They want something like the Star Trek computer or one of Tony Stark’s AIs that were basically deus ex machinas for solving some hard problem behind the scenes. Then it can say “model solved” or they can show a test simulation where the ship doesn’t explode (or sometimes a test where it only has an 85% chance of exploding when it used to be 100%, at which point human intuition comes in and saves the day by suddenly being better than the AI again and threads that 15% needle or maybe abducts the captain to go have lizard babies with).

AIs that are smarter than us but for some reason don’t replace or even really join us (Vision being an exception to the 2nd, and Ultron trying to be an exception to the 1st).

All I can say for sure is that the cinnamon desktop I’m using has wayland (experimental) as an option. I haven’t tried it myself so I don’t know how stable it is. Or how well it might work with other desktops.

IP as a concept exists in a superstate where it’s bad in the context of piracy but good in the context of generative AI.

Personally, I’d just try live boot usbs instead of going to the effort of setting up VMs for different distros.

For getting images, my approach would be to search for the distro name to find its website and look for their downloads page. If there’s multiple flavours, just pick one and see how you like it. You can always switch to a different one once you’ve got enough experience to decide what is and isn’t important for you.

If you just want to game, Fedora was pretty easy to get going for me. I just installed that and then steam and was able to play games after that. I’ve got an AMD gpu and it was actually easier than on windows, since you still need to install gpu and chipset drivers on windows. The only time I spent on that in Fedora was the time it took to figure out I didn’t need to do that.

Only parts that took a little digging was mounting my other partitions (I think because I misunderstood some setup during the install, but it ended up being no big deal) and finding the setting that enabled all games to be attempted to run with proton, since by default steam will only show games with official linux support as playable by default.

Also getting sound working the way I wanted it to was a bit of a hassle, though any of the workarounds I tried worked pretty quickly. I wanted to use the optical digital, but it wouldn’t at first, but sound did work from the analog port as well as plugging my soundbar in via USB. And even though I gave up on getting the digital to work at the time because I just wanted to play a game, when I later swung back to it, it just worked, so I’m guessing it was just broken because my motherboard was a new one and the software needed to be updated to properly support it.

That one is particularly rage inducing if it’s the one I’m thinking of (I think ep 1 of the new season?).

Some of the others in the new season aren’t so depressing or rage inducing, though.

It could also be interpreted as a George Bluth-esque extreme “always leave a note” lesson.

If you’re going to fake your suicide to get your crazy family off your back so you can be with your lover, always leave your lover a note explaining what you’re doing or you’ll both end up dead.

Iirc when he did make it more explicit, the AI responded with “no, don’t do that” kind of responses. He just kept the metaphor up when the AI didn’t have such an association in its training data and just responded as a lover would respond to their love saying they’d come home in their training data.

Though I’d say that if a kid would shoot themself in response to a chatbot saying anything to them, the issue is more about them having any access to a gun than anything about the chatbot itself. Unless maybe if the chatbot is volunteering weaknesses common in gun safes, though even then I’d say more fault lies with the parent choosing a shitty safe and raising a kid that would kill themself on the advice of their chatbot girlfriend.

Mostly loadwords from dwarvish.

Pelt, melt, Celt, belt, felt (the material), dealt, velt, welt, yelt.

Some of those are past tense verbs, some are me just making the sound and finding real words, one I’m not sure is a word but doesn’t sound wrong, so I hereby declare it to be a word henceforth, if it wasn’t already.

My first seagate HD started clicking as I was moving data to it from my older drive just after I purchased it. This was way back in the 00s. In a panic, I started moving data back to my older hd (because I was moving jnstead of copying) and then THAT one started having issues also.

Turns out when I overclocked my CPU I had forgotten to lock the PCI bus, which resulted in an effective overclock of the HDD interfaces. It was ok until I tried moving mass amounts of data and the HDD tried to keep up instead of letting the buffer fill up and making the OS wait.

I reversed the OC and despite the HDDs getting so close to failure, both of them lasted for years after that without further issue.

If it’s a topic that has been heavily discussed on the internet or in literature, LLMs can have good conversations about it. Take it all with a grain of salt because it will regurgitate common bad arguments as well as good ones, but if you challenge it, you can get it to argue against its own previous statements.

It doesn’t handle things that are in flux very well. Or things that require very specific consistency. It’s a probabilistic model where it looks at existing tokens and predicts what the next one is most likely to be, so questions about specific versions of something might result in a response specific to that version or it might end up weighing other tokens more than the version or maybe even start treating it all like pseudocode, where descriptive language plays a bigger role than what specifically exists.

My guess is what’s going on is there’s tons of psuedo code out there that looks like it’s a real language but has functions that don’t exist as placeholders and the LLM noticed the pattern to the point where it just makes up functions, not realizing they need to be implemented (because LLMs don’t realize things but just pattern match very complex patterns).

I guess it’s possible for the keyboard itself to handle that, but I’ve set that up in the OS on both windows and Linux machines. And when I replaced a shitty keyboard with a better one just a little while ago, it had Dvorak already as the default layout.

Valve existed at that point, too.

Or with cosmic rays, not sure anything would be opaque.

Also windows locks files that are in use, so attempting to delete system32 would (probably, I’ve never tried it) give some errors because it’s using a bunch of those files already and would leave those files intact even if you’re very determined to get rid of them. This is why you need to reboot to apply many updates because even the updater can’t get around that restriction.

It’s handled differently on Linux. I’m not 100% on the specifics of the implementation but it either loads files in use entirely into RAM or simply removes the reference to the file when deleted (or makes a new file and points the reference there if you’re replacing the file). That means anything that is currently using the file can continue to do so after a delete/overwrite, so the OS doesn’t prevent it from happening. This is why you can run any updates without restarting on Linux (though you do need to restart to get the system to use some updates, if they update critical components that can’t be restarted independently of the rest of the system, like the kernel).

If you want to nuke your whole os install drive on windows, you need to boot into a different OS instance (which is what the repair partition is, just a barebones windows install that can access files on the main install without the locking). But Linux can do it from within the same instance.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s decent entertainment. It’s just disconnected from any kind of scientific or technical reality and a part of me is rolling my eyes for a lot of it. And maybe a bit frustrated because I like thinking about things and analyzing and problem solving. I prefer hard magic systems over soft magic ones because there’s no point in thinking about soft magic systems because they just do whatever the plot calls for when it calls for it while hard magic systems have to build up to it and need to be clever to surprise viewers.

Tony uses a soft technology system that defies thought.

Yeah, Tony was capable of doing whatever the writers wrote him to be capable of, just like every other fictional character. And the writers wrote him doing it in a manner similar to the “programming” in Swordfish or the tech work in NCIS (or whatever show it was that had multiple people typing on one keyboard at the same time). As in difficult to tell if they had any understanding of it at all, sensationalised it for entertainment purposes, deliberately made it unlike any real programming to troll people who do understand programming, or some combination of all those.

MCU science might as well just be another school of magic. Especially when Tony’s suit could shapeshift and convert between matter and energy because of some quantum mumbo jumbo. He just cast a quantum spell on it.

Also every movie had multiple impacts in that iron suit that should have been worse for him than most car crashes.

Abuse of authority. A just legal system would have mechanisms that trigger audits and reviews of all individuals involved when a certain threshold of dismissals is exceeded. It should also make those incorrectly caught up in the process whole when it’s determined that there’s no real case against them.

Don’t run Linux, run the OG Unix. Don’t use a desktop, get a mainframe.