, bit flips happen outside the window of when I use my oven (or maybe they are just detected later).

Like I said, MemTest86 sometimes detects a single bit error, but consecutive runs don't. And no errors have ever been the same (they haven't even been detected in the same bank). To me, this strongly suggests external causes.

For decades, people have dismissed bit flips caused by cosmic rays, but here's what I've been dealing with: I have four 16 GB sticks of DDR4 RAM running at stock without overclocking or anything. At least once a week, the Linux kernel displays this message:

mce: [Hardware Error]: Machine check events logged
mce: [Hardware Error]: CPU 1: Machine Check: 0 Bank 19: 9460eb40d5040348
mce: [Hardware Error]: TSC 0
mce: [Hardware Error]: PROCESSOR 2:a20f10 TIME 1750853778 SOCKET 0 APIC 2 microcode a20102d

The issue is seemingly far more widespread than people realize. My memory is otherwise 100% stable because I've run a 24-hour MemTest86 loop at least a couple of times and it didn't find any errors. However, it's important to note that sometimes it actually detects a single error, but it's not reproducible.

When people refer to Linux they normally refer to an operating system based on it, and the most common and well known operating system using Linux is one of a gazillion of Linux distros. No one has ever thought of Android as the "Linux", it's just bunkers. Why? Because Google may replace the kernel component with something else and they almost went through with that for Android but stopped at certain Nest devices.

Without userspace [the] Linux [kernel] is 100% useless.

My "ignorance" is OK, while your logic and understanding of this world have never been there in the first place.

Again Linux is the kernel, not the UI or the distro.

The Linux kernel without userspace is 100% irrelevant and useless and the userspace defines it. The average Linux distro userspace is a complete fucking mess, as Linus Torvalds himself reiterated a few days ago. Yeah, he said that 11 years ago and no one has done shit to address it.

I could care less about your car analogy. You got the premise wrong. You call everything with the kernel - Linux. That's not how logic, common sense and reality work.

Your message is empty btw. Maybe try harder next time. Add some facts for a change.

Another nice insult and, sorry to break it to you, but I couldn't care less about Stallman.

Android is using the same "linux" technologies as any typical desktop, server or embedded implementation of linux (selinux, namespaces, dm-verity, etc).

Yeah, Android also uses glibc, systemd, xorg/wayland-something, and linux packages. Oh wait, it doesn't. There's almost nothing from the average Linux distro in Android aside from the built-in kernel features that you mentioned. Nice try though.

Oh, and it also uses the unmodified mainline kernel. Oh wait, again it doesn't. It uses its own heavily modified fork that offers API/ABI stability that the mainline kernel heavily eschews. STABLE API NONSENSE, you know.

Next, Windows 11 is also Linux. And FreeBSD is Linux. Everything is Linux if you squint hard enough.

Please cope harder.

Russian trolls

Nice insult, btw! It makes your argument so much stronger.

Yeah, and Android is also "Linux" which makes is the most popular OS in the world.

Very fat sarcasm aside, Android is not Linux (aside from a forked, heavily patched, frozen version of the Linux kernel), ChromeOS is not Linux (it's an atomically (!) updated immutable (!) Linux kernel based OS distributed by Google), and SteamOS is also not Linux (see ChromeOS above), if we are talking about Linux distros containing

  * upstream kernel with minimal changes
  * glibc and other usual libraries
  * Xorg or Wayland compositors
  * Desktop Environment
  * Packaging system that allows to install/update/delete any package

This article is just a huge piece of cope. Linux (distros) have always been crap and will continue to be crap for the average Joe and that's the exact reason the Joe doesn't touch them.

Linux fans will obviously downvote me to hell, but I'm OK with tribalism and zealotry because this post contains nothing but facts. You cannot call just anything using the Linux kernel "Linux" because it's just a kernel which in itself is 100% useless without usespace. And 99% of people out there (who has ever known anything about operating systems) think about Linux distros when they are talking about Linux.

The way Bitcoin has been going recently, there will soon be nothing of monetary value to steal. /s

Lots of world-class physicists deny free will as well. I have absolutely no idea why you think it's necessary or pertinent for "true" intelligence. And given how well they work in their domain, you cannot deny the evidence of some form of intelligence whether it's a statistical model or not. And you have to prove we ourselves are not statistical models.

You can't achieve your goals if you're dead. This means that LLMs will do anything to survive in order to achieve their goals.

I don't see anything sinister or unusual about that. It all seems like very simple reasoning to me.