Thank you for adding an option to disable swiping on posts and comments! I don’t know when it was added, but it’s a necessary feature for me.

I’ve seen the comparison to pair programming with a junior programmer before, and it’s wild to me that such a comparison would be a point in favor of using AI for improving productivity.

I have never experienced a productivity boost by pairing with a junior. Which isn’t to say it’s not worth doing, but the productivity gains go entirely to the junior. The benefits I receive are mainly improving my communication and mentoring skills in the short term, and improving the team’s productivity in the long term by boosting the junior’s knowledge.

And it’s not like the AI works on the mundane stuff in parallel while I work on the more interesting, higher level stuff. I have to hold its hand through the process.

I feel like the efficiency gains of AI programming is almost entirely in improving your speed at wrestling a chatbot into producing something useful. Which may not be entirely useless going forward - knowing how to search well is an important skill, this may become something similar, but it just doesn’t seem worth the hassle to me.

This article from last year compares LLMs to techniques used by “psychics” (cold reading, etc).

https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

I think it’s a great analogy (and an interesting article).

“In October 2021, Governor Greg Abbott hosted the lobbying group Texas Blockchain Council at the governor’s mansion. The group insisted that their industry would help the state’s overtaxed energy grid; that during energy crises, miners would be one of the few energy customers able to shut off upon request, provided that they were paid in exchange.”

Incredible. Driving up energy needs to make their fake currency will help the state’s energy grid, because we can then hold the grid hostage until we’re paid.

I like that I can currently adjust the volume or silence a call on my phone in my pocket by feeling the physical buttons. I miss being able to deliberately unlock my phone with touch id as I’m picking it up without having to look at it square on.

Hell, I even miss the chin and bezel. I liked having neutral space to grab the phone without it registering a tap or swipe.

Maybe I’m getting old, but smartphone design largely peaked several years ago, and they insist on making changes to parts of the phone that are perfectly fine.

Look into installing AppArmor instead of SELinux. AppArmor is easier to configure, and SELinux is not officially supported on Arch.

GPL can be used for commercial purposes, but it requires all software derived from it to also be open source and GPL compatible. So no one whose commercial business relies on selling software will use GPL because their customers can copy and distribute the code.

Neither Safari nor Chrome’s rendering engine is GPL. Safari’s engine is LGPL, which means the binary library can be linked into a closed source program, but modifications to the library’s code must remain open.

Chromium is BSD, which doesn’t even require modifications to remain open. So I can take chromium’s source, change it however I want for my own browser, and never distribute that code.

If Safari’s and Chrome’s engines were GPL, Safari and Chrome would be forced to be open source, and they very much are not.

If you have Elden Ring on PC, check out the seamless co-op mod. We were able to play through the whole game with very few issues. No invasions, no resummoning after bosses, normal use of torrent. It’s fantastic, and it’s shocking how well the mod works.

https://www.nexusmods.com/eldenring/mods/510

Kerbal Space Program 2 and Dark Souls 3.

KSP2 released their science patch this month that adds missions and a progression path to work through. It’s a lot more fun now that there are goals to work towards, and the missions are much better than what KSP1’s career mode offered.

I’ve been co-op’ing through DS3 with a buddy, which has been a fun way to tide us over until Elden Ring’s DLC comes out. I just wish there was a similar seamless co-op mod for DS3. Neither of us are interested in PvP, and it’s a little tedious to have to go through everything twice.

Time traveling North Koreans are getting ammo from the USSR? My god…

My spouse says that they LIKE the way I smell.

Did you know Kids in the Hall made a sketch about you?

I haven’t had time to build up a big city, but so far I’ve enjoyed it. I’m running on Linux with a 5600X + 6600XT, and 1080p at medium gets me 30-40 fps.

I LOVE that roads transmit power and water. Money is way more available early game than in 1. The only annoyance for me so far has been the terrain overlay that comes up when you select a zoning tool (similar to how selecting water pipes switches to underground. You can make it go back to normal by hitting i after selecting the tool. It’s minor, but its an annoying difference from 1.

There will be things to learn and unlearn, but modern Linux distros are fairly smooth sailing for basic tasks if your hardware supports Linux well. Laptop support is a little more spotty, where there may be issues with suspend, or the Wi-Fi needing 3rd party drivers, but desktops will probably work without much fuss (and there are plenty of laptops with no issues).

Gaming has been made much easier thanks to wine and proton, particularly valve’s contributions. For steam games, many of them will just work out of the box or after ticking a checkbox. ProtonDB is invaluable for quickly seeing how well a game will run on Linux.

But as you’ll see as you read some of the reports on ProtonDB, there will likely be a more troubleshooting than you’re used to on windows. As long as you know how to Google the name of your distro + the problem you’re seeing, you’ll usually find a solution.

You don’t need to be a terminal master to use Linux nowadays. But most things are easier to explain with terminal commands than with step by step gui instructions, so many guides online will have you use the terminal to some degree.

Honestly, the best advice I can give is just try it. If you have a spare drive (internal or usb), just go ahead and install Linux to it. If you want to be extra sure you won’t do anything to your existing windows install, remove the windows drive first (or disable it in bios). Then play around with things and see how it feels.

It’s possible that a nuclear response would have prevented the ground warfare that dragged on in the war on terror. Possible, in the way that it’s possible that a meteor will land on my head tonight.

One of the reasons the wars in the Middle East dragged on for so long is that for every terrorist we took out in an attack, multiple more civilians were killed. And every dead civilian potentially creates another person with nothing to lose to turn to terrorism.

Nuclear weapons are even more indiscriminate, and they have the additional problem of risking alienating basically all of our allies. Plus it drastically changes the nuclear calculus for near peer enemies.

If we’re willing to launch a nuclear first strike against a non-nuclear nation with no ability to threaten us militarily, then why wouldn’t we launch against Russia, China, etc the second we see an opportunity to take them out? That’s what they’d be thinking, anyway, and so their motivation for launching a first strike against us if the opportunity arises goes up dramatically.

There’s a reason Russia has only talked about nukes in their invasion of Ukraine. They know that actually pulling the nuclear trigger is crossing a line that sets them on a dangerous and irreversible course.

Interestingly enough, just yesterday I finished the (audio)book that this excerpt is from: Stolen Focus. It’s a good read and it really resonated with me.

I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. I’ve struggled with focus my whole life but had managed well enough to finish school and get established in a career. But even with treatment, it’s been getting harder and harder over the years to stay focused on anything - whether it’s work or hobbies that I enjoy.

It occurred to me after reading Stolen Focus that my struggles really started getting worse around the time I got my first smart phone. Over the years, more and more I’ve found myself reaching for my phone out of habit to fill time, even when I’m doing other things like watching tv. The timing may just be a coincidence, but I thought it was interesting. The book has definitely caused me to reevaluate my phone and social media usage (I say as I post on lemmy while watching the office).

Depending on what games you played, mac was a decent alternative for gaming. Blizzard treated mac as a first class platform for many years, indie games using multi platform engines often targeted it, and porting studios like aspyr would bring over a few big titles here and there.

Linux was in a similar boat before proton really opened things up, but with even less support than mac from game devs.