I used to think that I wanted to distro hop. Turns out that what I wanted was a bare bones OS that gave me the freedom to rice in strange and unnatural ways.

After 25(!) years of battling X11, dependency hells, and the early days of desktop compositing, I finally realized that what I wanted was Arch, and a few window managers to play with. SwayWM, and now Hyprland.

Unless you have some niche needs (real-time audio encoding) or want to play with more esoteric experiments (Nix, OSTree, etc), distro hopping is overkill.

But most distros have homogenized to the point to where all you need is knowledge about systemd to go from one to the other.

Just pick your favorite, non-snap distro and hack on it.

It’ll only affect 32bit systems with ancient operating systems storing dates in epoch time.

Not a small number. But nowhere remotely near what Y2K could have been.

Hopefully by the time we need to account for a 64bit rollover, I’ll be comfortably retired. But by that time, proton decay may be a more worrisome problem.

I imagine there are fan groups for Our Flag Means Death.

The term, “enshitification” is getting bandied about a lot. But the bots and corporations are an inevitable part of capitalism. Make money at all costs, never be satisfied with what you have, and treat everybody that isn’t you like a stepping stone.

Scammers and sociopathic c-levels are missing something fundamentally human. A complete lack of empathy. But this has always been a part of our species. The difference now is that we have a system that dramatically rewards that sickness. And that’s not even getting into how being able to be evil at scale is going to make the next few decades interesting.

Pop verification neck to continue.

Janeway would straight up murder them. She’s done worse for less reason.

My argument is thus:

LLMs are decent at boilerplate. They’re good at rephrasing things so that they’re easier to understand. I had a student who struggled for months to wrap her head around how pointers work, two hours with GPT and the ability to ask clarifying questions and now she’s rockin’.

I like being able to plop in a chunk of Python and say, “type annotate this for me and none of your sarcasm this time!”

But if you’re using an LLM as a problem solver and not as an accelerator, you’re going to lack some of the deep understanding of what happens when your code runs.

I live in a college town where you’d expect to find a lot of bike lanes.

And we do have them. For a few blocks at a stretch. Then they go away or merge with traffic only to pick up again a few blocks down the road.

Sometimes I need a car. I can’t carry a week’s worth of groceries on a bike. I can’t ride to a D&D gathering when it’s -35°F outside (Montana).

But situations like that notwithstanding, I could easily use a bike for 70+% of my travel needs. And yet I don’t.

There is no infrastructure. And any voter initiatives to create the infrastructure will inevitably get killed by Conservatives upset that something will help a college student while not providing themselves with anything. Or purely out of spite.

I spent some time in Davis, CA and have never seen a more mature and robust system of bike paths and traffic control. Bicyclists are first class citizens and (where possible) have paths that are completely separate from motor vehicle traffic.

I would ride my bike everywhere if I could do it without the justifiable fear that I’ll get run off the road for not going fast enough.

Imagine if slavery were left up to the states…

PHP: You’re not a nerd. But you are at least trying.