From Hobby to Hero: Linux Powers the Curious

For the Mavericks and Makers

This is almost completely true, but I would add the caveat that PWAs (progressive web apps) are not as easy to discover and less familiar to install as an app in an app/play store. It might also be because it's in Apple and Google's best interest to not streamline that. But it's still an obstacle nevertheless.

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.

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

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.

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.

"We know better than you" has never been an effective way to change other peoples' minds, in my experience.

I appreciate your question, but I think "we know" is problematic:

• who is "we"?
• how do we "know"?
• can some people know one thing while others know the opposite?

I'm not trolling, either, just asking questions from a philosophical point of view. I've changed my mind about several things I took very seriously and thought I was 100% right about. Could others be dealing with similar changing-mind-through-time processes? Could you?

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.

Snaps are basically Ubuntu's private app store, and flatpaks (the supported method of app distribution by almost every other distro) are not supported; there's no tiling WM built-in for large monitors; the kernel is not kept up to date (i.e. improved hardware coverage and support); some things like streaming with OBS studio and Steam don't work out of the box (this may have changed, but it was the case for me about a year ago).