TheFriendlyArtificer

joined 1 year ago
[–] TheFriendlyArtificer 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I used to think that I wanted to distro hop. Turns out that what I wanted was a bare bones OS that gave me the freedom to rice in strange and unnatural ways.

After 25(!) years of battling X11, dependency hells, and the early days of desktop compositing, I finally realized that what I wanted was Arch, and a few window managers to play with. SwayWM, and now Hyprland.

Unless you have some niche needs (real-time audio encoding) or want to play with more esoteric experiments (Nix, OSTree, etc), distro hopping is overkill.

But most distros have homogenized to the point to where all you need is knowledge about systemd to go from one to the other.

Just pick your favorite, non-snap distro and hack on it.

[–] TheFriendlyArtificer 32 points 10 months ago (4 children)

It'll only affect 32bit systems with ancient operating systems storing dates in epoch time.

Not a small number. But nowhere remotely near what Y2K could have been.

Hopefully by the time we need to account for a 64bit rollover, I'll be comfortably retired. But by that time, proton decay may be a more worrisome problem.

[–] TheFriendlyArtificer 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I imagine there are fan groups for Our Flag Means Death.

[–] TheFriendlyArtificer 24 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The term, "enshitification" is getting bandied about a lot. But the bots and corporations are an inevitable part of capitalism. Make money at all costs, never be satisfied with what you have, and treat everybody that isn't you like a stepping stone.

Scammers and sociopathic c-levels are missing something fundamentally human. A complete lack of empathy. But this has always been a part of our species. The difference now is that we have a system that dramatically rewards that sickness. And that's not even getting into how being able to be evil at scale is going to make the next few decades interesting.

[–] TheFriendlyArtificer 5 points 10 months ago

Pop verification neck to continue.

[–] TheFriendlyArtificer 2 points 10 months ago

I was working for a company doing analytics on Twitch. I was training an image recognition model overnight on Monster Train. My non-promoted testing channel was raided and I had 300 people watching my bot clumsily play through a game while another bot observed. Like a sort of GAN.

People didn't start filtering out for 3 hours. I didn't understand Twitch before I started all of that. And afterwards I felt like I somehow knew even less. I get being bored. But I've never been that bored.

[–] TheFriendlyArtificer 17 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Janeway would straight up murder them. She's done worse for less reason.

[–] TheFriendlyArtificer 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

My argument is thus:

LLMs are decent at boilerplate. They're good at rephrasing things so that they're easier to understand. I had a student who struggled for months to wrap her head around how pointers work, two hours with GPT and the ability to ask clarifying questions and now she's rockin'.

I like being able to plop in a chunk of Python and say, "type annotate this for me and none of your sarcasm this time!"

But if you're using an LLM as a problem solver and not as an accelerator, you're going to lack some of the deep understanding of what happens when your code runs.

[–] TheFriendlyArtificer 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I live in a college town where you'd expect to find a lot of bike lanes.

And we do have them. For a few blocks at a stretch. Then they go away or merge with traffic only to pick up again a few blocks down the road.

Sometimes I need a car. I can't carry a week's worth of groceries on a bike. I can't ride to a D&D gathering when it's -35°F outside (Montana).

But situations like that notwithstanding, I could easily use a bike for 70+% of my travel needs. And yet I don't.

There is no infrastructure. And any voter initiatives to create the infrastructure will inevitably get killed by Conservatives upset that something will help a college student while not providing themselves with anything. Or purely out of spite.

I spent some time in Davis, CA and have never seen a more mature and robust system of bike paths and traffic control. Bicyclists are first class citizens and (where possible) have paths that are completely separate from motor vehicle traffic.

I would ride my bike everywhere if I could do it without the justifiable fear that I'll get run off the road for not going fast enough.

[–] TheFriendlyArtificer 14 points 10 months ago

Imagine if slavery were left up to the states...

[–] TheFriendlyArtificer 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

PHP: You're not a nerd. But you are at least trying.

[–] TheFriendlyArtificer 38 points 11 months ago (11 children)

It takes nearly as long to decrapify a new Firefox install as it does to compile Librewolf.

Install uBlock.

Tell Firefox that you don't want to sync at the moment.

Disable "sponsored" stories. AKA, listicles designed to draw in idiots who want to see which 8 child actors from the 90s turned out to be the tallest. Alarmingly close to the tacky crap that you might see on a fresh Windows install.

Tell Firefox that you don't want to sync at the moment.

Now disable Pocket. Remembering to go into about:config to really disable it

Disable telemetry.

Tell Firefox that you don't want to sync at the moment.

Remove Amazon, Bing, et al. from the search engine list.

Remove "suggested" and "sponsored" autocomplete.

Tell Firefox that you don't want to sync at the moment.

Remind yourself that, despite this crap, Firefox is still a better browser than any Chromium knockoff.

 

I've been helping my 72 year old bilingual (Spanish) mother come to terms with one of her nieces having transitioned.

She's been remarkably progressive about it, but she did bring up some good questions that I didn't have answers for.

(I have my own set of annoyances for pronouns in English. Using a third person plural for single individuals has been leading to confusion, especially amongst my English L2 friends and family. But pronouns are some of the most conservative parts of speech in any language so I'm not going to tilt at that particular windmill. )

As a question for my LGBTQ+ kith, what have you been seeing/using as pronouns in different languages? Romantic languages are generally still heavily gendered, as are some Germanic. Does that interfere with non-binary language patterns? What about Turkish, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic, etc?

Have there been any instances of novel pronouns created?

And, not to pry open old wounds, but has anybody noticed new slurs or other intentionally hurtful epithets?

The first question is an effort to answer questions that I hadn't even thought to ask. I'm actually pretty proud of the older generation making an effort to live in the modern world.

The rest is pure personal curiosity and possible conversation material.

Huge thank you to everybody taking time out of their day to answer.

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