A really good way to do linux is to play around and break things, but to have a backup you can restore from.

I don’t know about other distros specifically, but Mint comes shipped with Timeshift, which is easily configurable and can be set up to include your home directory. Make a backup on an external drive every now and again so that if you break everything, you only lose a bit of work instead of all of it.

Search engines are your friend. If you want to do something, look it up first (ex/ “How do I [x] on linux”) and read some of the answers. Don’t just go with the first option you see, and if it looks decent but you don’t understand it try looking up the commands it uses to find some documentation.

Learning linux isn’t something you can do as passively as you can with Windows, so take time to really try and learn things you’re looking to do.

And a good rule of thumb is that if you think your system should be able to do something, it probably can.

I just had to go and check because I got my 2 year subscription for ~$0.75 a month ($1 CAD) back in April. When I check their pricing page while not logged in, it shows me that I can save 50% on my first year and pay $6 monthly.

Maybe we should reanimate John MacDonald. Not to be a politician or give him any legitimate power (for obvious reasons), just give him a bat and make him a CN lobbyist.

Surely we’d get our rail soon.

Oh I’ve been trying. He’s tech adverse in general, so the concept of open source software scares him because it means trusting others with regards to tech.

It also doesn’t help that my dad still isn’t filly convinced Linux isn’t a virus/dangerous to my PC.

This was with regards to Air Canada and its LLM that hallucinated a refund policy, which the company argued they did not have to honour because it wasn’t their actual policy and the bot had invented it out of nothing.

An important side note is that one of the cited reasons that the Court ruled in favour of the customer is because the company did not disclose that the LLM wasn’t the final say in its policy, and that a customer should confirm with a representative before acting upon the information. This meaning that the the legal argument wasn’t “the LLM is responsible” but rather “the customer should be informed that the information may not be accurate”.

I point this out because I’m not so sure CVS would have a clear cut case based on the Air Canada ruling, because I’d be surprised if Google didn’t have some legalese somewhere stating that they aren’t liable for what the LLM says.