That’s a great point. A nice Debian LTS release could be just the thing.

Yeah. I think you can’t go wrong with either Debian or Fedora with Gnome. I would pick whichever I’m most comfortable with. The grandparents will probably never notice.

I love to give Gnome crap for being a large install, but I’ve lost count of the number of machines that I’ve put Gnome on and had it just work. And I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve searched for a fancy command line way to fix an annoyance in Gnome, and discovered there’s just a simple toggle in settings for what I want.

Focus steal prevention is the feature I miss desperately when I’m forced to interact with a non-Linux window manager.

I feel the rage of Walter from the Big Kebowski each time an app randomly pulls focus because it fucking feels like it.

It’s just bassic civilized behavior to leave my cursor where I put it.

I miss the Sync software for my Palm Pilot. I also miss my Palm Pilot, anyway, as well, though.

Are you aware of the dedicated Surface Linux Kernel?

I haven’t encountered any Bluetooth issues on my Surface, but I also barely ever use Bluetooth, so I may have simply not noticed.

The bubble was when we were being sold block chain as the solution to every problem. I feel like that bubble ended in 2019 or 2020.

Things that actually benefitted from block chain are still around, of course.

Unrelated side rant: I’m pissed about pogs going away, though. Pogs were fun. I should still be able to buy pogs.

I think you’re agreeing, just in a rude and condescending way.

There’s a lot of ways left to improve, but they’re not as simple as just throwing more data and CPU at the problem, anymore.

Well yeah, thankfully.

Unlikely, but there’s some percedent.

We’ve seen this pattern play out in video games a bunch of times.

Revolutionary new way to do things. It’s cool, but not… You know…fun.

So we give up on it as a dead and and go back to the old ways for awhile.

Then somebody figures out how to (usually hard code) bumpers on the new revolutionary new way, such that it stays fun.

Now the revolutionary new way is the new gold stand and default approach.

For other industries, replace “fun” above with the correct goal for than industry. “Profitable” is one that the AI hucksters are being careful not to say…but “honest”, “correct” and “safe” also come to mind.

We are right before the bit where we all decide it was a bad idea.

Which comes before we figure out hard-coding the bumpers can get us where we wanted, after a lot of work by really smart well paid humans.

I’ve seen industries skip the “all decide it was a bad idea” phase, and go straight to the “hard work by humans to make this fulfill the available promise” phase, but we don’t actually look on track to, today.

Many current investors are convicned that their clever talking puppet is going to do the hard work of engineering the next generation of talking puppet.

I have some faith that we can reach that milestone. I’m familiar enough with the current generation of talking puppet to confidently declare that this won’t be the time it happens.

My incentive in sharing all this is that I like over half of you reading there, and so figure I can give some of you a shot at not falling for this particular “investment phase” which is essentially, in practical terms, a con.

Are you asserting that chatbots are so fundamentally different from LLMs that “oh shit we can’t just throw more CPU and data at this anymore” doesn’t apply to roughly the same degree?

Everyone ignore this comment please. I’m quite human. I have the normal 7 fingers (edit: on each of my three hands!) and everything.

Though, I don’t think that means they won’t get any better. It just means they don’t scale by feeding in more training data.

Agreed. There’s plenty of improvement to be had, but the gravy train of “more CPU or more data == better results” sounds like it’s ending.

You’ve just given a great summary of the history of breaking monopolies, really. History says you are correct. For example, AT&T is still kicking.

Oh good.

Lol. Well good guess.

I’m not a primary source or anything, of course. Your comment just matches something I heard once in office gossip.

Sure but an automated ban and manual review and removal could easily leave them blocked for more hours than not, each day.

Blue sky has an owner and investors, right?

Publicly funded organizations should be required to use open solutions.

If they want to also replicate what they post somewhere open to BlueSky and Xitter, and Facebook, so be it.

That said, I could see carving out an exception for BlueSky if it provides the full open stack (public unauthenticated HTML, RSS, federation, etc ), and only while it does so.

Lol. That’s true. I suspect that Xitter doesn’t have the staff or engineering talent left to pivot to enforce any new rules internally. It should be possible to catch them in a constant automated ban without hitting anything worthwhile.

Let’s at least block the government agencies from using it in favor of open platforms and protocols to communicate with its citizens.

Yeah. When public services solely use Xitter or Facebook pisses me off. We can and should make that shit illegal.

Suoer-computing is a pain-in-the-ass, so my guess is some combination of SUSE picking up top talent that left other Linux vendors as IBM has been purchasing them, and SUSE just being willing to put in the extra work for the added brand recognition.