> [...] it seems likely they also have enough to maliciously chug the hardware sufficiently to degrade capacity over time and otherwise impact system integrity. I hate the thought of some random website writing and overwriting random bytes in a tight loop in the background while I'm browsing elsewhere to find the cause of my slow disk subsystem.

Absolutely. Things like IndexedDB get fsynced super frequently. There's no way to tell Chrome that some web apps do not need to make it do the physical disk this often.

It's really difficult to reliably separate temporary and persistent browser storage. I tried at some point to reduce HDD noise. But given how neither Firefox or Chrome properly follow the XDG spec, it did not yield the results I wanted without a lot of handcrafted mounts.

In the end I'd guess you can also use some aspects of persistent storage to achieve similar results, even if the rest is actually tmpfs/RAM.

Indeed. Apps do always seem to keep adding new cruft to the filesystem layout. For a while my entire home directory was tmpfs on a few machines just to stop some of the tracking. I would commit my bookmarks back to persistent storage but that was it. It was a manual process and sometimes I would forget to commit but that's just my laziness. I'm sure others would automate this process.

I installed Syncthing on it to make syncing new books onto it much easier. That's the biggest and primary value I got from it.

It also works with time domain video files like audio visualizers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3gf88rSzqo

Nothing extremely surprising though.

BeepBerry is awesome, my only issue is the relatively low resolution of the screen. But it is very readable in bright light. Tradeoffs, I guess.

> As an online store you don't want to ask customers to manually input a payment reference into a SEPA transfer. It's all about ease of use (and safety).

How? With a SEPA transfer I can actually see who I'm paying. With a CC or equivalent it's a lottery.

Your comment reminds me of HP's obscure EFI OS called QuickLook. I would guess there are a lot of obscure OSs out there.

I'd watch this if I were you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssob-7sGVWs

I knew what video that was going to be before I clicked it. I highly recommend watching the whole series, including more cursed OSs created because windows booted slowly (?): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLec1d3OBbZ8IBeFODHXLy...

> I knew what video that was going to be before I clicked it.

A man of culture.

Text article, instead of video, for other video-haters like me...

https://gekk.info/articles/hp-quickweb.htm

Oh, yeah! I think ASUS also had something like that at some point.

There were multiple ones, including some by BIOS vendors offered to many hardware OEMs.

Hyperspace was one of the most widely-seen.

https://gekk.info/articles/hyperspace.htm

> They literally reject your emails. There is also nothing you can do if ms/google black lists you.

There are so many ESPs that do not get rejected. Neither is it true that there isn't anything you can do if you end up on a blacklist.

That's not to say that it's trivial, but it's certainly doable.

> Every major OS (Windows, Mac, iOS, android) ships with device level parental controls. Games consoles enforce these based on birth date.

These are unfortunately rather half-baked and should be improved. Which is exactly what could be mandated instead of invading everyone's privacy.

Honestly though - they’re enough to “protect the kids”. Any kid that’s smart enough to get around them is going to be snart enough to get around a VPN ban.

You are right though - the fact that those controls exist and are in place and the UK government isn’t enforcing that Apple Microsoft and Google provide better tools (which would actually achieve the aim) tells you that what they actually want is what they’re asking for - a VPN backdoor.

LLMs managing the "coloring book" equivalent of something is not bullish for the "art" version of something.

The intent for most CTFs is to provide a meaningful challenge that concerns a single topic without introducing noise that wastes time. Of course a training exercise is easier to complete for an LLM.