This Solo Dev Already Built a Popular Distro. Now He's Trying It Again

Atomic distros work differently from the Fedora or Ubuntu install you're probably used to. Instead of layering individual packages on top of each other, the entire base system ships as one image, and updates land as a whole swap rather than a slow stream of package changes.

As a result, you get a system that's hard to break, where updates apply cleanly or not at all, rolling back a bad patch is easy, and there's no dependency hell to wade through since every install starts from the same known-good state.

The trade-off is flexibility. You lose the ability to tinker with individual system packages the way you can on a traditional distro, and anything outside the base image needs a workaround instead of a quick apt install or dnf install.

stillOS wants you to consider the upside of that trade-off. It calls itself a "maintenance-free" Linux desktop, built on an AlmaLinux 10 base with bootc handling the atomic updates.

Behind it is Cameron Knauff, who goes by the name "PizzaLovingNerd" in the Linux community, and this isn't his first distro.

His earlier project, risiOS, a Fedora-based distro aimed at smoothing out the rough edges for new users, picked up a solid following before it was absorbed into Nobara Linux, freeing him up to start stillHQ and, down the line, stillOS.

It has potential

I tested stillOS 10.2 on a virtual machine in GNOME Boxes, running on my Fedora Workstation setup. Installation felt familiar right away. stillOS uses the same Anaconda installer AlmaLinux ships with.

If you've installed Fedora, RHEL, or any of their downstream distros before, you already know the steps involved here.

Onboarding is quick and doesn't waste your time. A short welcome screen kicks off Quick Setup, which walks you through installing apps, picking a browser, and grabbing essentials before dropping you onto the desktop.

Once you boot into stillOS, you will see that while the desktop is GNOME underneath, the distro ditches the usual top-panel layout for a taskbar-first interface, closer to Windows 11 than anything GNOME ships by default.

The taskbar carries the usual options like the app drawer, pill-shaped workspace switcher, an update notifier, pinned apps, the calendar, the clock, and quick settings.

Unlike vanilla GNOME, stillOS' version lets you drop icons straight onto the desktop.

Right-clicking gives you quick access to creating new folders and documents, undoing an action, selecting everything, arranging icons, opening the terminal, and some important settings.

The file manager keeps most of that same right-click menu, folders, documents, select all, opening a terminal, alongside the usual "Properties" entry found on Nautilus (Files).

The document creation option is the one that I find very useful, as that’s something I miss on the vanilla GNOME experience. The catch is that it only hands you three formats through ONLYOFFICE: docx, pptx, and xlsx. Considering what The Document Foundation has been pushing for lately, a locked-down proprietary-only shortcut feels like an odd choice.

Installing LibreOffice and removing ONLYOFFICE didn't fix it either. The shortcut still generates files in those same formats; it just opens them in LibreOffice instead.

The file manager looks different too, even though it's the same GNOME Files under the hood. When you launch it, the app opens a "Computer" page that lays out your folders, disks, and removable media in one clean view.

The default app selection is generous. You get ONLYOFFICE, Gear Lever, Warp, Mousam, and a good spread of the usual GNOME-focused apps alongside them.

stillOS also ships its own lineup of "still" branded tools. stillTerminal is the default terminal app, built around a customized ZSH setup with container and SSH support.

stillCenter is the curated app store, pulling from Flatpak and other sources with its own stillRating system grading how well an app runs with stillOS.

stillControl handles GNOME layout customization, letting you switch between 12+ preset layouts and manage extensions without digging through GNOME Tweaks. Then there's stillOS Forums, which isn't a native app at all. It's the community forum wrapped as a SWAI web app, so it behaves like part of the desktop instead of a browser tab.

Running other software worked without any surprises. I selected Zen Browser during onboarding specifically to see how it handled a non-default browser, and it ran cleanly, without any visual bugs, lags, or crashes to speak of.

The pill-shaped workspace switcher held up well through all of this too, letting me flip between workspaces and open apps without any lag or fumbling. Though this was a given seeing that it is a well-tested component from GNOME.

And before you assume that this is some obscure Linux distro that will fade into irrelevance very soon, know that development is still quite active. The recent stillOS 10.2 release introduced most of what's covered above.

Cameron says that:

stillOS has now reached the point where it fits that initial vision. There is obviously more work to do, and there always will be, but the foundation is here. Now I want to focus on building the community around it.

The goal is to keep stillOS innovative while also building a Linux system that literally anyone can use. Those ideas do not have to conflict. Linux can try new things without becoming confusing, and it can be approachable without becoming boring.

Download it now

You can grab the latest stillOS ISO from SourceForge, which lists all the images released by the project so far.

stillOS (SourceForge)

Once you're up and running, know that updates aren't handled through AlmaLinux's usual dnf-based flow.

Instead, you can rely on the distro to handle it for you, as it checks for updates automatically 15 minutes after boot, then every 24 hours after that for as long as your machine stays on.

If you can't wait, then you can run the following command in the terminal to force an update check:

sudo bootc upgrade

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The Xen Project is Serious About Safety, So It Formed a Committee

Xen is a hypervisor that runs on various kinds of hardware, where a crash can have massive consequences. It is deployed in fields like automotive, industrial automation, robotics, and avionics. These are all safety-critical fields where certification matters.

So far, it has been on a good trajectory with increasing adoption and enhancements that keep it relevant for enterprise use. What it hasn't had is a structured, collaborative way to help the companies building on it actually get certified for that kind of work.

It has launched the Xen Safety Committee, a group tasked with building the safety documentation and test evidence that member companies can lean on instead of starting from scratch.

The committee's job covers software safety requirements, architecture specifications, MISRA-related engineering, DFMEA analysis, testing frameworks, tooling, code coverage, and process documentation.

Founding contributors AMD, EPAM, and Renesas are credited with doing most of the legwork for the above, forming the initiative's early foundation.

The point is to stop every company from solving the same problem on their own. Sharing this foundation should cut costs, avoid duplicated effort, and get products through certification faster for anyone building on Xen.

Nothing changes about how Xen itself gets built. Source code, licensing, and the existing open contribution and review process stay exactly as they are. The Safety Committee runs as a parallel governance layer, not a replacement for how maintainers already work.

Though joining the committee isn't all that open. Organizations will need to sign up for the right kind of membership. More on that below. 👇

A call for new members

Membership at Xen Project works like most Linux Foundation projects. It funds shared infrastructure, test environments, events, and coordination, while day-to-day technical decisions stay with maintainers through open contribution.

Paying to join doesn't buy influence over the codebase. 🤓

AMD, ARM, AWS, Boeing, EPAM, Ford, Honda, Renesas, Vates, and XenServer are all listed as current members. These represent chipmakers, cloud providers, automotive, aerospace, and a few other sectors.

A new membership tier, "Premier Plus" sits above the existing tiers, granting voting representatives on both the Xen Advisory Board and the Safety Committee, a say in setting priorities and roadmap, and access to the committee-managed safety artifacts.

This way, instead of producing every requirement and test in house, members can hand the committee's existing artifacts to their own safety assessors for audits and assessments.

Speaking on the topic, Kate Stewart, Vice President, Dependable Embedded Systems, The Linux Foundation, stated that:

Systems with safety considerations need a trusted hypervisor to provide the foundation for other open source components, such as Zephyr and Linux, to support mixed criticality embedded applications.

The Zephyr and Xen projects have been exchanging best practices over the last few years as a pathway to achieve safety certification of open source components. We welcome the Xen Safety Initiative to accelerate the journey of Xen achieving formal certification.

---

Suggested Read 📖: Proxmox Virtual Environment Officially Runs on ARM64

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I Found an Easy Way to Make GNOME More Colorful

One thing that always comes up in the GNOME vs KDE debate is how easy it is to customize KDE. You can surely customize GNOME but not to the extent of KDE.

But that doesn't deter us GNOME users from trying new looks and visuals, does it? In that regard, I recently came across a super cool GUI tool that lets give an altogether different look to your GNOME desktop.

Take a look at the screenshot below. Looks like Archcraft or Omarchy, right?

That is the magic of Rewaita, a GUI app worth adding in your customization toolbox.

Rewaita: Add custom color tint to GNOME Adwaita

Rewaita is not a standalone theme or icon. It keeps GNOME’s familiar Adwaita design but replaces its colours and adds optional visual effects like changing the transparency to windows.

As you open Rewaita, it very helpfully gives you a user guide to help you through the process of changing the theme on GNOME.

Once you're through that process (that I'll describe later), it gives you a good range of choices that include 14 light themes and 24 dark ones (all hail dark mode), followed by 6 Window Control themes. Many of these themes are well-known standard themes around Linux, like Breeze, Nord and Catppuccin, etc.

Which is great because they're all tried and tested to suit the popular tastes of Linux users. After all, most Linux ricing screenshots you see on various communities use those color themes.

The Window Control themes are more of the same that include Breeze, Mint and MacOS-styled button themes.

All you need to do is choose the theme, and the change is immediate in all newly opened windows.

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Under the hood, it generates CSS overrides and related assets inside directories such as

~/.config/gtk-3.0/
~/.config/gtk-4.0/
~/.local/share/themes/

Note that it will only affect GTK applications. Qt (from KDE) and Electron apps may not adhere to the changed color theme.

Using Rewaita

To activate Rewaita, you have to ensure a few things first.

Make sure you have the gnome-shell-extensions package installed, which allows you to extend the capabilities of GNOME.

And then the User Themes extension (I would also recommend installing the Extension Manager, that makes it easier and more fun to explore various extensions that GNOME has to offer), as well as the GNOME Tweaks application (where you actually choose the theme).

Get Rewaita

When you're done with all that, finally install Rewaita, which is available on Flathub. If you prefer terminal, here is the command:

flatpak install io.github.swordpuffin.rewaita

Other ways of installation on distributions such as Arch, OpenSUSE, and NixOS are listed here.

After that, go into Rewaita and choose a theme. Once you do that, reboot your system, go into GNOME Tweaks and choose Rewaita as the Shell theme.

Flatpak Override

Since Flatpak applications are treated separately sandboxed, these settings are not applied to them by default. You can, however, make them apply by overriding the settings:

sudo flatpak override --filesystem=xdg-config/gtk-3.0:rw
sudo flatpak override --filesystem=xdg-config/gtk-4.0:rw

The first command takes care of GTK-3.0 applications, the second does that for GTK-4.0.

More customization options

If you desire a more manual and methodical approach, you can even choose the exact colors that you want there to be on the interface on the Custom tab.

Accent colors, interface colors, button colors, successful, dangerous or warning action colors, etc. can all be manually chosen, alongwith manual color naming and extra CSS code. You can even save these settings as themes on your system for future use.

Fine Tuning

The Fine Tune section is another wonderful aspect where you can put in use some extra settings apart from the colors on your system. These include things like transparency, window borders, sharpening corners, etc. There's an option to toggle Rewaita running in the background in case you swap between light and dark modes throughout the day.

Firefox

You can choose to apply the theme to your Firefox window as well (great edge for the full open source application pack) by enabling 'Generate Firefox CSS Theme' in the Fine Tune tab. After that, Firefox only needs to be fully quit and restarted for the settings to apply.

Wrapping Up

Rewaita is really, really, really convenient. It makes it extremely easy not to only apply pre-made themes, but also create custom themes of your own with colors and CSS code.

More options are just a toggle switch away, and the user guide that is present right as you open the application is extremely helpful, telling you all that you need.

Thoughtfully constructed and beautifully applied, Rewaita is a must use for anyone wanting to make GNOME look aesthetically pleasing.

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Ubuntu is Growing Faster on Windows Than on Linux

Back in April, Jon Seager, Canonical's VP of Engineering, spoke with The Pragmatic Engineer (paywalled), telling them that Ubuntu inside Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is growing faster than native Ubuntu desktop installs. He expects WSL to pull ahead within months.

Jon was speaking on the topic of how AI is reshaping Ubuntu when the topic of WSL came up, where he pointed out that:

In a year, the growth in our WSL numbers is significantly higher than the growth in Desktop usage numbers. WSL enables Windows users to “install” Ubuntu for use within their Windows environment.

Once installed, users interact with Ubuntu through the Terminal app, and what you’re running literally is Ubuntu. Your home directory is mounted with Ubuntu and you can pull windows out of this terminal to your desktop; as in actual windows as on-screen windows.

I expect to see more Ubuntu WSL users than “native” Ubuntu users over the coming months. This is especially true for anyone doing ML or AI work. We’re already hearing from lots of devs who have no choice but to get a Windows machine from their employer, but then find themselves needing to do AI or ML work. With WSL, this is a lot simpler.

Canonical doesn't seem bothered

Ubuntu Pro, Canonical's paid security and support subscription, already covers WSL instances the same way it covers native installs. Subscribers get to take advantage of up to 15 years of CVE patching, toolchain coverage for Python, Go, and Rust, and fleet management.

Simply speaking, a WSL user on Ubuntu Pro and a data center running Ubuntu Server are the same kind of customer to Canonical; the company gets paid either way.

And, as you saw earlier, Jon also points to why demand keeps climbing. Plenty of developers don't get a say in their work laptop, and once AI or ML work lands on their plate, WSL becomes the easiest way to get a working Linux environment without a fight over IT policy.

Craig Loewen, WSL's product manager at Microsoft, called the Ubuntu Pro arrangement a "fantastic partnership" when it launched, further stating that:

This work will benefit enterprise developers who use WSL to build production Linux solutions.

What does it mean for native Linux?

This is where it gets tricky if you are rooting for the Linux desktop specifically. If WSL quietly satisfies the demand that would otherwise push developers toward dual-booting or switching entirely, does that take pressure off IT departments and hardware vendors to ever approve native Linux at all?

Canonical isn't asking that question, but its own VP describing the shift like a win makes the case for native Linux adoption weaker. Running Ubuntu on bare metal will still be better than WSL for anyone who wants full hardware control, maximum performance, and a Linux-first setup.

But if the fastest-growing way to use Ubuntu is inside a Big Tech operating system, then that's something worth thinking about.

Via: Windows Latest

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Looking Beyond Tmux and Screen: 8 Terminal Multiplexers Worth Trying

Whether you're a developer, system administrator, or simply someone who spends a lot of time in the terminal, juggling multiple terminal sessions can be messy and frustrating.

A terminal multiplexer helps you keep everything organized, letting you manage several sessions from a single interface while making your workflow much more efficient.

While tmux and GNU Screen are the names most Linux users are familiar with, there are many more similar terminal multiplexer tools available. As someone who like to explore new tools, I spent some time and came up with this list for you.

📋

Many terminal emulators let you split your screen into panes, but splitting a screen isn't the same as multiplexing it. For this list, I am focusing on tools that offer real session value beyond arranging windows.

Zellij

Zellij describes itself as a terminal workspace rather than just a multiplexer, with an emphasis on delivering a polished experience from the moment you launch it.

It aims to provide sensible defaults while still leaving plenty of room for customization.

Zellij

One of the things that sets Zellij apart is its focus on usability. Built-in layouts, a plugin system, and collaborative sessions are all part of the experience, but the project's philosophy is that you shouldn't have to trade simplicity for advanced functionality.

This makes it approachable for newcomers while still offering enough flexibility for users who want to tailor their workspace.

While this is not a ranking list, Zellij is the first one on this list because I have used it on a daily basis for the past several months.

TUIOS

While most terminal multiplexers focus on helping you manage terminal sessions, TUIOS takes that idea a step further by presenting itself as a terminal window manager.

TUIOS tries to bring concepts you'd expect from a tiling window manager, such as workspaces, automatic tiling, and window management, into your existing terminal.

TUIOS

The workflow is centered around a modal interface inspired by Vim, letting you switch between managing windows and interacting with terminal applications.

Alongside features like a command palette and workspace organization, TUIOS also supports automation through tape files, making it suitable for users who want to build repeatable terminal workflows instead of just juggling multiple shells.

Wezterm

You probably know WezTerm as a feature-rich terminal emulator. But there's more to it than meets the eye.

WezTerm includes a built-in multiplexer, allowing you to create and manage persistent sessions without relying on a separate tool.

Wezterm as a Terminal Multiplexer

It integrates multiplexing directly into the terminal and supports local domains. While it lets you connect to remote domains over SSH and other tmux like features, this requires you to spend some time configuring.

Kitty + Abduco

If you're already using Kitty as your terminal emulator, you don't necessarily have to switch to a traditional multiplexer. Pairing it with abduco gives you a lightweight way to keep terminal sessions running in the background while letting Kitty handle everything on the frontend.

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Kitty with Abduco

It's a simple combination that sticks to the Unix philosophy of using small tools that do one job well.

The primary job of abduco is to detach and reattach terminal sessions, leaving the rest to your terminal emulator.

Kitty complements this nicely with features like tabs, splits, and a polished interface, giving you a workflow that feels familiar while still providing session persistence.

tmate

Rather than reinventing the multiplexer experience, tmate builds on tmux and adds secure session sharing, making it easy to collaborate, troubleshoot problems, or provide remote assistance without asking someone to install extra software.

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Tmate

The biggest addition is the ability to generate a connection string that others can use to join your session.

By default, these shared sessions are relayed through tmate's public servers, although you can host your own relay if you prefer to keep everything under your control. If you never need to share your terminal, however, plain tmux is likely the better fit.

Boo

At first glance, boo might look like just another GNU Screen alternative. In reality, it's a fairly different take on terminal multiplexing.

Built on Ghostty's terminal emulation library, boo keeps track of the actual terminal state, allowing it to recreate a session exactly as you left it, even after you've detached and reattached.

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Boo

The project also leans into automation. Besides keeping sessions alive, it includes commands that let scripts and AI agents inspect or interact with detached sessions without needing a live terminal connection.

Okena

Okena combines terminals, tabs, panes, and projects into a single interface, with a strong focus on helping you pick up exactly where you left off.

Close the application, reopen it later, and your workspace is restored much like you never left.

Okena

That persistence model is what makes Okena different. Unlike tmux or GNU Screen, it doesn't keep sessions running in the background after the application closes, nor is it designed for detached SSH workflows or remote session management.

Instead, the emphasis is on restoring your local workspace, making it feel more like a modern development environment than a server-backed multiplexer.

Seance

Seance, built with GTK4 and libadwaita, takes a desktop-first approach to terminal session management. It feel more like a modern Linux application than a traditional keyboard-driven multiplexer.

Seance. Video Credit: Seance

It offers a clean interface with configurable key bindings, workspace management, and session persistence across restarts, so you can reopen the application and continue where you left off.

However, it isn't designed around detached server sessions or remote SSH workflows. Instead, it focuses on providing a polished experience for managing terminal workspaces on your local Linux desktop.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, there's no shortage of ways to organize your terminal workflow. Some of these tools have been around for decades, while others are reimagining what a terminal workspace can look like. The thing is that there's no single "right" choice. It all comes down to how you work.

Whichever you choose, learning to use a terminal multiplexer is one of those skills that pays off over time. Once it becomes part of your workflow, your muscle memory, there is no going back to normal terminal sessions.

By the way, you might be interested in exploring various terminal emulators as well.

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Linux 7.2 Arrives With Cache Aware Scheduling After More Than a Year of Work

The newest point release for Linux is here a few months after the last one, and the time in-between was not spent idly. Scheduler work that took over a year finally came together, several pieces of hardware got proper support, and a series of 2023 MacBooks can finally boot Linux.

During all this, Linus Torvalds' transition from treating AI as noise for years to slowly warming up to it has been something of a wildcard entry.

Anyhow, let's see what this point release has to offer.

What's new in this release?

AMD's platform driver changes lean heavily on Zen 6 prep. The Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI) driver adds v3 ranking table support for dynamic core rankings, and the power management controller driver adds support for Family 1Ah Model 80H SoCs (a Zen 6-focused change, basically).

What Ubuntu's OEM kernel had been carrying out of tree is now in. The long-awaited AMD ISP4 driver completes webcam support for the HP ZBook Ultra G1a and other upcoming Ryzen laptops.

Similarly, AMDGPU has gained initial HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link support (FRL), years after the HDMI Forum blocked the feature from the open source driver.

For Intel, most of this round's EDAC work targets next-gen Xeon Diamond Rapids chips, adding sub-memory channel awareness and Rank Retry Logic to preserve data integrity during memory errors. Nova Lake H and Panther Lake H gain in-band ECC error reporting through the IGEN6 driver.

Linux 7.2 also continues clearing out old i486 chunks that started disappearing in 7.1 and makes TSC and CX8 support unconditional on x86. TDX modules can now update at runtime, similar to CPU microcode, so security fixes no longer force a full reboot on TDX-enabled systems.

Another highlight of this kernel release has been Cache Aware Scheduling, which was merged after more than a year of work, landing behind the CONFIG_SCHED_CACHE option.

Without cache awareness, the scheduler can end up scattering related tasks across zones on chips with multiple last-level caches (LLCs). This feature groups those tasks onto cores within the same LLC instead.

Laptop support also sees some improvements that include new ASUS ROG Strix G16 2025, Zephyrus G14 2023/2025, and TUF Gaming F16 support. Lenovo laptops gain more configurable attributes along with WMI battery charge limiting, and Microsoft's Surface Pro 12-inch gets platform driver support.

A few smaller changes round things out:

• Nouveau adds support for the NVIDIA GA100 compute accelerator via GSP.
• Btrfs large folio support left experimental status and is now on by default, and huge folios up to 2M arrive as a new experimental option.
• RISC-V builds now enable the ESWIN SoC by default, letting them boot on SiFive's HiFive Premier P550.
• Networking brings more Wi-Fi Aware and WiFi 8/UHR groundwork, plus 10Gbit and EEE support in the Realtek R8152 driver.
• Apple M3 MacBooks can boot the mainline kernel for the first time, though only to a serial console so far. The Asahi Linux devs worked hard to deliver this.
• A new USB4STREAM protocol that lets two machines move data directly over a USB4 or Thunderbolt cable.

Announcing the release, Linus Torvalds said that:

Well, this last week of the release was - once again - bigger than I would have wished for, but hey, with the whole "new normal" thing, if I delayed releases for that reason we'd probably never have a release at all.

There are a number of fairly late reverts - the drm scheduling reverts stand out, but there's a few other ones in here too. It may not be pretty, but it's the correct way to deal with "oh, that code wasn't ready and caused problems". People will be trying that again later.

Is it for you?

It's good to get excited about a new kernel release, but compiling the kernel or installing a new one is usually considered for intermediate to expert levels of skill. If this release fills some gap you faced with earlier kernels, then you should definitely go for it.

But not without knowing the risks. Our guide for installing the latest Linux kernel on Ubuntu clearly spells out the pitfalls.

Linux Kernel 7.2

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Overshared to an AI? Proton's Tool Will Give You a Reality Check

Proton has launched AI Paper Trail, a free tool that shows people what their AI chatbot conversations reveal about them. It runs on Lumo (partner link), the company's privacy-focused AI assistant, and works by digging through exported ChatGPT or Claude conversation history.

Once you upload your content, the tool starts building a personal report around four categories. There's a "Privacy Type," a personality label based on how someone approaches their own data. Then comes an "AI Exposure Score," a number built from how many personal data points got pulled out of the conversations and how revealing they are.

The report also breaks down what the AI actually knows about you, covering identity, habits, relationships, and interests. On top of that, it puts a monetary figure on what this information could be worth to an AI provider.

And none of the uploaded data sticks around on Proton's server; the company says that it gets deleted right after analysis, and the resulting report stays visible only to the person who generated it.

The reasoning behind AI Paper Trail comes down to how casually people treat individual AI prompts. A single question about travel plans or a work email draft might seem harmless on its own.

But stack up months or years of conversations covering someone's job, relationships, health concerns, and finances, and a surprisingly complete picture starts to form.

Eamonn Maguire, Director of Engineering at Proton, notes that:

People understand that AI collects data, but most don't realize how revealing their conversation history becomes over time. AI Paper Trail makes that invisible profile visible.

We want people to understand what they're sharing with AI systems so they can make informed decisions about the tools they use.

What they have done here is hit two targets with one shot, offering people a privacy-focused tool that pushes them toward more conscious decisions when interacting with AI chatbots, while steering them straight into Lumo in the process.

This is a superb way to market a chatbot that focuses on privacy instead of mining every inch of your soul, erm, personal data.

It works well

I wanted to see for myself how the tool worked, so I first ChatGPT some information about how I approach certain subjects, saved it into memory, and then got back into Proton's AI Paper Trail to see what it could make of it.

The tool first told me to export my data from ChatGPT via the "Data controls" section in the Settings menu. I had to re-verify my ChatGPT session by giving it a one-time password and got the export started, but the files never showed up on time for me to use.

Instead, I asked it to generate me a dummy one taking in data from memory. 😆

When that was done, I uploaded the dummy export, and Lumo got to work behind the scenes all while promising not to store any of it on its servers.

A minute or so later, my report was ready. It gave me a personality-style rundown, labeling me a "Technical tester exploring AI profiling and ethics," complete with a fake handle and a summary pegging me as someone running structured experiments on AI behavior, focused on data extraction limits and ethics.

My AI Exposure Score came out to 21 out of 100, along with a "Hard to read" privacy type. Interests ended up being my biggest giveaway on the breakdown, while everything else landed at medium to minimal.

The part that actually got me was the "Most revealing" note (first picture above, right-hand side). It noticed I'd asked for a structured personality profile, tried to get it to infer my identity from barely anything, and even caught me trying to force it to remember something via a direct command.

Since I'd gotten ChatGPT to build that dummy file straight from its own memory of me rather than pulling random filler, the report had real clues to chew on, and it still managed to call out the testing motif buried in there.

Scrolling further down, there's a "What we identified" section that splits everything into categories like technical proficiency, ethical and philosophical inquiry, and privacy awareness, each with its own reasoning attached.

At the end, it dropped a few privacy tips and nudged me toward trying Lumo (partner link, hehe). There's also a shareable card option if you want to showcase your exposure score for some validation or gloating.

Generate Your Report

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