Immutable distros are great for applications where you want uniformity for users and protections against users who are a little too curious for their own good.

SteamOS is a perfect use case. You don’t want users easily running scripts on their Steam Decks to install god knows what and potentially wreck their systems, then come to Valve looking for a fix.

Immutable distros solve that issue. Patches and updates for the OS roll out onto effectively identical systems, and if something does break, the update will fail instead of the system. So users will still have a fully functional Steam Deck.

If you’re not very technical, or you aren’t a power user and packaged apps like Flatpaks are available for all your software, then go for it. I prefer to tinker under the hood with my computers, but I also understand and except the risk that creates.

Immutable distros are a valuable part of a larger, vibrant Linux ecosystem IMO.

Learn Linux TV. Great educational channel for all things Linux.

Hearing from “both sides” and coming to some compromise/middle ground only works if the following is true:

1. Both parties are acting in good faith.
2. The viewpoints expressed are close enough that they don’t require a total departure from one’s current viewpoint.
3. The disputed topic doesn’t have a obvious or clear correct answer.

The problem is, at least in the US, none of these are true for right wingers and even many “centrists.”

You cannot talk to somebody and try to find common ground if they don’t believe in statistical studies by government agencies, they don’t believe in scientific studies by major universities and research institutions, and don’t care about the rights and protections for minority groups.

The older members of my family are almost all conservatives, MAGA supporters, and fundamentalist Christians.

They genuinely believe that Evolution is a myth and the Earth was created 6000 years ago. They believe that illegal immigrants are invading this country and that Democrats are secretly allowing them to. They don’t believe humans have any effect on climate change. They don’t think Covid was anything more than a common cold that the government used as an excuse to try to control people. They don’t believe in vaccines.

I find Lemmy to be very refreshing. I get news from a diverse collection of Leftists sources. Anarchists, statists, weak socialists like the AOC/Bernie types, government studies, independent guerrilla journalists, Communists, Mutualists, Marxists, etc.

But I have no interest in further “diversifying” by adding right wing “sources.”

Cookies can taste good with many different ingredients, but no cookie tastes good with horse poop.

…You are considering abandoning Libre Office because it doesn’t auto-capitalize after line breaks?

You must be a bot, you don’t understand the semantics. Ironic, and blocked.

The point is that it actually can be vetted.

Absolutely.

And yet, this AI expert stated that we don’t know why the AI designed the chip in specific ways. There’s a difference between understanding the rough mechanism for something, and understanding why something happened.

Imagine hiring an engineer to design something, they hand you a finished design; they cannot explain what it is, how they actually designed it, how it works, or why they made the specific choices they did.

I never made the false equivalency you claimed I did, and you also never addressed my second criticism, which is telling.

Nope, we actually have entire fields of study that focus on the brain and cognition with thousands of experts and decades of research and experimentation to effectively understand a ton about how our brains work and why we behave the way we do.

Plus, your brain is not created and owned entirely by trillion dollar megacorps with the primary incentive to use it to increase profitability.

Almost zero, but not because I believe in American democracy. I think the techno-fascist machine will grind forward regardless of Trump being in office.

“We are coming up with structures that are complex and look randomly shaped, and when connected with circuits, they create previously unachievable performance. Humans cannot really understand them, but they can work better.”

Great, so we will eventually have black box chips running black box algorithms for corporations where every aspect of the tech is proprietary and hidden from view with zero significant oversight by actual people…

The true cyber-dystopia.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a game theoretic concept, not a psychology experiment, and cops use it all the time to successfully get suspects to rat each other out or provide confessions in exchange for certain plea deals.

🖕

Easily smart and slightly below average attractiveness. It’s pretty trivial to boost your appearance by 2-3 “points” with some decent fashion choices, makeup, working out, and good grooming.

Worst case, I use my high intelligence to get a high paying job and use some of the money for plastic surgery.

Got my tickets a few days ago, hoping for a win!

history | grep command you’re searching for

That will return all commands you’ve typed that contain that keyword. Helps if you remember part of a command, but can’t remember the specific flags or the proper format.

If there are common commands that you use over and over, turn them into a Bash script and name the script something descriptive.

I do that for long commands that I don’t want to type out, like my whole system update workflow: sudo apt update -y && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo flatpak update -y

I saved that as a Bash script and called it “update.sh” then I saved it in my home directory. Now whenever I want to do a full system update, I just type ./update.sh and it asks me for my password, then updates my whole system without me having to do anything else. I do this with several different tasks like my remote Ansible server updates.

Other than that, you can buy/make a linux command cheat sheet with the most common commands. Keep it with you or next to your computer. Look at it whenever you need a refresh.

tmux - makes managing remote SSH sessions a breeze.

tomb - A little FOSS encryption utility that runs in the CLI. Easy, cute, effective. Tomb Utility

There are two core issues I have with AI generated content:

1. Ownership - All the big players are using proprietary software, weights, models, training methods, and datasets to generate these models. On top of the lack of visibility, they have farmed millions of peoples data and content without their knowledge or consent. If it were up to me, all AI research and software would be 100% open source, public access, non-copyright. That includes all theoretical work in scientific publications, all code, all the datasets, the weights, the infrastructure and training methods, absolutely everything.

2. Lowest common denominator - AI has unleashed the ability for individuals and organizations to produce extremely low effort content at volumes that haven’t been seen before. I hate how search results are becoming totally poisoned by AI slop. You just get pages and pages of sites that abuse SEO to become the top search result and are nothing more than click-farms to generate ad revenue. This is a systemic issue that stems from several things, primarily Capitalism, but also the way we cater to powerful corpos that push this sludge onto us.

I have no issue with AI tools that are actually helpful in their context. For instance, animation software that uses AI to help generate intermediate frames from your initial drawings. Screen reader software that uses AI to help sight-impaired folks with more accurate text-to-speech. AI tools that help with code completion, or debugging.

These are all legitimate uses of the technology, but sadly, all of that is being overshadowed by mountains of sludge being shoved on us at every level. Because those implementations aren’t going to make rich people even richer, they aren’t going to temp investors to dump billions more into AI startups and corpo tech. Helping blind people and indie animation studios is boring and low-profit, therefore in a Capitalist system, it gets shoved to the bottom of the stack while the high-margin slop gets pumped down our throats.

Default terminal -> Kitty

I’ve really been enjoying Fish on my personal laptop.