No you’re probably right, I’ve had my Ubuntu-based distro act up after upgrades, and I actually find it more random now than what it used to be like in the 2010s. My feeling is that Debian/Arch are better in this regard, and most newbies don’t actually need bleeding-edge patches.
Thank you
I have a recommendation for your recommendations. There’s KDE Neon which is distributed by the KDE project, which is Ubuntu-based. That’s what I personally run, now that I really don’t have the time/energy to tinker.
I find the best way to get help is to find a good source of documentation, rather than asking questions directly. ArchWiki is great, UbuntuWiki is not bad. There are lots of blogs out there with people writing guides for how to solve issues that they’ve had, and they’re usually really good (but this relies on search engines finding these results).
Yeah, let everyone do their own thing - there’s nothing wrong with starting with Slackware if you want to. But if we’re going to recommend a starting point to people, maybe go with something that is designed to work out of the box. There’s going to be so much else to get adjusted to that extra options aren’t necessary.
Oh, and by the way, most people don’t like tinkering. They want their car to take them from A to B and their computer to do the thing, it’s not a hobby for them and we shouldn’t expect new users to be looking for a new hobby.
You’d choose proprietary software that’s a wrapper for a near-monopoly technology over free and open source software because you didn’t like a press release?
Power is owned by Capital. Capital is owned by Violence.
It cuts even deeper than that. KDE took Microsoft’s philosophy to the extreme, didn’t abandon projects that crashed and burned under Windows, and somehow at long last made many things work.
Explorer was supposed to be an everything-browser. Didn’t work out. Microsoft gave up and made a file explorer and separate Internet Explorer. Meanwhile, KDE made Konqueror with KHTML that browsed everything – sftp, samba, websites, open any file within any Konqueror pane, split your view horizontally and vertically as many times as you god damn like. It was really fucking weird until you got used to it. KHTML went on to become WebKit then Blink; Internet Explorer went on to become a wrapper for Blink.
Windows 98 wanted to put HTML on your desktop as applets or gadgets or whatever. Didn’t work. Sucked. Huge resource hog too. Got abandoned for the next ambitious Microsoft project that they never follow through on. Meanwhile that’s exactly how Plasma works, and it rules.
For real. This is photo of the year material.
That’s actually terrifying. Code has been degrading a lot in the past 10 years or so, and it looks like the LLM trend for code is doing more harm than good. I don’t think that needs to be the case but it appears to be the case.
I’m not going to argue that take on “Fuck AI” but come on man, that’s just not reasonable.
Honestly I thought so too, but I quickly looked it up before commenting, and at least according to Our World in Data it’s actually up both per capita and in absolute terms.
Unfortunately despite leading on EVs, renewables and nuclear power deployment, China is also expanding coal. So their greenhouse gas emissions are still rising.
Your coworker is mistreating Claude and this story wants me to call CPS.
Claude will come up with all kinds of creative ideas and that’s neat, but you really need to reign it in to make it useful. Use Claude’s code as a suggestion, cut out the stuff that’s over the top – explain why you did that to Claude, it will generally get it. Add it to your CLAUDE.md if it’s a repeat issue.
Exactly. There’s a Dunning-Kreuger effect here where if you don’t know what you’re doing, it looks like AI just miraculously does what you would have wanted it to do if you were smart enough to craft a good prompt.
But if you know what you’re doing, you know what tasks it is worth using AI for, and then you craft a good prompt, get a lot of valuable processing done by the AI, and then review, fine-tune and polish the rest.
I think a lot of the hype with AI comes from the sincere shock that throwing more compute at a really simple algorithm resulted in a program that kicked the Turing test’s ass. If we can’t recognize the significance of that, then we must truly have lost our sense of wonder and curiosity.
But the hype is focusing a little too much on the LLM side of things. The real gains are going to come from models that specialize on other kinds of data, especially data that humans are bad at working with.
Exactly.
Are we about to witness a technological revolution on the scale of broadband access for the masses? Yes.
Are we in a financial bubble the size of the dotcom and subprime mortages combined? Also yes.
Hey, sounds like you really recognized how to balance a real need for sanitation with keeping sane in a world that is often indifferent.
This is just common sense in the end. I’m kind of grossed out that in Europe, people don’t wash their hands before eating with their hands. Compared to the Middle East where the dustiest falafel shack has a sink with soap right by the entrance, I’d say it’s a weird cultural quirk.
Same goes for the kitchen of the vast majority of people where I live. Why no soap by the sink? Some actually wash their hands with dish soap which is really bad for your skin, but most just use water only. I try to politely ask if I can gift them some soap when I visit. Helps keep me sane.
Your hands are made to interface with the world. They will get dirty, and that’s fine. You just need to get the gunk off them before touching your face or vagina.
Down with the bourgeoisie
Eat the rich
Sodomize the land-owners
Impale all people who have more than 25 reál in their pocket
Literally murder all human beings regardless of their political beliefs
There’s a reason why Debian is so popular as a base for other distros. It’s just no-nonsense, does what it’s supposed to do, never expects praise just for doing its damn job.