You need to accept the fact that you are AI generated.

On the plus side, it’s proof you’re living in a simulation!

I didn’t mention Cleveland, but those ads are hilarious. At first I thought, because I was talking up Oregon, you were linking to one of these Oregon travel ads:

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Southern Florida? Like the man said: Florida: the more North you go, the more South it gets. Orlando seems mostly OK. Big city, opportunities, and there’s a NASA space center and launch facility not too far.

My mom lives there, and that’s about the limit of my knowledge. I will personally never again willingly live south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Oh, I hear that if you stay out of the little handle at the bottom, Missouri is nice. A friend from there once told me that if they’d cut off that handle and give it to Arkansas, it’d raise the average IQ of both states. Never been there, myself.

Lots of places in Oregon and Washington are great; large swaths are not, but if you’re not prone to SAD, there are great towns in the Willamette Valley: Corvallis, Eugene, and Ashville down on the California border. Also, California is enormous. N California is very different from S California, and the coast is enormously different from the interior. It’s a huge state, and painting it with a single brush is like saying Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania are all the same. It’s seriously about the same area as all those put together, lengthwise, at least. The greater LA/San Diego area alone is almost as big as your entire state. But the Pacific Northeast is wet if you live in the Valley, and there isn’t much in the way of big cities east of the Cascades.

How about Boise, ID? Good size college city, lots of microbreweries, lots of outdoor recreation, pretty great weather if you like hot, but you get snow in the winter, too. Plus nearly half the state is national park; fantastic backpacking.

Most of these places I mentioned specifically lean liberal, although when you venture into rural areas it gets red pretty quickly, like anywhere. An exception is Orange County in CA, which is full of really crazy red-hatters. But it sound like you’ve already ruled out at least part of CA, and “insufferable” makes me think you’re thinking specifically of S Cal.

Eugene is, or used to be, fantastic. Extremely liberal, and not trust-fund hippie style. Decent sized to be entertaining. You just have to put up with the weather and hippies, or whatever hippies have mutated into with successive generations. Pot’s legal in OR, too, if that’s your bag.

Bend, OR is one of the best places in the planet if you’re sporty. It’s high desert, but smack up against the mountains. In the summer, people rock climb and bike. In the winter, they ski Mt Bachelor. There’s fishing and camping, and at one point it had more restaurants per capita than any other city in the US. There’s no humidity. At all. Very pretty town. A 4 hour drive north, and you’re in Portland, OR, which isn’t what it used to be and has been having problems, but is still a large metro area with lots to do and a fantastic science center. 2 hrs West through the mountains is Salem, the capital, which frankly sucks; or or 3+ hours SW is the aforementioned Eugene. A couple hours south is Crater Lake. A couple three more hours and you’re in the N California Redwood forest. Oh, and if you do speed through So-Lame (Salem), another 1.5 hours and you’re on the Oregon coast, so 3-4 hours from Bend to the coast, mostly through a fantastic, amazing mountain range (and then the Valley and then the smaller coastal range).

If you want to stay on the E coast, I recommend the greater Philadelphia area. From there, NYC is a 3hr drive. The Jersey shore is a 3 hr drive. Washington DC is a 3 hr drive. Gettysburg is a 3 hr drive. Williamsburg, VA - possibly my favorite place in the US - is a 4-ish hour drive (depending on DC traffic). Plus, you can get to almost any of the coast cities from Philly by train, if you’re willing to sacrifice a couple more hours. Pennsylvania wasn’t my favorite place to live, but if you can stand living in S Carolina I’m sure it’d be fine for you.

Honestly, you might consider Minneapolis. It does get cold in the winter (-50F is the coldest I’ve experienced), but The Cities are fantastic, full of Art Deco architecture, and end-summer temps can hit the 100’s. In September, any of the literally over 10,000 lakes are bath-water warm. And we don’t have copperheads. The great lakes are close; we’re practically in the center of the country, so flying anywhere in the continental US is a 4-hour flight or less. The Cities are very progressive - again, you drive an hour outside and it’s Trump signs everywhere - par for the course - but within The Cities it’s quite nice. And the bike paths are incredible; miles and miles, and much of it completely off-road - at some point they took all the old industry rail lines and turned them into maintained bike and foot paths. It’s really quite remarkable. And the metro system isn’t half bad, for a US city. The humidity gets oppressive, but, again, you’re surviving S Carolina so I don’t think that’d be a problem for you.

This is my favorite, mainly because it’s been well argued by some respectable scientists.

Another is that we’re in a simulation, and aliens aren’t part of it. There are also some very good statistics pointing to the simulation theory, from just sheer scale.

Thanks! Downvotes don’t bother me. I was a big KDE fan, a couple of decades ago, and plasma has been exciting to watch; I was just saying that I wish it’d been as far along when I was still interested in DEs.

There are tiling communities, so I don’t feel a deep need to expound on this; it came across my feed only because I browse World occasionally, - in the name of Eris - and I still get curious almost every announcement. And, every time I try it, it looks very pretty, but I find it counter-productive and fussy, and I end up back in herbstluftwm.

You are absolutely right about the script-ability strength of Linux, and I think KDE of pretty scritpt-able, too. It’s just not a core value, like it is in bspwm or herbstluftwm, and that makes all the difference.

Anyhoo, cheers and have a great day!

Man, I want to try this. But ever since I went fill tiling, scripted WM any DE that forces me to use a mouse just annoys me, no matter how pretty it is.

It’s like when you get really comfortable in vim; any other editor feels like you’ve been given a Studebaker.

But the mother plant produces “pups,” which you can break off and plant, which can become new mothers themselves. Also, the flowers last a really long time.

I had a pimiento I bought from a grocery store; I knew about the “single flower” thing, but the plant was still going after the flower died and I just couldn’t throw it out. Then someone told me about the pups, and now I have 5 healthy pimientos. None have yet bloomed; I need to do more reading and see it they need some special condition - but I just wanted to pass along the information about the pups!

Bonus if it can edit .sc files, a-la the best spreadsheet editor, sc-im.

Maybe because not every system is Debian, and Plasma has to work on systems that either don’t have /usr/share/i18n/supported or put is somewhere else?

I manage a project that encounters this sort of thing regularly; my biggest problem is terminfo entries. Not all distributions contain all of the same terminfos. It is one of the biggest source of bug reports my project gets. I’ve been considering just embedding all of the terminfos in my project, just so I know they’ll all be there on every system it’s installed.

I don’t know this is Plasma’s reason for including their own list, but it could easily be. It could also be because those are the locales Plasma supports, and it may not support every locale that might be in the distro system list.

And all of those things are then analyzed and verified before anything is done with them. No reputable scientist is taking those results and dumping it straight into a paper; the deep learning engines are pointing scientists in the right direction; they’re taking the haystack and making it a handful. Protein folding is a little different because the results can be directly verified programmatically (I think; I’m not an organic chemist, or biologist, or whoever is doing this research).

The output of LLMs can be great outlines. They can also be wildly, and confidently, wrong.

You can’t install FireDragon on any other Linux distribution?

Oh, believe me, I don’t. At all. I’ve been working in the software engineering sector since the mid 90’s; I’m quite aware of the rapid pace of change in this sector. I was briefly considering a focus on AI when getting my degree, back in the early 90’s.

But this specifically mentions LLMs, and the fundamental way LLMs function is not going to lead to self-aware AI, or any sort of system that is going to be able to self-evaluate for accuracy or “truthiness.” It’s going to take an advance in neural net science; maybe in combination with LLM - but LLMs by themselves will only ever be dumb machines that generate predictive text based on - I don’t know, Bayesian probabilities, or whatever.

This exact scenario scares me, because what we know about current LLMs is not that they are good discovers of things, but that they are very convincing liars.

Hugo isn’t a server, per se. It’s basically just a template engine. It was originally focused on turning markdown into web pages, with some extra functionality around generating indexes and cross-references that are really what set it apart from just a simple rendering engine. And by now, much of its value is in the huge number of site templates built for Hugo. But what Hugo does is takes some metadata, whatever markdown content you have, and it generates a static web site. You still need a web server pointed at the generated content. You run Hugo on demand to regenerate the site whenever there’s new content (although, there is a “watch” mode, where it’ll watch for changes and regenerate the site in response). It’s a little fancier than that; it doesn’t regenerate content that hasn’t changed. You can have it create whatever output format you want - mine generates both HTML and gmi (Gemini) sites from the same markdown. But that’s it: at its core, it’s a static site template rendering engine.

It is absolutely suitable for creating a portfolio site. Many of the templates are indeed such. And it’s not hard to make your own templates, if you know the front-end technologies.

It depends on how you want to write. If you want to use a web interface, WriteFreely is decent. If you like your text editor, Hugo is fantastic.

:shrug:

It’s trivial to host yourself, and super light on resources. Personally, I don’t use it; for blogging I write markdown and rsync it over to the server where Hugo picks it up and turns it into a blog. Now that I think about it, I should probably go shut my WriteFreely down. I have a few pages on it, but I hate web app interfaces, so I didn’t put much content in it.

OK, now a serious response.

What you are describing, to me, is how people should vote. It’s normal voting behavior. In realty, there are dozens of issues people care about to varying degrees, and you can assign values to each issue (how much it matters to you), add them up, and vote based on that.

My issue is that single-issue voters assign infinity to one issue and vote based on that, which is both usually lazy and stupid. There are cases where it’s reasonable, but they’re rare; if Trump supported Palestine and Biden supported the genocide (which tells you which side I’m on on that topic), then yeah; I think genocide is a reasonable single issue to make a decision. But in this case, Biden is pro-Israel, and Trump is pro-genocide (he’s said he thinks Israel isn’t going hard enough), so pro-Palestine voters should vote Biden.

Going back to your example: if two candidates do have the same position on issue X; and candidate A supports Y and Z; and candidate B doesn’t support Y or Z, then even if your single issue is X, you don’t just not vote. You have an opinion about Y and/or Z, so you vote for A or B based on that. And in your specific example, first: there is no candidate C in the US; there hasn’t been since Abraham Lincoln. Voting on the US is fucked up, and a vote for a third party is a wasted vote: not a protest vote, but a wasted vote, b/c C has zero chance of winning, and you’re taking your vote away from one of the other candidates, one of whom is more aligned - even if only slightly - with you values. Second, it would be unusual if you cared about X, Y, and Z equally, so one of those two candidates is going agree with you on one of those topics which is more important to you, and you should vote for them. Or - and this is the real situation in the US - two candidates are very similar about a half dozen issues, but widely differ about another dozen pretty important topics. And although that long tail of issues may not be your triggers, the weight of all those issues should make it clear which guy (and, so far, it’s always a guy) you prefer.

Biden and Trump agree on Palestine, although it’s clear Trump is the worse choice for Palestinians. They agree on big business. The differ about many other important topics:

• A woman’s right to choose
• Supporting Ukraine in its defense against the Russian invasion
• Universal healthcare
• Environmental protection
• Worker’s rights
• Nepotism in government
• The peaceful fucking transition between administrations
• Minority rights
• Whether black people are humans or not
• Whether women have the right to not be molested

and many other “lesser” topics. Saying that you aren’t going to vote because Biden is only less bad about Palestine is making a decision about a single issue, and it is a problem; it’s thoughtless, and lazy.

I’ve experienced that, too. That’s what prompted me to simply give up and try something else after the first CAPTCHA.

Your edit is spot on. Google is trying to annoy people out of using VPNs and other tracking blockers. In most cases, I allow one CAPTCHA, and if that fails, I go somewhere else. If it’s Google search, where I go next is Bing, just to punish Google.

When I must use Google, I do so in a dedicated container on Firefox. That way, Google knows who I am, but the only thing they ever get is what traffic I’m sending to them.

One thing I have yet to do is randomize my VPN exit node for Google; I’ve noticed that they correlate exit nodes to device trackers, and if I visit somewhere outside of my Google container, they can tell it’s me by correlation. I may start using Firefox’s VPN for Google connections, or just fire up Tor for Google connections.

I’ve heard rumors that, while we see two kinds of mango in the US, there are many more varietals in India, and they’re all better. I’d like to have access to some of those; mangoes rock.