Take your best on which will kill us first: the climate apocalypse or the robot apocalypse.

Boo

Where app data is stored.

~/.local

~/.config

~/.var

~/.appname

Sometimes more than one place for the same program

Pick one and stop cluttering my home directory

LLM scraping is a parasite on the internet. In the actual ecological definition of parasite: they place a burden on other unwitting organisms computer systems, making it harder for the host to survive or carry out their own necessary processes, solely for the parasite’s own benefit while giving nothing to the host in return.

I know there’s an ongoing debate (both in the courts and on social media) about whether AI should have to pay royalties to its training data under copyright law, but I think they should at the very least be paying to use infrastructure while collecting the data, even free data, given that it costs the organisation hosting said data real money and resources to be scraped, and it’s orders of magnitude more money and resources compared to serving that data to individual people.

The case can certainly be made that copying is not theft, but copying is by no means free either, especially when done at the scales LLMs do.

Why Linux Mint specifically, why not just Linux? Or if they want to pick a specific distro, why not Trisquel or another FSF-endorsed distro?

I just did a line of microcontrollers

These are the chips boomers think are in vaccines /s

There’s literally no reason to buy a game until the minute before you’re going to play it. It’s not like digital copies sell out or takes time to ship. Add games you want to play to our wishlist and buy them when you’re actually ready to play them.

Ah sweet, manmade horrors beyond my comprehension.

Fedora Linux has been the most stable OS in my experience, having used Windows XP to 10 and switching to Linux before 11 came out. I can leave it on for literally weeks on end and the memory never randomly fills up, nor does it get more and more glitchy/crash prone as you leave it on, both of which I have experienced on Windows.

FOSS is not American. Foss belongs to literally everyone.

Microsoft: has town hall

Also Microsoft: “approved opinions only!”

Why would anyone bother writing it like that? That just seems like int main() with extra steps. Like does auto enable some compiler optimisation of the return type that I’m not aware of?

I think this is kind of a good thing, that way companies can’t sell old cpus to people who don’t know any better.

But the other side to this is that those new old stock CPUs just became e-waste when they could have been sold at a discount to people who could make use of them despite their age. Perfectly good parts containing precious natural resources and people’s labour getting thrown away because Microsoft said so.

Microsoft: NOOO YOU CAN’T USE THAT CPU IT CAME OUT AN ARBITRARY AMOUNT OF TIME AGOOOO!

Linux: Haha potato chip go BRRRR

Every time Rust takes forever to compile something, I picture in my mind it checking every possible edge case and buffer vulrnability I didn’t check and suddenly I’m a lot more okay with how long it takes.

Reminder that Linux’s decision to write an entire kernel in C and not a mix of C and assembly was just as controversial back then as Rust vs C is now. The pro-assembly programmers used many similar arguments as the anti-Rust programmers (it’s bloated, it’s too high level for the kernel, it has a complicated compiler, it’s just a pointless abstraction over what’s actually happening at the processor level, it’s not mature enough, if you were competent in assembly you wouldn’t need to use C, if assembly is too difficult for you then you shouldn’t even be developing a kernel, etc). Now Linux is hailed as one of the pioneer software projects that led the switch from assembly to C for kernel level code.

If even senior C developers can and regularly do write critical memory vulnerabilities that can give attackers remote code execution as root, then I’d say it’s indeed already broken.

Honestly playing a competitive game with AI is kind of like playing with a child who hasn’t grown out of the making up random rules phase.

“Rock crushes scissors, I win!”

“Nuh uh! My scissors are actually a ray gun and disintegrated your rock!”

Because AI doesn’t actually “understand” the concepts it’s using the same way humans do. Nor does it know what winning or losing is or even the concept of a game itself. All it knows is you told it to prioritise reaching a certain state (try to “win” the “game”) so it will do whatever it can to reach it without regard for if it makes sense or not. AI at its core is just statical analysis and prediction of what a human might do given the prompt.