So scylly

US once again beaten by rest of world.

The real question is all the stuff beyond just having the distro installed. The packages, the services, the configs, the application data.

If you leave all that stuff the way it was installed via the old package manager, it may have some bad assumptions baked in and may be incompatible with packages you install with the new package manager.

And if you clear all of it out and reinstall it, have you really gained anything vs. just doing a clean install?

There’s a reason you have a home dir. Just copy that forward along with whatever other config files you might’ve customized.

Btw, if the ability to make drastic changes while still maintaining continuity is an important feature for you, maybe check out NixOS.

upower -d can provide some useful info on-demand. I think there’s a daemon component to it too, which may have variable log levels.

No, not really. I didn’t downvote you btw.

Edited my original comment to avoid suggesting that.

toxic men

Kinda sad and ironic, that the term “toxic masculinity” began as a way to describe how culture manufactures a harmful concept of what it means to be a man, and it seeps into men and damages them like a toxin… but now we use it to mean that the man himself is toxic, undermining the whole notion of thinking of the problem as systemic rather than one of individuals.

Anyway, patriarchy is absolutely demolishing men right now, and the political right is saying “women’s fault” while the left is saying “lmao skill issue”. If we don’t get our shit together and start treating this seriously, we’re gonna have big problems.

Portal though?

Also: mobile games? Flash games? FarmVille left a helluva mark.

Not really. There are barely any chips out there.

Oct 2021: 200 billion ARM chips

Nov 2023: 1 billion RISC-V chips, hoping to hit 16 billion by 2030

Nov 2024: 300 billion ARM chips

Cool, but… why not just NixOS?

ARM support. Every SoC is a new horror.

Armbian does great work, but if you want another distro you’re gonna have to go on a lil adventure.

Behind the Bastards had a Christmas special non-bastard episode on the Tupamaros of Uruguay and Pepe Mujica. It does seem like they have some decent politics there.

thousand’s*

Wind of change: did the CIA write the cold war’s biggest anthem?

It makes people click.

True… but you can sure enable one by not voting.

Oh hey me too!

Also true. It’s scraping.

In the words of Cory Doctorow:

Web-scraping is good, actually.

Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually.

Scraping when the scrapee suffers as a result of your scraping is good, actually.

Scraping to train machine-learning models is good, actually.

Scraping to violate the public’s privacy is bad, actually.

Scraping to alienate creative workers’ labor is bad, actually.

We absolutely can have the benefits of scraping without letting AI companies destroy our jobs and our privacy. We just have to stop letting them define the debate.

If an LLM consumes the same copyrighted content and learns how to copy its various characteristics, how is it meaningfully different from me doing it and becoming a successful writer?

That is the trillion-dollar question, isn’t it?

I’ve got two thoughts to frame the question, but I won’t give an answer.

1. Laws are just social constructs, to help people get along with each other. They’re not supposed to be grand universal moral frameworks, or coherent/consistent philosophies. They’re always full of contradictions. So… does it even matter if it’s “meaningfully” different or not, if it’s socially useful to treat it as different (or not)?
2. We’ve seen with digital locks, gig work, algorithmic market manipulation, and playing either side of Section 230 when convenient… that the ethos of big tech is pretty much “define what’s illegal, so I can colonize the precise border of illegality, to a fractal level of granularity”. I’m not super stoked to come with an objective quantitative framework for them to follow, cuz I know they’ll just flow around it like water and continue to find ways to do antisocial shit in ways that technically follow the rules.

What OpenAI is doing is not piracy.

But then you’ll need dog water to deal with the cat water