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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I like the ideas some other people mention. Specifically: read about your specific hardware and the distro of Linux you want to install. Then, make sure you are using as many open source cross platforms apps as you can, so when you do switch, you will be in familiar territory. I do think the criticisms of Ubuntu as a bad first choice are interesting, and maybe true, but I wouldn’t over look downstream distros like Pop!_OS. It’s Ubuntu, but with Flat packs and a distinctive Desktop Environment. Mint might also be a good choice, I know lots of people who like it (I don’t personally, but to each their own).

    When I started on Linux, I installed Arch on an old MacBook. In those days apple was using amd64, but they were not friendly with Linux or the rest of the computing world. However it was older hardware, and the Arch Wiki had a great page on how to install Linux for that particular configuration. Arch is not a beginner friendly distro, but the wiki is fantastic, and so well documented.

    But my main piece of distinctive advice is just do it. If you have read a few articles and have a pretty good sense of what is required (and are running common, last generation hardware), just jump in. You will probably never “feel” ready, and you will come across unique problems that no starter guide will prepare you for. So just go for it, and learn along the way.





  • I am not as familiar with RDBMs internals, but you could also build your server in the database. Right now, I am building a server client of sorts with Oxigraph. I have a store object that I am manipulating directly with rust code. It is an option. However its not going to be very flexible, and it does complicate the sanitization issues.

    Also, prolog is a complete language, very capable of running the server. I don’t know what kind of architecture you are thinking of and having the distinction between datalog on the database and prolog in the server might be problematic. Also, I may be projecting a little. I wish I could be using prolog. But alas.


  • Everyone else has more experience than I, and I am not sure these are exactly the kinds of answers you are looking for…but the two things I have thought is using something like PL/SQL and stored procedures, so much of your backend logic is removed from the server and set into the database itself. Not exactly what you are looking for I think, and it has problems of its own.

    Second, Prolog is a great query language (from what I am told) and capable of running a server. TerminusDB runs their server in prolog, and also postgres has a prolog implementation. It would be interesting to play with these things, but they may not exactly be what you are looking for.






  • I’m glad you bring up Google Books in this. Those lawsuits in the early teens about this issue are really important. But two things bother me: Google really won the case, but then basically abandoned the project. It’s still there, but a shell of what it used to be. I wonder if the case may be, even though they won, they really lost. Or it could be Google just abandoning another project because they never cared about it.

    I think AI for searching books like Google books would be an a amazing use case, and really, it is t that much different than what Google books is: an index of all of the published words. In fact, I can imagine AI being able to help you figure out if this book has the info you actually need from the book. That’s not what GPT is, but one could make one that could do it.

    I am torn. I am sort of a GPT may sayer, but on the other hand, is it really all that philosophically different than what humans do? I don’t think it is materially different, but it is a little.