As I had zero plans on moving to Windows 11, I was looking into which distros are popular nowadays over the past few weeks. Today, I tried Cachy OS and Aurora(non-gaming version of Bazzite) in VirtualBox and after 5 minutes I knew that after 30 years of using a computer with windows(dos, then w95 and onward) Linux is still not there yet on the desktop. I just can't believe how they still can't get the utmost basic things right. Yet here we are. And yes, you can game on linux nowadays, finally! Even get better performance due to Windows bloat. Office, OBS, internet, video...everything is working...yet it still is not there in usability. To be specific what irked me today when I tested them was installing new programs. On Cachy, I wanted to test jetbrains IDE. Last time i tested it was on suse and fedora in virtualbox last year and it worked but neither distribution was there just yet in UX. This time, I downloaded the tar version from jetbrains website. I could not open it(maybe due to it being run in live cd mode in virtualbox) or extract(no option in dir manager or decompression program) the content in Cachy. So I wanted to get 7zip but there was no linux version. Cachy has its own packages that can be opened(website) via its welcome screen(otherwise there is no program manager - no snaps, flatpacks...) and after downloading it with some arch file extension i could not install it. I could open it and see usr and bin directories but that helped me fuckall and i was not willing to tinker with this bs in 2026. Then in Aurora, it has bazaar for flatpacks, before i wasted bandwidth to download the IDE in vain again i preemptively wanted zip manager, there was pea..something. So i clicked install, it did and .. nothing. Nowhere to be found. Tried multiple times and no result. Could not find it anywhere. So I said F that and am sticking with the indian windows spyware. The devil you know and whatnot.
You seem to have missed a couple of things that have caused you a bit of a headache here, I'm hoping I can encourage you to try again with a little bit of info. I've been using Linux for as long as it has existed, I'm also a backend-dev that works on a Linux machine and targets Linux-based platforms for deployment, even my kids use Linux. Windows went downhill for me after about Windows 2000 and Linux has only gotten better. > yet it still is not there in usability I want to wholeheartedly disagree with you. Nothing comes close to Linux in terms of usability for me, but a lot of it is about what you're used to, I've used Window's, I've used Mac, Mac I could live with, but I'll never intentionally use Windows again. > To be specific what irked me today when I tested them was installing new programs. On Cachy, I wanted to test jetbrains IDE Ok, let's begin; this one is partly JetBrains' fault, and partly yours. You can open a terminal and type `paru jetbrains-toolbox`, hit enter a couple of times and it's installed. Don't know what `paru` is? I recommend reading the frankly excellent documentation from CachyOS[0]. > or extract(no option in dir manager or decompression program) the content in Cachy You didn't specify which Desktop Environment you chose, this is important when helping newcomers because each comes with its own set of tools; but in Gnome's (what I use) the file manager, called Nautilus, I can right-click almost any archive type and will be presented with "Extract", "Extract to..." as well as a few other options. I just looked up how KDE does it, in case you're using that, the file manager is called Dolphin, and apparently you might need to install an archive tool first such as Ark and/or 7zip, gotta give you that one, I'm a little shocked, that's a pretty shitty OOBE in my opinion, but a quick search and you'll now probably be confused because the solution is here[1] but they say to use `apt install...` which you don't have on an Arch based distro. But once you know what the file managers you do have access to are, it should be easier. > So I wanted to get 7zip but there was no linux version There certainly _is_ a Linux version. `paru 7zip` and I get at least 3 legit options; the base package, an architecture optimised package, and a GUI for it, as well as a dozen or two community options. You can also try the standard arch package manager aptly named "pacman"; `sudo pacman -S 7zip` and it installs it for me after I hit enter to confirm, don't even need to choose the package. Wtf is `sudo`? That's how Administrator is typically done in Linux. > Cachy has its own packages that can be opened(website) via its welcome screen(otherwise there is no program manager - no snaps, flatpacks On Gnome there is "Software" which supports Flatpaks as well as other package types; don't worry about snaps, you don't want them, and there's Octopi from CachyOS. In KDE there's a GUI called "Discover". There are a bunch of others such as Bazaar which you mentioned. Usability really isn't an issue in Linux once you know the way of your distro; If you're used to Windows, then it's _different_, sure, and in that case I'd suggest taking an hour to read the CachyOS docs; Arch Wiki (CachyOS is based on Arch) is also an amazing resource for all things Linux, and learn a little about how software management is different, we don't (usually) pull random crap from websites, we install from package managers, and sometimes compile the source ourselves. If you didn't choose one of the two DEs I've mentioned (Gnome, KDE), I'd recommend giving them a go, they're both very mature and usable. If you're into Discord, I can suggest hitting up the CachyOS or another distro's Discord servers, there's lots of helpful people there willing to help, if you had any other questions give me a shout. [0] https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/navigation-guide/ [1] https://discuss.kde.org/t/how-to-add-extract-here-right-click-option-to-dolphin-file-manager/41389
> I know we instinctively want to frame this as a privacy problem I think it is, but I think this is a more fundamental level of privacy than most people are thinking of when they think of privacy > In "good" times this made investigations run smoothly. Privacy people often talk about a concept called "Turnkey Tyranny". Really a reference to Jefferson's "elective despotism". The concept is that because any democracy can vote themselves into an autocracy (elective despotism) that the danger is the creation of that power in the first place. That you don't give Mr Rogers (or some other benevolent leader) any power that you wouldn't give to Hitler (or any horrifying leader). Or as Jefferson put it The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered. > but the real problem we need congress to act So no, that is not the "real problem". They should be involved but there are more fundamental issues at hand. Power creeps. Power creeps with good intention. But there is a strong bias for power to increase and not decrease. And just like power creep in a movie or videogame it doesn't go away and can ruin everything. Jefferson himself writes a lot about this tbh. It is why we have a system of checks and balances. Where the government treats itself adversarially. But this is also frustrating and makes things slow. So... power creeps. So the real problem we need to solve is educating the populous. They need to understand these complexities and nuances. If they do not, they will unknowingly trade their freedom to quench their fears. And this is why it is a privacy problem. Because we the people should always treat our government adversarially. Even in the "good times". Especially in the "good times". The founders of the US constitution wrote extensively about this, much like the privacy advocates write today. I think they would be more likely to take the position of "why collect this information in the first place?" than "under what conditions should this information be collected?". Both are important questions, but the latter should only come after the former. Both are about privacy. Privacy of what is created vs privacy of what is accessed.
>Even if interpretability of specific models or features within them is an open area of research, the mechanics of how LLMs work to produce results are observable and well-understood, and methods to understand their fundamental limitations are pretty solid these days as well. If you train a transformer on (only) lots and lots of addition pairs, i.e '38393 + 79628 = 118021' and nothing else, the transformer will during training, discover an algorithm for addition and employ it in service of predicting the next token, which in this instance would be the result of an addition. We know this because of tedious interpretability research, the very limited problem space and the fact we knew exactly what to look for. Alright, let's leave addition aside (SOTA LLMs are after all trained on much more) and think about any other question. Any other question at all. How about something like: "Take a capital letter J and a right parenthesis, ). Take the parenthesis, rotate it counterclockwise 90 degrees, and put it on top of the J. What everyday object does that resemble?" What algorithm does GPT or Gemini or whatever employ to answer this and similar questions correctly ? It's certainly not addition. Do you Know ? No. Do the creators at Open AI or Google know ? Not at all. Can you or they find out right now ? Also No. Let's revisit your statement. "the mechanics of how LLMs work to produce results are observable and well-understood". Observable, I'll give you that, but how on earth can you look at the above and sincerely call that 'well-understood' ? Has the meaning of well understood changed and I was simply not made aware ?
> Taxes don't usually work as efficiently because the state is usually a much more sloppy investor. But it's far from hopeless, see DARPA. Be careful. The data does not confirm that narrative. You mentioned the 1950s, which is a poignant example of reality conflicting with sponsored narrative. Pre WOII, the wealthy class orbiting the monopolists, and by extension their installed politicians, had no other ideas than to keep lowering taxes for the rich on and on, even if it only deepened the endless economic crisis. Many of them had fallen in the trap of believing their own narratives, something we know as the Cult of Wealth. Meanwhile, average Americans lived on food stamps. Politically deadlocked in quasi-religious ideas of "bad governments versus wise business men", America kept falling deeper. Meanwhile, with just 175,000 serving on active duty, the U.S. Army was the 18th biggest in the world[1], poorly equipped, poorly trained. Right wing isolationism had brought the country in a precarious position. Then two things happened. Roosevelt and WOII. In a unique moment, the state took matters in their own hands. The sheer excellence in planning, efficiency, speed and execution of the state baffled the republicans, putting the oligarchic model of the economy to shame. The economy grew tremendously as well, something the oligarchy could not pull of. It is not well-known that WOII depended largely on state-operated industries, because the former class quickly understood how much the state's performance threatened their narratives. So they invested in disinformation campaigns, claiming the efforts and achievements of the government as their own. 1. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/06/06/how-world-war-ii-almost-broke-american-politics-227090/
>Stomach paralysis is apparently a known side effect [1]. There are also lots of anecdotes about lesser (but still foul) digestive surprises that are too unpleasant for me to bother elaborating on here. These are real, but they're also not permanent, and are why you start on a low dose to evaluate how your body reacts to the medication. My spouse is a long time GLP-1 user (coming up on four years now) and had mild (or more) bouts of several of these digestive related systems. However, within six months these had greatly diminished. And by the one year mark, even at the highest dose, they were essentially gone and have remained a non-issue since. You should certainly be mindful of side effects, and follow the recommended dosage scale up, which should be monitored by your doctor. >I was on my thiccboi swag for the latter half of last year and am presently working it off by rebuilding my fitness base with kettlebells and cardio. I'd rather do this than GLP-1s not because I'm some sort of iron-willed badass so much as I'm simply distrustful of anything that messes with one's metabolism so severely. While these drugs are useful for the morbidly obese and diabetics I simply can't imagine how or why anybody would go on them for aesthetic or off-label purposes. I do think folks with obesity fall into one of two camps (or somewhere on a spectrum between): those that are in that place because they don't put in any effort, eat whatever they want, don't workout, and so on. And then there are folks like my spouse. They were able to lose weight in the past, but only through continued suffering. To be "just" overweight, they needed to be working out constantly and in a state of always feeling hungry. They never reached an equilibrium where it wasn't agony to maintain that weight, and after months/years would always rebound. For them, a GLP-1 was the only thing that ever quieted the food noise. They workout constantly still and are in the best shape of their life. It wasn't entirely the GLP-1, but that gave them the tool to quiet the noise and get to a state where fitness could be fun/sustainable, and now they're killing it. So, the TL;DR is that some people need this tool, and it's not necessarily an either/or. It can be one part in a series of positive changes that lead to better health and well-being.
For me, the complex numbers arise as the quotients of 2-dimensional vectors (which arise as translations of the 2-dimensional affine space). When you divide 2 collinear 2-dimensional vectors, their quotient is a real number a.k.a. scalar. When the vectors are not collinear, then the quotient is a complex number. Multiplying a 2-dimensional vector with a complex number changes both its magnitude and its direction. Multiplying by +i rotates a vector by a right angle. Multiplying by -i does the same thing but in the opposite sense of rotation, hence the difference between them, which is the difference between clockwise and counterclockwise. Both 2-dimensional vectors and complex numbers are included in the 2-dimensional geometric algebra, whose members have 2^2 = 4 components, which are the 2 components of a 2-dimensional vector together with the 2 components of a complex number. Unlike the complex numbers, the 2-dimensional vectors are not a field, because if you multiply 2 vectors the result is not a vector. A similar relationship like that between 2-dimensional vectors and complex numbers exists between 3-dimensional vectors and quaternions. Unfortunately the discoverer of the quaternions, Hamilton, has been confused by the fact that both vectors and quaternions have multiple components and he believed that vectors and quaternions are the same thing. In reality, vectors and quaternions are distinct things and the operations that can be done with them are very different. This confusion has prevented for many years during the 19th century the correct use of quaternions in physics.
I've been thinking about this myself. First, let's try differential equations, which are also the point of calculus: Idea 1: The general study of PDEs uses Newton(-Kantorovich)'s method, which leads to solving only the linear PDEs, which can be held to have constant coefficients over small regions, which can be made into homogeneous PDEs, which are often of order 2, which are either equivalent to Laplace's equation, the heat equation, or the wave equation. Solutions to Laplace's equation in 2D are the same as holomorphic functions. So complex numbers again. Now algebraic closure, but better: Idea 2: Infinitary algebraic closure. Algebraic closure can be interpeted as saying that any rational functions can be factorised into monomials. We can think of the Mittag-Leffler Theorem and Weierstrass Factorisation Theorem as asserting that this is true also for meromorphic functions, which behave like rational functions in some infinitary sense. So the algebraic closure property of C holds in an infinitary sense as well. This makes sense since C has a natural metric and a nice topology. Next, general theory of fields: Idea 3: Fields of characteristic 0. Every algebraically closed field of characteristic 0 is isomorphic to R[√-1] for some real-closed field R. The Tarski-Seidenberg Theorem says that every FOL statement featuring only the functions {+, -, ×, ÷} which is true over the reals is also true over every real-closed field. I think maybe differential geometry can provide some help here. Idea 4: Conformal geometry in 2D. A conformal manifold in 2D is locally biholomorphic to the unit disk in the complex numbers. Idea 5: This one I'm not 100% sure about. Take a smooth manifold M with a smoothly varying bilinear form B \in T\*M ⊗ T\*M. When B is broken into its symmetric part and skew-symmetric part, if we assume that both parts are never zero, B can then be seen as an almost complex structure, which in turn naturally identifies the manifold M as one over C.
I'm 61 (retired when I was 57). I too began with BASIC (but closer to 1980). Although I wrote and published games for the Macintosh for a number of years as I finished up college, my professional career (in the traditional sense) began when I was hired by Apple in 1995 and relocated to the Bay Area. Yeah, what started out as a great just got worse and worse as time went on. I suspect though that to a large degree this reflects both the growing complexity of the OS over that time as well as the importance of software in general as it became more critical to people's lives. Already, even in 1984 when it was first introduced, the Mac had a rich graphics library you would not want to have to implement yourself. (Although famously of course a few apps like Photoshop nonetheless did just that—leaning on the Mac simply for a final call to CopyBits() to display pixels from Adobe's buffer to the screen.) You kind of have to accept abstraction when networking, multiple cores, multiple processes become integral to the machine. I guess I always understood that and did not feel too put out by it. If anything a good framework was somewhat of a relief—someone else's problem, ha ha. (And truly a beautiful API is just that: a beautiful thing. I enjoy working well constructed frameworks.) But the latter issue, the increasing dominance of software on our lives is what I think contributed more to poisoning the well. Letting the inmates run the asylum more or less describes the way engineering worked when I began at Apple in 1995. We loved it that way. (Say what you want about that kind of bottom-up culture of that era, but our "users" were generally nerds just like us—we knew, or thought we knew anyway, better than marketing what the customer wanted and we pursued it.) Agile development, unit tests, code reviews… all these weird things began to creep in and get in the way of coding. Worse, they felt like busywork meant simply to give management a sense of control… or some metric for progress. "What is our code coverage for unit test?" a manager might ask. "90%," comes the reply from engineering. "I want to see 95% coverage by next month," comes the marching orders. Whatever. I confess I am happy to have now left that arena behind. I still code in my retirement but it's back to those cowboy-programmer days around this house. Yee haw!
I also have just read both articles and think the opposite: We've got accountability-free, armed, masked, criminal thugs acting with impunity: - Taking face scans of peaceful protestors and retaliating against them later; - Racially profiling citizens and harassing them if they have the "wrong" skin color -- including local cops! - Visiting the homes of citizens who have civilly and legally criticized ICE behavior online, to intimidate them; - Invading homes without warrants and destroying evidence of their crimes (jamming wifi, covering up cameras, arresting and deporting witnesses, etc). - Arresting people who came here legally, are here legally, and have not committed a crime in their lives, then unilaterally revoking their prior legal authorization and rapidly deporting them and their whole family; - Raiding schools: kidnapping children and sending them off to torture prisons, while traumatizing the rest of the children (and assaulting some of the children too -- grown-ass men beating up children smh); - Assaulting innocent, peaceful people for protesting them, whether citizen or not, whether legally here or not, including deploying chemical agents against them; - Performing summary executions in the streets of unarmed citizens who are helping their community but do not support said masked, armed thugs; - Etc etc etc You'd have to be hysterical (or some other form of mentally unwell) to not let that affect your judgement of the wisdom of bringing young children into that world to be victims of it. Unfortunately, such hysterical, mentally unwell deniers never think (and will not accept) that they are. It’s an irrational, emotional dismissal, so it can’t be fought with logic. What they need is deprogramming, and I don’t know how to do it. I just find it interesting that the brains of so many people in the minority, even intelligent ones, have been turned this way in recent years. I see it here somewhat often (roughly in proportion to the minority they represent). They just cannot process, much less accept, that most people do not agree with them, and are not hysterical and mentally unwell like them.
> you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here Oxide just recently talked about that actually the LLM people do want to buy Oxide. Because turns out, doing everything around LLMs also requires compute, and quite a lot of it. And when you already have to deal with massive issues to run a complex advanced Nvidia stack you might not also want to worry about what firmware bugs Supermicro is delivering. If you are not one of the hyperscaler who already has all the CPU based infrastructure on their own cloud stack (google, amazon, facebook) then Oxide is quite interesting. Also as for this shrinking/small market claim. About 50% of IT spend is still outside of the cloud. While nobody know the real number, its still a gigantic market, much bigger then most people realize. And it might not be shrinking because the bad economics of cloud are becoming increasingly clear to many company. Along with other trends such as making computing more local, not letting US companies control everything. > You are like a fancier version of Dell or Supermicro. Dell has a market cap of 80 billion $, Supermicro has 20 billion $. Must really suck to be them I guess. I'm sure Michael Dell wishes he had done something worthwhile with his live instead. I mean he could have worked for Digital Equipment Cooperation instead then he might not have ended up being such a loser. I feel you are being really dismissive talking as if aiming for that is somehow not worth doing.
Again, I like Debian a lot as a distro (much more than Ubuntu), but it's just not the same as a distro like Arch, even when you're on testing. Sid is close, but between Arch and sid... I've actually found fewer issues on Arch, and since there's an existing expectation that the community maintains and documents much of the software in AUR, there's almost always someone actually paying attention and updating things, rather than only getting around to it later. It's not that Debian is a bad release, but it's the difference in a game on steam being completely unavailable for a few hours (Arch) or 10 days (Debian testing) due to an upstream issue. I swapped a while back, mostly because I kept hitting issues that are accurately described and resolved by steps coming from Arch's community, even on distros like Debian and Fedora. --- The power in debian is still that Ubuntu has made it very popular for folks doing commercial/closed source releases to provide a .deb by default. Won't always work... but at least they're targeting your distro (or almost always, ubuntu, but usually close enough). Same for Fedora with the Redhat enterprise connections. But I've generally found that the community in Arch is doing a better job at actually dogfooding, testing, and fixing the commercial software than most of the companies that release it... which is sad, but reality. Arch has plenty of its own issues, but "Stale software" isn't the one to challenge it on. Much better giving it a pass due to arch/platform support limitations, security or stability needs, etc... All those are entirely valid critiques, and reasonable drivers for sticking to something like Debian.
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