Cool! Community-specific defaults is actually not a bad idea.

Exactly, threads that get new activity should be bumped. Maybe they don’t need to be super-visible for people who ignored the thread in the first place, but they could at least go to the top-50 posts.

I think it would be cool if conversations that link to the same URL are all automatically grouped, so that reposts just become bumps with a new context/title.

This really is a problem with expectations and hype though. And it will probably be a problem with cost as well.

I think that LLMs are really cool. It’s way faster and more concise than traditional search engines at answering most questions nowadays. This is partly because search engines have degraded in the last 10 years, but LLMs blow them out of the water in my opinion.

And beyond that, I think you can generate some pretty cool things with it to use as a template. I’m not a programmer but I’m making a quite massive and relatively complicated application. That wouldn’t be possible without an LLM. Sure I still have to check every line and clean up a ton of code, and of course I realize that this is all going to have to go to a substantial code review and cleanup by real programmers if I’m ever going to ship it, but the thing I’m making is genuinely already better (in terms of performance and functionality) than a lot of what’s on the market. That has to count for something.

Despite all that, I think we’re in the same kind of bubble now as we were in the early 2000s, except bigger. The oversell of AI comes from CEOs claiming (and to the best of my judgement they appear to be actually believing) that LLMs somehow magically will transcend into AGI if they’re given enough compute. I think part of that stems from the massive (and unexpected) improvements that happened from GPT-2 to GPT-3.

And lots of smart people (like Linus Tordvals for example) point out that really, when you think about it, what is intelligence other than a glorified auto-correct? Our brains essentially function as lossy compression. So I think for some people it is incredibly alluring to believe that if we just throw more chips on the fire a true consciousness will arise. And so, we’re investing all of our extra money and our pension funds into this thing.

And the irony is that I and millions of others can therefore use LLMs at a steep discount. So lots of people are quickly getting accustomed to LLMs thinking that they’re always going to be free or cheap, whereas it’s paid for by the bubble money and it’s not super likely that it will get much more efficient in the near future.

Alamaailman Vasarat - www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk8rHXLLFdw&list=OLAK5uy_lYZj_YUq87l-FS9wF8anChzP4jOXXMxTA

Heads up it’s an acoustic band, not some dude with a synthesizer.

So KDE Plasma is just a graphical environment that you can use on any distro. It’s my preferred desktop environment, but Gnome and XFCE are famous ones, and lots of nerds/programmers love i3 (a tiling graphical environment which encourages you to use keyboard only).

So when choosing a distro, we’re looking at other qualities.

A Linux distro is basically a collection of tools that constitute your OS. The most notable difference between distros is package managrment – how do you install new packages?

This might sound weird but the reason is that open source software comes with tons of different options that can be toggled before compiling to binaries, and at the same time we need our ecosystem of software to play nice accross different packages. They often depend on each other! So that’s why different philosophies split the community into so many different distros.

When installing new software, you essentially run a specific command from the terminal. Your package manager (which is a core part of your distro) then downloads and installs all dependencies. There are graphical tools to help beginners with this, but in fairness I think you should be prepared to learn to use the command line to search for applications and install them. You won’t avoid the terminal as a Linux user.

A really common distro is Debian. It’s the basis for tons of other popular distros, including Ubuntu. My problem with Debian is that they are a bit conservative, which means that they’re often slow with rolling out updates for KDE.

Since I’m also a KDE Plasma person, I run Neon https://neon.kde.org/ which is based on Debian but focuses on rolling out stable updates for KDE packages.

I do not recommend starting with a hobbyist distro like Gentoo, Nix or even Arch if your focus is productivity or gaming. If you want to learn about computers, then those distros can be incredibly rewarding, but they are time-consuming. Go with something Debian-based, or alternatively OpenSUSE or Fedora.

Regarding your other questions, you likely do not need to swap out hardware. But some graphics cards have poor support for Linux, so research your model in advance. You can also try running a distro of your choice live from a USB stick (most distros support this). It’s slower than running from hard drive, but you can get a feeling for what works out of the box and what may need further configuration.

Many games will not work properly on Linux, at least not without extensive tinkering. If you’re serious about certain games, I’d say Windows is unavoidable. I detest dual-booting but if you only have one computer then it may be your only option. However games that work on Deck should work fine on any Linux machine.

Hope this helps.

The best thing to do is just start with whatever you already have. An old gaming rig, laptop or Raspberry Pi, doesn’t matter. Each will present some technical obstacle that you need to overcome (for example keeping the laptop going when the lid is closed). That’s part of learning.

Self-hosting is a hobby where we gradually learn more. Experimentation is just as important as reading the docs.

Gentoo is fun and a nice way to learn more about computers. Their wiki and their community was really good when I was into it, I’m sure it still is. But compiling everything from scratch is quite demanding of your CPU and your time, so it’s not really something that you run as your daily driver for long.

Also lots of killers seek psychiatric help voluntarily (and are often sadly ignored). For a sane, moderately competent person it’s easy to plan the perfect murder or terror attack – it’s a different thing to carry it through because a sane person also has mental guardrails.

Mossad is effective because Israelis are ruthlessly trained to dehumanize anyone who’s an obstacle to their goals.