Interesting. Nope. Does it break anything unintentionally, like logins and such?

I use uBO and still sometimes get on-page popups. “Modals” would be the correct word, I’d say.

Have you checked Artstation?

No problem! This is the sort of thing I think everyone will have to learn how to do sooner or later. Viewing source, checking archive.org, and such are just going to be a part of evaluating a site for legitimacy. I’m happy to help make it seem more attainable!

Definitely fake, imo. They don’t pass the sniff test for me.

1. The design is identical on all four sites, with the exception of the logo. Now, this in and of itself isn’t a smoking gun: the design appears to be the WordPress default design from 2024. But it was the first thing I noticed, and with everything else…

2. The subjects are all the same but the copy is conspicuously different–if you and I were to each write an article about the same ramen, we wouldn’t write the same article, but we would probably come up with a couple of similar sentences or sentence fragments. These are intentionally making an effort to be as different as possible, but with the same title and topic.

3. I checked the Whois of each site you linked, and they’re all registered through Reykjavik despite having nothing to do with Iceland. Three of them are even pointing to the same Cloudflare servers.

4. The relationship between the “writers” and the content here make no sense. I could potentially see the Alabama Delta Gamma chapter posting some of these reviews, but Ninjago? Men’s shirts? Shadow the Hedgehog soft toy? “Evan Feinberg” says that he’s an advocate for “limited government,” and “his” photo is of a white dude, so why is “he” “reviewing” women’s fashion and Korean music? What does Cap City Energy have to do with any of this stuff?

5. By looking into the RSS feed, you can see that most of the articles on a given site were published within the same hour: Evan Feinberg’s articles were all posted between 0800-0900 UTC on June 13, 2024. There are only seconds in between them.

6. Subjective: The content feels very much like slop. Not even current slop, either, but year-ago slop.

7. Also subjective: The Cap City Energy site doesn’t seem to know that “Cap” is probably supposed to be short for “Capital.”

If you look in the Internet Archive, you can see that a few (maybe all?) of them used to be real, legitimate sites. Bama Delta Gamma has an archived version that even links to an Instagram that certainly seems to actually be for a sorority. I think that whoever is behind these waited for a URL to become available, snagged it when it expired, copied some of the details (maybe the logo and some images), then fed it along with a list of topics to an AI, and plugged the output into a WordPress site.

Those are silly folks lmao

Eh, I kind of get it. OpenAI’s malfeasance with regard to energy usage, data theft, and the aforementioned rampant shoe-horning (maybe “misapplication” is a better word) of the technology has sort of poisoned the entire AI well for them, and it doesn’t feel (and honestly isn’t) necessary enough that it’s worth considering ways that it might be done ethically.

I don’t agree with them entirely, but I do get where they’re coming from. Personally, I think once the hype dies down enough and the corporate money (and VC money) gets out of it, it can finally settle into a more reasonable solid-state and the money can actually go into truly useful implementations of it.

This is one of the few things that AI could potentially actually be good at. Aside from the few people on Lemmy who are entirely anti-AI, most people just don’t want AI jammed willy-nilly into places where it doesn’t belong to do things poorly that it’s not equipped to do.

“I never give advice, but there is one thing I wish you would do when you sit down to write news stories, and that is: Never use the word ‘very.’ It is the weakest word in the English language; doesn’t mean anything. If you feel the urge of ‘very’ coming on, just write the word ‘damn’ in the place of ‘very.’ The editor will strike out the word ‘damn,’ and you will have a good sentence.”

—William Allen White

Yeah, I don’t love that they’re on a Microsoft service, but GitHub is not their worst product.

In your defense, Mozilla did have a read-only mirror on GitHub for a while. I assume it’s the same repo, they’ve just repurposed it.

I’m not the OP, but it’s probably easier to get (free) community contributions on Github than on any other spot.

Or it’s to make it easier to fork, in case Mozilla goes out of business.

Because this here is for support. That there is for evangelism.

I’m a newcomer to Linux (only about a year in), but here’s what I’ve got so far:

Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?

Mine wasn’t at all. Valve has done a lot of work to make this seamless so that more games can be played on the Steam Deck. Check the Proton DB to see what your games look like.

Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

I have very little experience with this, but probably. Linux users tend to be tinkerers.

If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?

Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?

Same answer for both: There’s Wine, and a whole bunch of setup scripts that can get even stuff like Adobe Creative Suite working with it. Worst case scenario, there’s VirtualBox for the one or two apps you might need to run Windows for. But I find that the open source options, while they might have a learning curve, tend to be substantially better than either of those options.

How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?

More or less, but you can pick and choose what updates you want to install and when. Most distros have a package manager that’ll let you update the kernel, the drivers, the middleware, the desktop environment, all your apps, and even the package manager itself on your schedule, from one interface. You can also just ignore it and never update anything, though I wouldn’t recommend that.

How does digital security work on Linux?

Very well. It’s much more locked-down by default, for one thing.

Is it more vulnerable due to being open source?

Quite the opposite. Open source projects are well known for being less vulnerable out of the box; Linux in particular is used by huge companies as a lightweight server OS, so it has a lot of highly-paid people committing security fixes back down to the open source project.

Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?

Antivirus is a bandaid on Windows, provided because the OS was written with certain naive assumptions that let attackers get access they shouldn’t have. On Linux, those assumptions were not made. No application can be installed without your root password, for instance; downloaded files can’t even be executed without specifically making them executable; and access to edit system files is restricted by a very robust permissions system.

All of that, plus Linux’s much lower market share, also means that no malware authors are really wasting their time trying to write Linux malware. The attack vector just isn’t worth the extra effort.

So no, there’s no integrated antivirus; but for most users in most situations, it’s not needed at all.

Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?

Your mileage may vary significantly, but anecdotally it seems like most architectures from AMD and Nvidia have good support.

Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?

Maybe, but like with Windows, I assume you have to really go out of your way to do so.

And also, what distro might be best for me?

I’ve only used Ubuntu and Mint. Mint has so far been the easiest and most user-friendly of the two. It’s also regularly touted as the best for newcomers.

This ain’t it, Chief.

I have one that was proven false, and then later re-proven true: the existence of the brontosaurus.

When I was in elementary school, we were taught that they existed, they were big, etc. Then, at some point while I was in college, I discovered that actually what we thought was a brontosaur was a brachiosaur or an apatosaur. And then, when my kids went to school and learned about the brontosaur, I discovered that actually, they did exist!

Yeah, I’ve been targeted by enough romance spam that I just assume any photo of a woman I don’t know was probably stolen from some random Tumblr or Instagram.

I also just jumped onto Linux gaming on Mint. Mine is a slightly underpowered laptop, but so far it can run everything in my Steam library (which is a bit dated at this point) with no problem at all.

Look at moneybags over here being able to afford eggs.

Voice to text -> AI expansion -> Character Encoding -> Character Decoding -> AI summarization -> Text to voice

We should’ve just stuck with voice calls.

I’m aware of the feature, it’s been around since before I left. I’m saying that it looks functionally like they coded it to be nothing more than a subreddit named for you, in which you’re the only one allowed to post. They may have put some sort of flashy nonsense over the top of it, but that’s pretty much what it is.