tangeli

That’s surprising. I have an older version of coreutils (9.7 from Debian 13) that doesn’t produce the links and formatting. I’m running bash and the behaviour you’re experiencing isn’t reproduced.

Aliases aside, I wouldn’t expect the shell to be the cause. None the less, I installed version 4.0.2 of the fish shell and ran the same command in it and didn’t see any control characters. But that’s not really surprising - my old version of ls doesn’t produce them. So I ran ls | less because even with my version ls colour highlights files by type, but in the pipeline to less, there were no codes.

If I run ls --color=always | less then I do see codes in the less output.

You might check your environment variables to see if CLICOLOR_FORCE is set.

Otherwise, I am out of ideas.

I would say your ls shouldn’t be working that way: when it detects that it’s standard output isn’t a terminal, it shouldn’t be outputting the control codes. Which makes me wonder what version of ls you are running.

edit: what is the output from alias ls and what happens if you run \ls --help | less?

Today I was looking at the Intel IME issue.

Intel has the following advisory: Intel® Management Engine Critical Firmware Update (Intel-SA-00086)

Intel does not provide updates to the software in their IME. They claim they cannot do so due to the system manufacturers possibly having customized parts of the system.

Lenovo no longer supports this model. The last IME update from Lenovo was to version 12.0.95.2489, release by Lenovo 2025/02/13.

This predates to latest vulnerability discoveries in the Intel IME. Neither Intel nor Lenovo will provide any further updates for this model. So it will remain vulnerable.

You should consider this, when you consider any older laptop with an Intel CPU.

Otherwise, I am quite happy with it. It is physically more robust than my previous laptops and it works very well with Debian. But it isn’t a perfect solution.

I am happy with the refurbished ThinkPad T590 that I purchased earlier this year. It works well with Debian. The primary reason I purchased it is because I couldn’t get a replacement keyboard for my not so old Dynabook. No such problem with this one - parts are readily available.

I think the way they are operating now is commonly called predatory pricing.

I don’t know if there is a potential for a profitable business that covers all the costs. Possibly the direct costs, but I think not if they had to fairly compensate those who created the intellectual property they consumed to train their models, and much less likely if they had to pay the indirect costs. They might, some day, compensate creators a little, like Google shares a pittance of their ad revenue with some creators. But it is unlikely to be anything near a living wage.

That’s because, thus far, they get away with choosing not to distribute any of their trillions of dollars to the suppliers of the information they consume - money has only gone to the suppliers of hardware and power, and to influencing politicians and rewarding investors. That’s their choice, and they should not be allowed to continue to make that choice. Good luck to the NYT.