So… You’re saying instead of “main”, “app”, or “core”, we should change the convention to make tiananmenSquare the entry point for apps?

Or maybe make it the filename for utils, so it’ll just break

First of all, aviation has vastly more stringent oversight than cars do, in terms of manufacturing regulations, maintenance regulations, and pilot regulations.

This fact is so underrated… They do pre-flight checks and frequent maintenance, let alone requiring extensive testing and redundancy

The second question I struggle to get past… Why is this, in any way, better? In a 747, I doubt a pilots strength could control the aircraft, even if everything linking the steering column was strong enough to handle the forces directly. In a truck, the driver’s strength could still steer… So what advantages are there to steering by wire? I’ve never heard an answer, and I’d love to hear any

In fairness, most computers built after around 2014-2016+ last way longer, performance started to level off not long after that. After all, devs write software for what people have, if everyone had 128 gigs of RAM we’d load everything we could think of into memory and you’d need it to keep up

Macs did have some incredible build quality though, the newer ones aren’t holding up even close to as well. I’m still using a couple 2012 Macs to play videos, it’s slow as hell when you interact, but once the video is playing it still looks and sounds good

Trouble is, their main job is to game public perception

A transparent, honest CEO would win a lot of people over (although they’d also probably be less likely to ignore the horrible decisions that require apologies)

Just remember - generic PR apologies are an attempt at mimickingv leaders actually taking responsibility for a mistake. The transparency will just become as soulless and corporate as the apologies are now

We need to fix the system to remove the incentive to put heartless demons in positions of power

A neighborhood kid showed me a fighting game on it, and I think there was a star fox esque game that should’ve been the launch app (assuming it was any good)

The virtual boy was awesome. I literally thought it was a childhood hallucination for almost 2 decades…

Imagine if they had more games for it, and kept improving the tech. Up through the Wii, Nintendo actually made some of the most amazing tech - the Wii accelerometers are what made quadcopters possible (outside of DARPA projects). The Nintendo back then could’ve made worthwhile VR before the iPad took the “I want to be on the Internet on the couch” niche

That’s a better alternative…

You can survive without running water. You can survive without Internet.

Lack of Internet will make survival harder, just like lack of running water (if not to the same degree)

Keep in mind, if you fall behind too far people will kick you out of your house, disrupt any attempts to make a shelter, significantly increases rates of death for a variety of causes

Going further, they’re like magic. They’re good at what takes up a lot of human time - researching unknown topics, acting as a sounding board, pumping out the fluff expected when communicating professionally.

And they can do a lot more otherwise - they’ve opened so many doors for what software can do and how programmers work, but there’s a real learning curve in figuring out how to tie them into conventional systems. They can smooth over endless tedious tasks

None of those things will make ten trillion dollars. It could add trillions in productivity, but it’s not going to make a trillion dollars for a company next year. It’ll be spread out everywhere across the economy, unless one company can license it to the rest of the world

And that’s what FAANG and venture capitalists are demanding. They want something that’ll create a tech titan, and they want it next quarter

So here we are, with this miracle tech in its infancy. Instead of building on what LLMs are good at and letting them enable humans, they’re being pitched as something that’d make ten trillion dollars - like a replacement for human workers

And it sucks at that. So we have OpenAI closing it off and trying to track GPU usage and kill local AI (among other regulatory barriers to entry), we have Google and Microsoft making the current Internet suck so they’re needed, and we have the industry in a race to build pure llm solutions when independent developers are doing more with orders of magnitude less

Welcome to the worst timeline, AI edition

Can we please not?

Compared to full paralysis? I think a lot of people would still want it

All I knew until today was you apply headon directly to your forehead. Why would you do so? If I had to guess, I would’ve said for headaches, but that’s completely an assumption

Well hey listen, I appreciate it. I would’ve spent who knows how long waffling between distos that I don’t feel drawn to, and even if I came across an atomic flavor, I probably would’ve just assumed it was marketing fluff

Good ideas need advocates, and this is a good idea… It’s a promise of an OS I want, not just running from one I don’t

I’m probably going to look at bazzite first. If I have containers that can run LLMs on my GPU, that checks off everything on my wish list except gaming. I’ll read up on it though, you’ve given me the context I need to care about learning more

Ok, when I googled it earlier I saw “containers and roll back to previous version” and I made a note to do more reading

Your write up was good, much clearer than what’s on fedora and Wikipedia. And the fact you pitched immutable OS’s in general first caught my attention… The concept is a no brainer. Decouple the os and the rest of the software, and don’t bother digging into one of a kind conflicts when updating things - just make it rebuildable and create it fresh. You never know when the wrong bit will flip

Nix’s “learn this one thing, configure it once, and you’re done” stuck in my head. And after a different distros, a couple lines installed Nvidia, Nvidia’s docker package and docker

But then I had to configure WiFi and spend half an hour learning why I couldn’t mount an external drive and how to manage it… I still have no regrets, I’ve got a USB that should start converting my friends and family’s old PCs into a self organizing AI/self hosting cluster… Hopefully it works next month lol

But not what I want in a daily driver. I want something that’ll quickly do what I tell it and gracefully handle the fact I have 6 versions of Java and no idea why I need a version from 2018 specifically. And that I’m going to add a repo to install something and instantly forget what I did if it seems like the best path forward at the time

You’ve sold that pretty well - my takeaway was that atomic fedora is very modular and low side effect and also an interchangable foundation I can swap out and roll back easily… At this point, if it can run containers and the drivers I need, it sounds like a great option.

I used to use VMs so every 6-12 months I could start clean with the latest and run setup scripts for my dependencies… It was just easier than debugging some conflict. This sounds even cleaner - I swap out the base at will, and the stuff I’ve built on it should stay intact. Plus it sounds much more testable

So my main concern is will it run on an HP omen - it has zero Linux support and a bunch of concerning driver needs, but it does have a second m2 slot… What’s the worst that can happen? Except apparently some models forget they have fans in Linux and I just know the iGPU-GPU switch will cause some problem with sleeping… But Windows is only going to get worse

Now that you’ve convinced me this might be the best course (I only see less problems than other distros would have), and I’ve talked myself into giving it a go, is there any recommended reading or key concepts I should look into? Any particular flavor(s) you’d point me to first?

Fedora Atomic a chance, it’s an extremely nice family of distros (e.g. Bluefin/ Aurora, Bazzite, etc.)!

Can you elaborate on this? I landed on nix for my PC turned server and haven’t regretted it, but I’ve been hesitant to go all in on my main laptop (I’m wary of my laptop iGPU and GPU switching becoming a config issue, and I’m dreading having to configure my wsl dev environments again…)

Windows is getting blatantly terrible enough I know I’m just putting it off, maybe a cool new technology might help make it sound more fun

It also just got crushed in a collapsing hangar? 4 years after the test flight? That doesn’t sound like a failure, it sounds like it got mothballed and forgotten

I always found it to be a real PITA… It felt like a parallel system to file permissions, which meant I had two things to configure instead of one and I never really saw the purpose. It seemed like it could be more granular than the default, but if it did anything more than that I never learned about it

Granted, I’m a dev, not an admin. I go back and configure the firewall after I shut it off because it was in my way… Eventually

I feel like they go through cycles of “hey, we just remembered we have de-facto monopolistic power, what are we doing with that? Let’s do stuff with that” And “everyone got mad at us for anticompetitive practices again… Let’s lay low and play nice until governments stop threatening to break us up”

Several months ago, fresh off the high of following through on my resolution to leave Reddit forever, I made the same decision with YouTube. Once ublock stopped working, I’d try out peer tube, or maybe sail the seas

But ublock never stopped working. I watch more YouTube now than ever before, I got totally addicted as I binged in preparation to leave

At this point, I don’t know if it’d be good for me, or send me in a desperate arms race to get my fix