Take your pick from the Linux family tree

"[In] nine out of the last 11 elections. Our sales of the successful candidates’ [campaign merchandise] outpaced that of the candidates who lost in the elections,” Steve Ferber, co-owner of Lori Ferber Collectibles, told VOA Mandarin.

[…]

“I think Trump merchandise was outselling the merchandise for Joe Biden 2-to-1. And amazingly, the day after the debate ended, that completely flopped in the other direction. And now we find that items that are promoting Kamala for president are outselling Donald Trump items 3-to-1.”

Upskill. I’m not ‘upskilling’ someone, I’m training them.

Would you settle for a single clergyman?

Let’s not be too hasty to call it garbage when it could in fact turn out to be rancid dog shit.

I’ve consistently enjoyed and come back to the following for years:

• “Make it Sweet” by Milkcan (Um Jammer Lammy soundtrack), 35 mins
• Forgotten Worlds arcade OST by Kawamoto Tamayo, ~45 mins

I also like to boot up and listen to the Amiga title music for SWIV and the Mega Drive/Genesis soundtrack of Revenge of Shinobi.

This was also my first Linux distro after having used Sun’s Solaris while at uni. I think I tried out Slack and Suse at around the same time, but stuck with RedHat and related distros for about 6 years.

Google speed running enshittification over here 👉👉

I am not renting my corporeal existence from a megacorporation. There is no way this is ever affordable to the masses without some pretty huge caveats

The culture novels, such a good pick!

I played the game back when it originally came out. Like any media based on a book, it was slightly frustrating for a while that the graphics didn’t match the visuals I had imagined whole reading the book. I still have the discs somewhere, might see if I can get it running somehow. I suspect I’ll find the game mechanics to be clunky but today’s standards.

I’m surprised there hasn’t been a movie made yet.

Other people who’ve read it and who I’ve talked with seem to be split over whether the first book is better than the sequels, or the other way around. I prefer the sequels, my wife prefers the original. Do you have a preference?

Game: Super Mario Galaxy
Book: The Rama series, Arthur C Clarke
TV: The West Wing
Movie: The 5th Element

If you’re not using GNU/Hurd are you even trying?

I’m going to use this next time my wife complains about my noisy farts.

Is it a nice cabinet? I like a good walnut cabinet with at least 2 shelves.

As an aside, the ‘ever trustworthy’ Google AI suggests, ‘completely ionizing a human body would require an energy output similar to a very small nuclear explosion’.

Disclaimer: I have nothing more than a secondary education level of physics and a keen interest in physics in general.

It’s common scientific belief that all physical forces are backed up by a field, for example, magnetism by the electromagnetic field, gravity by a gravity field. It would follow that the strong and weak nuclear forces also have corresponding fields.

For a disruptor to work as seen in fiction, you’d probably be looking to disrupt the weak nuclear force, and would need a mechanism to locally change the properties of the corresponding weak nuclear field.

I don’t know if there is such a mechanism available to us currently. Hopefully someone else has a definitive answer.

One of the critical differences between FOSS and commercial software is that FOSS projects don’t need to drive sales and consequently also don’t need to immediately jump onto technology trends in order to not look like they’re lagging behind the competition.

What I’ve consistently seen from FOSS over the 30 years I’ve been using it, is that if a technology choice is a good fit for the problem, then it will be adopted into projects where relevant.

I believe that there are use cases where LLM processing is absolutely a good fit, and the projects that need that functionality will use it. What you’re less likely to see is ‘AI’ added to everything, because it isn’t generally a good solution to most problems in it’s current form.

As an aside, you may be less likely to get good faith interaction with your question while using the term ‘luddite’ as it is quite pejorative.