I kid you not, I bought a DVD player over this nonsense. Now my kids watch the same few used Disney movie and show DVDs however much they like, and I’m not paying these clowns monthly to be abused by them.

As long as our health is perfect, of course.

Linux, MacOS and Windows have been completely rewritten multiple times across their existence.

So it’s not like the original decisions are all still in play.

Windows and Mac OS were rewritten under some particular weird duresses of closed source profit driven engineering; so it has been a mix of improvements and seemingly illogical setbacks.

Linux developers still need to eat, so some of the same (corporate) influences are there.

But the average engineer who sets out to create a brand new completely modern operating system - usually decides to reuse any components of Linux that they don’t have any concerns with…

Which usually gives us yet another cool new Linux variant.

But sometimes we get…

Sacrilege!

Not our fault everyone blows past the kind offer of : vimtutor on startup! (I kid. The default editor shouldn’t require a class.)

You’re 100% correct. Nano is a perfectly reasonable default.

That said, it is 2026. It also wouldn’t kill us to default to an interactive one-time prompt that defaults to nano, but offers one or two others, and removes itself after setting the user’s choice.

Like it cannot print invisible characters.

I was looking at an option to display invisible characters in Kate like last week. So it got better, I guess.

haha!

Sometimes I feel like my side of the holy war isn’t engaging in completely good faith.

I might switch sides to emacs if my fingers were long enough to reach the key combinations.

Maybe I’ll go try it, anyway!

…

What was the command to exit vi, again…?

But but but…vimtutor is right there on startup - so it’s an easily obtained diploma…

I’ll see myself out.

kate is fantastic, all around.

Ctrl+Alt+V makes the key bindings tolerable. (Vi mode)

Yes. Lack of :r! is what keeps me from using most editors that aren’t vim.

There’s so many things I don’t remember well enough to type accurately from memory, but I know the command to fetch quickly.

Let’s not give the idiots more ideas. haha.

Strictly speaking, we only have to govern the billionaires if we don’t just eat them…so it’s kind of a run-off between how easy to govern they decide to be, and how they taste…

(This is solely meant to humorous, officer, your honor.)

Yes. And we know Microsoft was drooling over the day when they shut down that server, and everyone’s library stops working 30 days later, allowing Microsoft to re-sell them all the games they previously bought.

Somehow it’s difficult for me to remember what I like?

I used to have mini-panic attacks when asked what I prefer.

Now, I just have memorized good enough responses that I won’t be unhappy with later.

Is that strange?

I’m told it’s not usual. So I guess so?

Does that make me non-human?

Nah. Human experience is much more varied than most people ever realize.

It does make you interesting.

I think a lack of enthusiasm has been kinda the default for me for as long as I remember

I’ve had life phases like that.

It doesn’t bother me as much, today, as it did, in the past.

Now, I focus on the things worth avoiding while I wait for my enthusiasm to return.

For me, enthusiasm returns, in bursts, eventually.

Thanks. I think every data point helps people.

I can’t say that particularly shocks me. I imagine that Chat GPT has probably swallowed dozens of Physics textbooks.

The bigger part of the problem is knowing where we are on the human knowledge novelty / training data available curve, or rather, when we need to get off of the ride.

Edit: Any chance your chosen AI has access to Wolfram Alpha as an MCP Tool? Because that would be very different, too.

If it’s successful at math, there’s likely much more than a leanring model in play.

Which brings us back to the opacity problem. :(

If the answer machine has been cleverly rigged (and weighted) to pass off math questions to more capable software, things can be great.

But a person who just hears that AI can do math now can have a very bad time if they go blindly use a brute force pleasant answer machine on a math problem. :(

For simple math that could work, and as long as the question is close enough to an exact match with plenty of published examples to copy.

A good rule of thumb is that the script it will come up with is about as likely to be correct as blindly taking the highest voted answer to the most similar question on Stack Overflow.

If the question is simple and common, the odds are quite good. If the question is nuanced or rare, the odds of a correct result drop off aggressively.

Edit: Your mileage may vary - providing an API to these LLMs that can do math correctly for them is pretty easy. Getting the LLM to consistently detect when to use that API is more challenging.

You’ve misspelled “Fuck JK Rowling” there, mate.

I’m beginning to suspect we’re allowed to swear here…