Lina's Corner

I am:

The body's age

Schrodinger's woman / trans woman gendered.

ace/aro, like seriously don't hit on me. I won't even notice you exist.

I have that general "hacker girl" thing going on, spending much of my time programming or tinkering with the computer.

I like Programming, Linux and Open Source Software

I enjoy working on projects with others

Only really fronting during autumn and winter (NZ/UTC+12 time)

Trying to make sense of the fact that I am an alter of a DID system

another alter, Lana who is quite similar to me also posts here.

I was resetting my chromebook. I reverted to the stable channel from beta (which requires a powerwash) after backing up my Linux container environment, but it failed to restore my previous Linux container.

After troubleshooting steps found online failed to produce any results I decided to investigate the backup file on a PC running debian trixie.

First thing I tried:

$ file chromeos-linux-2026-08-04.img.zst chromeos-linux-2026-08-04.img.zst: Zstandard compressed data (v0.8+), Dictionary ID: None I then tried opening the file with ark. I was able to extract a chromeos-linux-2026-08-04.img from it. I guessed that this was a raw file system image of some kind so I tried loop mounting it

$ sudo mount -o loop ./chromeos-linux-2026-08-04.img /mnt/cros

these companies want to rent your own hardware back to you and you should not trust anything they come up with.

I still have not figured out how to get a mainline Linux distro booting on my ARM Chromebook, please don't tell me in the comments that this is not possible - I will just think you are a moron. I haven't quite got the layout right to boot an aarch64 kernel in developer mode and unfortunately you have to powerwash the damn thing for every attempt because it will go to the "ChromeOS is missing or damaged" screen. Probably the way to go would be to make one of those special debug cables mentioned in the documentation so I can see error output from the bootloader & firmware on my PC. Or maybe I could try building the open source chromium OS code and seeing if I can get THAT to boot in developer mode and then seeing what I can change before it complains.

Take the tumblr mobile app.

If the network connection drops, it just says "the network connection flaked out and eats your post" you then have to move closer to the wifi access point and write your whole post again.

Going back to the post editor so you can retry would be an improvement.

[Image ID: Text that says:

People Thought I Was Dead

The first reaction people had was to think something bad had happened to me, some of them even thought I was dead. Then something socially curious happened: everybody started speaking to each other on Facebook and WhatsApp to try to figure out what was wrong. Some of them even contacted my family multiple times. They all had my phone number, email address and other ways of contacting me. However, none of them did. It was like I had exited the matrix, and was living in another reality.

Trustworthiness

I was told that I couldn’t be trusted since people can’t check online what I’m doing when I’m not around.

Yeah, you read that right.

Society has been brainwashed to believe that privacy is something criminal. Sorry to disappoint, but privacy is a basic fundament of freedom and democracy. That’s why the voting system is anonymous [1]. When people tell you “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”, what they really mean is “democracy is overrated, get over it”.

[1] Privacy: you know who I am but not what I do. Anonymity: You know what I do but not who I am. The voting system uses both, privacy when you go vote, anonymity when they count the results. /end Image ID] This is from an article about a computer security professional's experiences giving up social media and smartphones, which we are now considering doing. Although we will likely retain some use of tumblr on a computer only. You can read the full article here:

unrestricted sideloading and being able to run my own code without jumping through any code is literally the ONLY thing that android offers that iOS doesn't. There is literally no other reason to choose android, it's an otherwise inferior operating system.

This is not about security, it's about making sure that you don't download a youtube ad blocker.

The only way to get certain permissions on android and iOS is to take google and apple to court and win, which is obviously only possible for massive tech companies.

The developer develops the app and releases it

The community is excited and embraces it

the community starts demanding more and more features

The developer can't say no because most CDD app developers have a CDD themselves and traumatized people are bad at saying no

More features are implemented and the app grows increasing the amount of work the developer has to do until it completely consumes their life

The community launches harassment campaigns targeting the developer over some perceived failing

The developer issues a statement defending themselves

The community gets angrier.

The developer gets sick of it and shuts down the app

Someone else makes a new app to take the place of the app that shut down starting the cycle again.

I know i should get a lawyer to look at it, but getting a lawyer to draft a TOS costs approximately $2,000 so fuck that.

My app does not collect any personally identifiable information so I should be fairly safe.

VS Code now tries to complete the code you are typing using AI and I can't figure out how to turn it off. You can press tab to accept it's suggestions or just ignore it and keep typing, it is sometimes confusing what is the actual contents of the file and what is an AI suggestion as this is indicated by making the AI suggested text dimmed.

I do accept suggestions occasionally for things like config files, but most of the time it doesn't seem to understand what I am trying to do.

In javascript and typescript it actually works reasonably well.

I think it would choke on C++ or rust.

I am trying to decide if I feel that using this is OK or not.

I am for most part anti AI and my position generally is that AI is dangerous and should be completely banned world wide, except for certain permitted safe uses (eg enemies in video games). There is a book that explains the reasons for this better than I can called If anyone builds it, everyone dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Before we even get into the issues posed by superinteligence, present day AI systems that actually exist learn things like racisim and discrimination from humans and amplify them.

For a practical example, supermarkets in new zealand have started using facial recognition and computer vision systems that try to detect shoplifters. This system had an issue where a number of people who had done nothing wrong were banned from their local supermarket because the computer said they were shop lifting.

The thing these people had in common was that they were brown.

There is no way to prevent an AI system from learning patterns that are present in the training data. You cannot say "learn this, but don't learn that.". These systems are trained on white men and malfunction when presented with faces of other demographics.

Advice for people making DID/OSDD management apps:

Do not use online website builders or online app builders, they will hold you back.

Use an actual development environment installed on your actual computer. If you don't want to do this, something like GitHub codespaces could also work.

AI coding assistants can be helpful, but you must have enough programming knowledge to know whether to accept what the AI wants to do to use them effectively. AI is often confidently wrong.

Store your code on GitHub and use proper git version control. Private repos are available if you would rather keep your code private.

Use one of the big cloud providers for hosting, but be sure that you understand how you are billed and choose resources accordingly. You can end up with a huge bill you can't pay if you set things up wrong.

Most cloud providers have a certain amount of resources that you get for free. It is possible to design things so that you stay within these free limits

Protect your REST APIs with API keys that you don't share, this will help prevent you from getting a big bill.

NoSQL / document type databases are often cheaper than things like MySql or SQL server

consider just storing data locally, no server costs that way!

Javascript or Typescript based app frameworks are probably the easiest for a beginner to get started with.

If building for Android back up your release signing key and store it securely. You will not be able to update your app without it.

If building a web site or a rest API for an app, learn about the OWASP Top Ten security vulnerabilities and make sure that you do not have them in your app.

Allow people to export their data to JSON, data sovereignty is important and is a legal requirement if your app can be downloaded or accessed in EU countries.

Do not check secrets like database passwords or keys into git source control.

If your app grows beyond a few users, at some point you will need to talk to actual lawyer about the legalities of your operations. Terms of service and things like that usually need the help of a lawyer.