olivierestsage

Em dashes are really good actually and a standard stylistic choice for non-technical writing, particularly outside the US.

No horse in this race because I don’t want a Claude app, but the median Linux user is increasingly just a normal person who doesn’t want spying telemetry or ads or whatever

Sure sign that we are not dealing with a coercive situation! :)

I've noticed a tendency among people who have built careers known for visionary, forward-thinking work that they hesitate to make the natural move into more "conservative" positions/approaches as they age. This leads to missteps, because as one ages, one inevitably becomes further removed from the zeitgeist. On paper, embracing AI might seem like a great idea if you don't want to become an old fogey, but not all changes are positive and I doubt this decision will age well

Is there any reasonably practical way to play a "restricted" version of MtG with physical cards and a somewhat stable ruleset, reminiscent of what play was like in the late 90s (as I remember it)? I like what's being proposed here, but I don't have access to old cards.

I'm not averse to buying new cards, I just don't want to be on an infinite treadmill of buying new cards and learning new rules forever, it's just not fun in my opinion

The problem is that something like (say) a song is much more than an idea. It’s an idea + work (arrangement, production, performance, etc. depending on the situation). The argument for owning work, at least for X number of years in a limited way (vs. our current system), seems reasonable to me.

The US is going to lose a lot on that bet

The perfect OS doesn’t exi-

Save us Richard Stallman

Is the practice on this site now to flag anything critical of AI...?

In a world of slop, one truly noble project emerges

Flagged… incredible. Mockery is the way

This post is right over the target. I see others posting that the author is out of touch, so here’s a humble +1 to the view that they’re not. Cathartic stuff here

First thing I did upon opening this comment thread was ctrl-F for "pretentious"

I think it's because its main use in this particular context is to produce results that the creator does not have the skill to produce and/or does not want to invest the time to produce.

I guess you could argue that drum machines offered simplification/automation when they first appeared compared to the option of a human drummer, but also, those machines opened up all sorts of creative and stylistic possibilities that simply couldn't be done by sitting someone at a traditional drum kit. Using AI to make music doesn't do this -- it's a shortcut that has no argument in its favor whatsoever except that it saved the person making it time (and/or enabled them to generate something they couldn't have produced through their own work). That's why it is fundamentally uncool in a musical context, and always will be.

If win2000 got updated by the community with improved driver support people might actually prefer it to current Windows, which would be humiliating.

I wondered which of this distros would be the first to attempt this shit. Hopefully Red Hat has more sense

Nice work. (The author is right, that printing ASMR in the video is incredible.)

It is not a sentence unless “to technologist” is a verb.

Do typical users care that much about a bit of jank, though? All the “typical users” I know are on spyware infested Windows laptops and just interpret the horrible shabbiness of the whole experience as being normal.

I think what you're seeing is partly a consequence of how capable Linux has become. Linux is in a weird phase where it can still be enjoyed by hobbyists/enthusiasts/eccentric types, which were arguably its original audience, but now you can also Zoom and do work and install Steam on it, which gives it less appeal from the niche/hobby angle. The software ecosystem in Linux is also increasingly homogenizing, which helps with the "practicality" aspect, but also diminishes the niche appeal. BSDs are in a position to snap up that audience that appreciates engineering elegance/design and uses the computer as an end unto itself (not just as a means to an end). This audience isn't necessarily bothered by wonky laptop WiFi, and may even enjoy tinkering with it as a hobby project. Just my take.

It's crazy how much negativity there is in comment threads like this. I would get it if FreeBSD was a product you paid for, or someone was evangelizing about how you're missing out if you don't get the FreeBSD laptop experience, or something.

As someone who liked FreeBSD in the past and curious to check it out again, I'm glad to have this handy list.

Swans is good for programming. And good for gnosis.

Mamma Mia soundtrack also works well \m/

No thanks

Around 10 years ago, I picked up an old Thinkpad T42, put FreeBSD on it, and had an amazing experience. Actually used it as a daily driver for a while, which seems crazy in retrospect, but I enjoy trying to work within that kind of constraint sometimes. I miss it! This post rekindles the flame...

Whenever someone says online that something's declining (Hollywood movies, video games, UX experiences in desktop environments, etc.), I see a variation on this argument: "actually the options are even better today, they're just buried" (often accompanied by: "you were just younger then and everything was new and that's why you liked it").

Sometimes, cultural decline actually does happen, usually eventually followed by some kind of renaissance. Anyone who has studied the cinema, literature, etc. of a certain country in the past knows that there are "hot" periods and "cool" ones. When we see this phenomenon in the past, it doesn't tend to trigger the same defensive reaction, I guess because it doesn't feel as personal.

He's downplaying the "social change" aspect. For many, open source/free software has a political element, at least implicitly. That element is strongly opposed to aggressive centralization of capital and surveillance power. You can point out how different licenses were always written in a way that permitted monetization/for-profit use, but that's beside the point -- the people who chose those licenses never imagined that their code would be used at this scale for this kind of purpose.

You gotta be out of your damn mind to give your kid an AI toy

Nothing against the MacBook Neo, but this reads like an advertisement.