Have you investigated more on this topic? like, anything similar in concept that competes with Serena? if so, have you tested it/them? what are your thoughts?
Fingerprinting. There are a few reasons you'd do it:
1. Bot prevention. If the bots don't know that you're doing this, you might have a reliable bot detector for a while. The bots will quite possibly have no extensions at all, or even better specific exact combination they always use. Noticing bots means you can block them from scraping your site or spamming your users. If you wanna be very fancy, you could provide fake data or quietly ignore the stuff they create on the site.
2. Spamming/misuse evasion. Imagine an extension called "Send Messages to everybody with a given job role at this company." LinkedIn would prefer not to allow that, probably because they'd want to sell that feature.
> The bots will quite possibly have no extensions at all
I imagine most users will also not have extensions at all, so this would not be a reliable metric to track bots. Maybe it might be hard to imagine for someone whose first thing to do after installing a web browser is to install some extensions that they absolutely can't live without (ublock origin, privacy badger, dark mode reader, noscript, vimium c, whatever). But I imagine the majority of casual users do not install any extensions or even know of its existence (Maybe besides some people using something like Grammarly, or Honey, since they aggressively advertise on Youtube).
I do agree with the rest of your reasons though, like if bots used a specific exact combinations of extensions, or if there was an extension specifically for linkedin scraping/automation they want to detect, and of course, user tracking.
I wrote some automation scripts that are not triggered via browser extensions (e.g., open all my sales colleagues’ profiles and like their 4 most recent unliked posts to boost their SSI[1], which is probably the most ‘innocent’ of my use-cases). It has random sleep intervals. I’ve done this for years and never faced a ban hammer.
Wonder if with things like Moltbot taking the scene, a form of “undetectable LinkedIn automation” will start to manifest. At some point they won’t be able to distinguish between a chronically online seller adding 100 people per day with personalized messages, or an AI doing it with the same mannerisms.
Third–party tools don't bring money to LinkedIn, that's the issue. Rather than try to compete, much easier to force you to use their tools! Reddit did the same thing.
Easy solution is to sell a plan that explicitly allows third-party tool usage. Then they get the money and the users get the tooling LinkedIn is incapable of building themselves.
(except they won't, because they're not after money but engagement, and their built-in tools suck on purpose to maximize wasted time)
I think you should take another look, especially at the “Bazzite developer experience” edition: container based development is pretty much what it’s centred around. Alternatively, Bluefin, which is much more dev focused
I ran Archlinux as my main driver on both PC and Laptop for more than a decade but after having the opportunity to use a Windows machine with WSL and eventually WSL2, I felt like I had access to the best of both worlds: a Linux terminal for development (bash + tmux + vim, now bash + zellij + neovim) without the hassle of updates breaking things every few months and a out-of-the-box native gaming experience.
But with the enshitification of Windows (first all the spam and ads on the Start menu, then Microsoft forcing you to have an account to be able to use the machine and the expensive license for Windows Professional if you want access to Hyper-V, which I did), I did some research, tried a few new distros (Manjaro, Bazzite and CachyOS) and settled for CachyOS (gaming support was the main driver, based on Archlinux was secondary).
I do everything I did on Windows and some more: all the terminal stuff plus browsing, CAD modeling, 3D printing / slicing, Office stuff... I miss nothing. No more double partition to boot into Windows when I want to game.
My RX 9070 XT runs smoothly with no driver issues whatsoever. I even have tested the waters running some LLMs with LM Studio and that also worked out of the box.
The only thing that has been a bit meh are Teams and Slack and I believe that has to do with the fact that I ran them in Firefox. Once I ran Slack on Chromium, noise canceling was again available.
2009 was the year of Linux on desktop for me.
17 years later, after going back and forth between macOS and Windows, it feels good to be back home.
One last note in my random ramble is that I do not have as much spare time as before, and I had heard this from other people back in the day whenever I'd say I ran Archlinux on my machines, so I am going to repeat what others have said to me: it's really nice to not have to worry about much, be able to sit down and get productive right away. To me, CachyOS and KDE have made that idea my actual experience and for that I am grateful.
My experience with generating code with AI is very limited across a limited set of programming languages but whenever it has produced low quality code, it has been able to better itself with further instructions. Like "oh no, that is not the right naming convention. Please use instead" or "the choice of design pattern here is not great because ${reasons}. Produce 2 alternative solutions using x or y" and in nearly every case it produces satisfactory results.
Kinda, yes, my experience has also been that it takes too long in that way though. I've been using AI for different tasks than something that requires high quality code
When I was in college I didn't have my own computer so I relied on the Windows machines from the library.
That's when I discovered Slax and Puppy Linux [1] and all its different variants. Such a beautiful thing to boot into these pendrive distros and discover the world of Linux through them without altering the host system.
I recommend everyone to watch GamersNexus' documentary on the NVIDIA AI GPU black market.
They explain how companies like DeepSeek can get a hold of chips that are otherwise banned by the US government to export to China
I was just selling my RTX 4090 on Ebay recently and got a ton of bids from Chinese accounts. The winner ($2,325) had Australia set as the country on their profile, but a Chinese name on the account, and the order shipping address was to a different Chinese name (to a regular single-family house in Delaware). Most bidders straight up had China as their profile country.
So my 4090 (24 GB) is probably going to get turned into a 48/96 GB VRAM frankenstein in a Chinese chop shop. I haven't watched the full 3.5 hour documentary you linked but from the first few minutes, it seems quite interesting. And covers this exact thing.
Edit: Again, I checked the address, it was a house, not a freight forwarder warehouse. And if it was actually going to AU, the forwarder would be on the west coast in CA/WA, not east coast (had another order go to Thailand with a forwarder in SF. And Miami is the big hub for South America). For legit freight forwarding they also wouldn't have different names on the account & shipping address. As the parent comment's YT video describes, these are often just normal Chinese-Americans or international students who do this to make a bit of extra money.
Do they all live at the same address of the overseas freight forwarder too? I've sold stuff on eBay to someone in Europe who had me ship to the same address in Delaware. I was confused so I googled the address and turned up the freight forwarding service.
This has happened to me a couple of times with eBay sales.
Is it safe to transact with people who use freight forwarders in your experience? Do you lose any protections?
Out of fear, in my cases, I cancelled the auctions.
On second thought though, I wonder if it's actually the buyer using the service that is more at risk (introduction of 3rd party, more complex delivery, probably impossible to return, etc)
What's not safe for you? They pay you the money, then you send the item to the address they ask. You already got the money! Cancelling the sale because the buyer wants to spend a bit less on shipping seems like an awful thing to do. International shipping gets ridiculously expensive, so combining multiple small packages into one shipment makes perfect sense.
If you are selling in the US, and an account with a primary address overseas buys your item and uses a US shipping address, you are likely shipping to a package forwarder. These services are common because many people and businesses in the US only ship to the US.
I have my eBay account set this way, and I still get bids from overseas accounts -- I always Google the shipping address, 100% of the time it has been a package forwarder.
I would like to point out that in Australia and NZ, it can be a massive pain to find someone who will ship internationally.
Normally this is for things like Amazon US, and other US-based companies. There are services[1][2] that advertise virtual postal addresses in your purchase-country where they’ll box and ship it to you.
So yes, a Chinese name based in Australia with a shipping address in the US isn’t immediately a red flag. Lots of Chinese in Australia and NZ, and lots of people here like to use shipping services like this.
I got a work laptop stolen (in my favorite bag, which they don’t make anymore) and found out from the police that there’s a chain from fences for drug addicts to criminal organizations in the Middle East. They’ve found American hardware there a number of times. Little harder to steal a desktop graphics card in general, but breakins happen.
Yeah, or just jump unto Alibaba and Ebay from any neighboring country to China and see for yourself how easy it would be to buy a GPU then transport yourself ~500m and now be within China with these GPUs.
One of the keys being, of course, that the Chinese government doesn't care. Yeah it might require mules bringing the GPUs into China but once they're in China, no one is breaking any laws. Of course DeepSeek is using these GPUs! It's not illegal for them to do so!
That’s not a ban of nvidia chips though. It’s for a few of the biggest companies, and is specifically telling them not to buy a made-for-china SKU:
> The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) told companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, this week to end their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, Nvidia’s tailor-made product for the country, according to three people with knowledge of the matter
We have someone in the comments section talking about how they encountered a bunch of suspicious bidders on their GPU auction. That's not what happens when people care about being potentially investigated for breaking export rules.
I was going to ask how this would be better than any of the other options out there (like dd, the RPi imager and similar) but after seeing the README I consider this the superior alternative because you don't have to reflash the USB stick over and over again.
It supports multiple images at the same time, unlike the other solutions where one image take over the whole USB stick.
I see that not all models available in my Github subscription are available (all models should be visible).
Further, is it possible to use openrouter with the current implementation? I couldn't figure it out by reading the documentation alone.
Thank you!
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