Stage 2:

Documents folder? You want to rule my whole computer, dictate some nonsensical folder structure and then you act like, out of the goodness of your heart, I can have this little set of folders, deep in your weird structure, to store my stuff? And you’re even telling me how to sort it? On my own hard drive connected to my own computer?

I’m the weird one in the room. I’ve been using 7z for the last 10-15 years and now .tar.zst, after finding out that ZStandard achieves higher compression than 7-Zip, even with 7-Zip in “best” mode, LZMA version 1, huge dictionary sizes and whatnot.

zstd --ultra -M99000 -22 files.tar -o files.tar.zst

Tankies make liberals uncomfortable because liberals believe they are the furthest left you can go

Without trying to be combative, but that sounds like one of those tidbits which one side believes about the other, circulated only to divide. At least I don’t have the impression that it is a view with any footing amongst liberal-minded people.

Most liberals want to move further left, ideas like free college and public education, public transport, less corporate power and splitting up large corporations, even unconditional basic income, etc. are popular with the majority. Just violent revolution and authoritarianism won’t roll, after all, liberal means “live and let live.”

As a mixed-ideology lefty (maybe I fit within your definition of liberal), I’m not worried about tankies being too far left, not at all, rather, I am tempted to think of them as confused right wingers believing themselves to be “the left.”

Thanks for bringing this up, it’s really needed.

Your example is just one of many I’ve seen. The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign where only this gross mix of Western doomerism with Russia/China-glorifying fascism is allowed to thrive.

I don’t know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there’s no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in “raids” on other instances.

Make it two: emerge firefox (Gentoo users only)

I think that is really the core of it.

I remember that it took months of discussions, compromises and buttering up specific opposition members to get it passed, and that it was a trimmed-down version of the original Medicare plans.

I wish I could remember where, but when answering a question very similar to the OP’s - perhaps in an interview? - Obama explained that he would have very much liked to tackle two big things: health care and climate, but that his party’s resources were stretched too thin to do both at the same time and that he knew they would loose control of the house in the midtems (2011), so he picked one thing.

Not yet. It can lead to that point, but this is just the kernel handling an “out of memory” situation. The kernel in the screenshot is configured to run its OOM reaper / OOM killer.

The OOM reaper checks all running processes and looks for the one that causes the least disruption when killed. It does that by calculating a score which is based on the amount of memory a process uses, how recently it was launched and so on. Ideally, a Linux desktop user would simply see their video game, browser or media player close.

This smart TV is in real trouble, though, it probably already killed its OSD, still didn’t even have enough memory to spawn a login shell and is now making short work of strange VLC instances that probably got left behind by a poorly written app store app :)

I don’t know why that comment is collecting downvotes. They are referencing George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

Context: “Animal Farm” is a story about how communism can devolve into dictatorship. In the story, the animals on a farm drive out their tyrannical drunkard farmer. They write on the barn wall: “all animals are equal” and live in communist utopia. But some animals, too, hunger for power and status. Rather than overturn the system, they undermine it by adding “…but some animals are more equal than others” to the barn wall, legitimizing a ruling class (themselves) because they are “more equal.”

Disclaimer: I wondered the same, since 2014, and this is what I puzzled together for myself, read it with that in mind!

I believe a lot of it can be traced back to the wealthy and to conservative think tanks / media control by right wing moguls.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives were perceived as well-off business people trying to protect their own wealth (I’ve read that people used to say things like “I’m not rich enough to vote Republican” or children shouting “last one in the house is a dirty Republican”). You can even see old movies dunk on conservatives (i.e. take Stanley Kubrick’s “2010: The Year we Make Contact” (1984), at the beginning, with the satellite dish tower, the protagonist noses off about reactionaries being in control of congress, thus leading the country towards war).

This is the rather extreme election result from 1964:

Because liberals mostly were Democratic Party voters, Republicans and their wealthy donors tried to alter public perception of liberals (i.e. make it undesirable for their Republican indoctrinatees to be liberal). This included taking over the media (and Reagan conveniently cancelling the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which gave political bias in the media some guard rails), then painting liberals as all things undesirable: arrogant, weak, clueless, leeches, etc.

Having a “hate object” worked so well that they kept capitalizing on it. Much of it was/is just slinging sh*t against the wall and looking what sticks, but think tanks are indeed looking at what sticks, so successful patterns get repeated. Some of these successful patterns I can see are: installing a victim complex in conservatives (feeling their back against the wall, they lash out easier, ensuring anyone talking about conservatives is conditioned to use very soft gloves) and the two-year bogeyman, often trying to capture, redefine and vilify some prior existing concept (thus, when the campaign hits, indoctrinatees can find lots of “proof” online of this thing existing).

For example, social justice used to be universally agreed on as a good thing, woke used to mean remaining aware of systemic inequalities, now they make conservatives pop an artery. This has been going for a while (the “hate object” over time has been rock music, hippies, metal music, supposed satan worshippers, pen and paper games, paganism+atheism, video games, social justice activists, cancel culture, black lives matter, critical race theory, wokeness, …)

And I think, yes, your perception is spot on. This is, for example, what I get when I search for “anti-conservative t-shirts” (if it’s too tiny, try it yourself - they’re all anti-liberal):

TL;DR: conservatives are intentionally made and kept angry. It keeps them unified against a bigger enemy (see Genghis Gambit), drives them to go vote and prevents voters from switching sides even if they do not like some things the conservatives are doing. Add to that Russia amplifying this division like there’s no tomorrow. They’re installing this hate for liberals both in tankies and in far-right bigots (and, as far as I can tell, anti-liberal sentiment is pushed into Russian society, too).

Just some thoughts:

• Current LLMs (chat AIs) are “frozen brains.” (Over-)Simplified, the synapses on the AI’s input neurons are given the 2048 prior words (the “context”) and the AI’s output synapses mean a different word each, so the synapse that lights up most strongly is the next word the AI will say. Then the picked word is added to the “context” and the neural network is executed once more for the next next word.

• Coming up with the weights of the synapses takes insane effort (run millions of books through the “context” and look if the AI t predicts the next word correctly, if not, change a random synapse). Afaik, GPT-4 was trained on more than 2000 NVidia A100 GPUs for somewhere around 4 to 7 months, I think they mentioned paying for 7.5 Megawatt hours.

• If you had a super computer that could keep running the AI with live training, the AI’s ability to string up words would likely, and quickly, degrade into incoherence because it would just ingest and repeat whatever went into it. Existing biological brains have these complex mechanisms of distilling experiences and evaluating them in terms of usefulness/success of their own actions.

.

I think that foundation, that part that makes biological brains put the action/consequence in the foreground of the learning experience, rather than just ingesting, is what eludes us. Perhaps at some future point in time, we could take the initial brain structure that grows in a human as the seed for an AI (but I guess then we’d likely have to simulate all the highly complex traits of real neurons, including mixed chemical and electrical signaling and possibly even quantum-level effects that have been theorized).

What would be missing from VS Code or VS Codium that an IDE needs?

I’m an ex Visual Studio user, now writing all my code in VS Codium. I organize my project tree in VS Codium, I build from it and, like a Visual Studio user, I press F5 to debug, set breakpoints and inspect variables.

And that’s just the default install using the vanilla C/C++ extension it ships with, not some complicated setup that takes any time to get working.

When you have a bunch of computers networked, each of them is assigned a unique number, so when other computers send data on the wire, they can say who it is meant for (imagine each blurb of data starting out like: “yo, I’m sending these next 500 bytes for computer 0A123FBC32, here they come”).

Now the right computer will listen, but it doesn’t know what program the data is for - is it a chunk of a file your browser is downloading? Or the email your email app wants to display? Or perhaps a join request from your buddy’s computer for the Minecraft game you’re hosting?

So in addition to the unique number of the target computer, the data also specifies a “port number”, which tells the computer which of its running programs the data is meant for (programs ask the computer’s operating system: “if any network data arrives on port XY, give it to me”). Some ports have become standards - for example, a program that serves web pages to other computers would typically ask the operating system that any data arriving on the computer that indicates port numbers 80 and 443 should be given to it, and when a web browser wants to fetch a web page, it will send a request to the computer serving the page, defaulting to port 80 o 443.

If you dig deeper, you’ll find that there are even more unique numbers involved and routers/firewalls let data through not only by port number but also by distinguishing between data that is the initial request to another computer’s port number and data that is an answer to an earlier seen request – and more.

I am a Gentoo user and most of that is already a reality on Gentoo systems. Get the stage3 tarball set up, slap your /etc/portage/make.conf and /var/lib/portage/world files in there and build.

Obviously, depending on whether it should be a blank system with the same apps installed or a clone of a previous system, configuration in /etc and one’s home directory may need to be copied, too.

That’s how the Earth got destroyed in “The Forge of God.” :)

That might be it for me, too.

I run a distro with OpenRC instead of systemd, so I had to gain some understanding of udev permissions for USB devices and come up with my own udev rules for Steam because I couldn’t follow Valve’s setup guide.

I happened across the Kaiju No. 8 manga two years ago. While it’s not a never-seen-before concept, it kept me engaged until the last published issue (at the time). Definitely going to check that one out.

I usually compile with --quiet-build=y, it doesn’t have to be configures and makefiles blasting into a shell window the whole time. On the rare occasions where a build fails there’s still the log in /var/tmp/portage/....

Regarding the “novelty wears off” thing, another side: I’ve been running for two decades, starting from a sedentary lifestyle, but it only became fun later on. I started running shortly after a friend, probably out of some youthful ambition or inferiority complex, so I ran alone and picked routes where as few people as possible would see me struggle. I don’t know why I didn’t drop it like so many other things, but I learned to yearn for it and it’s part of my identity now.

Yes, in various ways.

One part is immediate. When I’m nervous or keep worrying about something, going for a run almost certainly resets my flow of thoughts. It also burns off most of the tension, at least I have a much easier time relaxing after a workout.

The other part is more long-term. Despite many, many years of running, it merely helped keep my weight in check rather than give me a dream body, but it seems to have changed my thinking a bit – not like some motivation guru’s story where someone forces themselves through hardship to develop a warrior mentality stuff, though. It’s more like becoming aware, long after the change happened, that, woah, I may have skills now.

As in, there is no mental talk-back or willpower needed for me to run up a steep mountain trail in my area, the gist is more: no question that I can do it, it will be cool to experience it again. For a long time, I wasn’t even aware that it’s not always been that way. It also doesn’t seem to rub off on other areas of life like one would hope, but just having proof in myself that I may have built up to something is a small confidence booster.

I had a gig as a software developer at a company that tried to organize its software development with… the most horrid call center ticketing system I’ve ever seen.

The software was named “TANSS” (an acronym for “transaction action notification solution system” which… says a lot… in a certain way). It couldn’t handle UTF-8 and the company had Asian customers, it placed the signature of a different company under each message sent to a customer and project management might as well have been non-existent (supposedly the crapper of a ticketing system had “projects” but it was just a super naive lining up of tasks without buffer times, burndown/velocity chart or anything).

The expensive p.o.s. was strong-armed into the company, probably because one of the company owners had a background in tech support crap where you’re generally chasing billable minutes.

I don’t know if it was unprofessional by me, but I quickly refused to interact with the whole thing and handed in my notice (and I had actually liked the company and my tasks up until that point). Even Jira, which many consider a highly unpleasant system to work with, felt lean, responsive and fun after that experience.

It’s been over 6 years, but I can state with certainty, if I see that system in use anywhere, my respect is gone and whether customer or employer, they’ll be a hot potato in my hands form that moment on :)