I’m sorry for your suffering and heartache. I wish you the best.

What would a good incentive structure look like? For example, would working with public school districts and being paid by them to ensure safe learning experiences count? Or are you thinking of something else?

I wonder if some of our intelligence is artificial. Being able to drive directly to any destination, for example, with a simple cell-phone lookup. Reading lifetimes worth of experience in books that doesn’t naturally come at birth. Learning incredibly complex languages that are inherited not by genes, but by environment–and, depending on the language, being able to distinguish different colors.

A coffee bean is a seed from the Coffea plant and the source for coffee. It is the pit inside the red or purple fruit. This fruit is often referred to as a coffee cherry, and like the cherry, it is a fruit with a pit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_bean

I appreciate the candid analysis, but perhaps “nothing to see here” (my paraphrase) is only one part of the story. The other part is that there is genuine innovation and new things within reach that were not possible before. For example, personalized learning–the dream of giving a tutor to each child, so we can overcome Bloom’s 2 Sigma Problem–is far more likely with LLMs in the picture than before. It isn’t a panacea, but it is certainly more useful than cryptocurrency kept promising to be IMO.

Is human intelligence artificial? #philosophy

Have you ever heard the story of the snake?

One evening, a man walks along a dimly lit path. He suddenly halts, his heart pounding with fear. Before him, on the ground, lies what appears to be a venomous snake. He freezes, paralyzed with dread. Only when a friend comes by with a lantern does the true nature of the object come to light: it is merely a piece of rope.

I learned this story from Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist author. He would indicate with stories like this that our perceptions shape our reality. Often, we react out of fear and misunderstanding, seeing snakes where there are none. He said that mindfulness and deeper understanding can act like the lantern, illuminating the true nature of our experiences.

Working development system. I got quite far, but after so much work, became very frustrated when a VSCode plugin wouldn’t work properly because it needed (and assumed) read/write access. I didn’t want to have to manage and think about every little plugin I experimented with at the OS level.

I wonder if it would help to think back to the first time you littered? When I was 5 or 6, I remember eating a candy and not wanting the wrapper any more. It had to be someone else who saw what I did and pointed out that it isn’t good if we all did this, because then the playground would be all full of trash and we couldn’t play there. I was like, “Oh, I get it.” But if someone hadn’t explained it to me, I think the behavior could have innocently continued for quite some time. I grew up in a very rural place (northern Canada).

Your condescension has sent my IED absolutely through the roof

Do I have to break out the crayons for you?

You understand condescension, and yet you still do it yourself.

Word of advice–be a good person to your colleagues, and let friendship possibly develop after one of you leaves. I’ve made many friends throughout the years once we each know there is no pressure to be friends. I’ve had many job leads throughout the years because people I previously worked with thought I was a great colleague.

See comment above, but basically, I question whether mouthwash is all that, based on recent research: https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/jmm/10.1099/jmm.0.001830

Based on recent research, mouthwash is now in question in my books.

We aimed to assess if daily usage of Listerine Cool Mint influenced the composition of the pharyngeal microbiome… Listerine use was associated with an increased abundance of common oral opportunistic bacteria previously reported to be enriched in periodontal diseases, oesophageal and colorectal cancer, and systemic diseases. These findings suggest that the regular use of Listerine mouthwash should be carefully considered.

Basically, it differentially kills good bacteria, leaving more of the bad kind.

https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/jmm/10.1099/jmm.0.001830

I really wanted to like NixOS (and I do, theoretically), but I couldn’t dedicate more than 5 full days over Christmas to learn how to get to a working development system.

Very nice! I was just looking at reviews on this. Really nice machine in every way, except maybe for the camera, and minor points off for the display being “only” 1080p. I have a lovely framework 13", but am jealous of the Lemur’s battery life.

Is it possible to get this to work with OBS studio? I see the author mentions OBS as an “Alternative Project” but it seems ideal to have these pieces work together.

This is really cool in concept, but it is SO SLOW. OMG.

I’ve started playing with Chimera Linux. Super interesting hybrid between BSD-like systems (ports, BSD-derived userland tools) and the Linux kernel, with neat design choices like LLVM compiler instead of gcc and musl C instead of glibc. I think of it as a next-gen Void Linux.

The short answer is “yes, but only as much as it needs to”. Flatpak had to make a decision between “do we guarantee the app will work, even with system upgrades” or “do we minimize space” and they chose the former. The minimum necessary dependencies will be installed (and shared) amongst flatpaks.

Have you had the unfortunate experience of a utility or program losing its packaged status? It’s happened to me before–for example fslint. I don’t think this can happen with flatpak.

It’s funny, I do almost the exact opposite–whenever there is a flatpak version, I prefer it over a built-in apt package. The flatpak is almost always more up-to-date and often has the features and bug fixes I need.

Examples:

• Vorta (0.8.12 flatpak; 0.8.3 apt)
• Pinta (2.1.1 flatpak; 1.6 apt)
• Minder (1.15.6 flatpak; 1.13.1 apt)
• Xournal++ (1.2.1 flatpak; 1.1.1 apt)

.

I don’t think it’s fair to expect the distro maintainers to be up to date with every software out there–the universe of software has grown and grown, and we just can’t expect them to wrap/manage/test every new release and version bump.