Yup. Zorin’s another great Debian-based distro. I’ve been running it on my laptop for awhile now and I’m a fan.

Man… Anybody remember “Back Orifice”? The late nineties were weird.

If not vanilla Ubuntu, I’d still suggest trying an Ubuntu derivative like Linux Mint or POP! OS. Ubuntu has a huge community, so in the event you run into issues it’ll be easier to find fixes for it.

What you’ll find is that Linux distros are roughly grouped by a “family” (my term for it anyway). Anyone can (theoretically, anyway) start from a given kernel and roll their own distro, but most distros are modified versions of a handful of base distros.

The major families at the moment are

• Debian: A classic all-rounder that prioritizes stability over all else. Ubuntu is descended from Debian.

• Fedora: Another classic all-rounder. I haven’t used it in a decade, so I won’t say much about it here.

• Arch: If Linux nerds were car people, Arch is for the hot rodders. You can tune and control pretty much any aspect of your system. … Not a good 1st distro if you want to just get something going.

There are many others, but these are the major desktop-PC distro families at the moment.

The importance of these families is that techniques that work in one (say) Debian-based distro will tend to work in other Debian-based distros… But not necessarily in distros from other families.

I used to work summers as an apprentice electrician. The amount of crazy wiring I saw in old houses was (heh) shocking. Sometimes it was just that it was old. Real old houses sometimes just had bare wire wrapped in silk. … And a few decades later that silk was frayed and crumbling in the walls and needed replacing.

My current house was wired at a time when copper was more precious, so it was wired up and down through the house, with circuits arranged by proximity, not necessarily logic. When a certain circuit in my house blows the breaker, my TV, PC and one wall of the master bedroom all lose power. The TV and PC are not in the same room either.

Just saying.

… Saying what, exactly?

I said that we should

• design for change
• “within reason”
• because we can’t know what exact changes are needed.

And you argued… The same thing? Just in the reverse order?

Have you ever been in an old house? Not old, like, on the Historic Register, well-preserved, rich bastard “old house”. Just a house that has been around awhile. A place that has seen a lot of living.

You’ll find light switches that don’t connect to anything; artwork hiding holes in the walls; sometimes walls have been added or removed and the floors no longer match.

Any construction that gets used, must change as needs change. Be it a house or a city or a program, these evolutions of need inevitably introduce complexity and flaws that are large enough to annoy, but small enough to ignore. Over time those issues accumulate until they reach a crisis point. Houses get remodeled or torn down, cities build or remove highways, and programs get refactored or replaced.

You can and should design for change, within reason, because all successful programs will need to change in ways you cannot predict. But the fact that a system eventually becomes complex and flawed is not due to engineering failures - it is inherent in the nature of changing systems.

… And can you fix it?

That sounds amazing - OMW to check it out!

Oh, for sure. I focused on ML in college. My first job was actually coding self-driving vehicles for open-pit copper mining operations! (I taught gigantic earth tillers to execute 3-point turns.)

I’m not in that space anymore, but I do get how LLMs work. Philosophically, I’m inclined to believe that the statistical model encoded in an LLM does model a sort of intelligence. Certainly not consciousness - LLMs don’t have any mechanism I’d accept as agency or any sort of internal “mind” state. But I also think that the common description of “supercharged autocorrect” is overreductive. Useful as rhetorical counter to the hype cycle, but just as misleading in its own way.

I’ve been playing with chatbots of varying complexity since the 1990s. LLMs are frankly a quantum leap forward. Even GPT-2 was pretty much useless compared to modern models.

All that said… All these models are trained on the best - but mostly worst - data the world has to offer… And if you average a handful of textbooks with an internet-full of self-confident blowhards (like me) - it’s not too surprising that today’s LLMs are all… kinda mid compared to an actual human.

But if you compare the performance of an LLM to the state of the art in natural language comprehension and response… It’s not even close. Going from a suite of single-focus programs, each using keyword recognition and word stem-based parsing to guess what the user wants (Try asking Alexa to “Play ‘Records’ by Weezer” sometime - it can’t because of the keyword collision), to a single program that can respond intelligibly to pretty much any statement, with a limited - but nonzero - chance of getting things right…

This tech is raw and not really production ready, but I’m using a few LLMs in different contexts as assistants… And they work great.

Even though LLMs are not a good replacement for actual human skill - they’re fucking awesome. 😅

What I think is amazing about LLMs is that they are smart enough to be tricked. You can’t talk your way around a password prompt. You either know the password or you don’t.

But LLMs have enough of something intelligence-like that a moderately clever human can talk them into doing pretty much anything.

That’s a wild advancement in artificial intelligence. Something that a human can trick, with nothing more than natural language!

Now… Whether you ought to hand control of your platform over to a mathematical average of internet dialog… That’s another question.

In order to add their names to your dictionary. You don’t have to allow it. But given that there’s no internet access for the keyboard - it seems pretty safe

No - but it is the game based on the anime that inspired the phaser design! Er, more directly both the phaser and the Zillion game were based on an anime named Zillion.

The Master System phaser was such a slick design. Perhaps not as iconic as Nintendo’s blaster, but I think it’s much cooler looking.

Lots of little quality of life things. For instance, in Kotlin types can be marked nullable or not. When you are passing a potential null into a non-nullable argument, the compiler raises an error.

But if you had already checked earlier in scope whether or not the value was null, the compiler remembers that the value is guaranteed not to be null and won’t blow up.

Same for other typechecks. Once you have asserted that a value is a given type, you don’t need to cast it everywhere else. The compiler will remember.

Kotlin is Java with all the suck taken out.

It’s a modern, ergonomic language that runs on the JVM and removes as much GD boilerplate as it can.

It’s fantastic.

That one dude still using Delphi is getting screwed.

Also, these salary numbers seem… real low. I get that it’s the median so maybe a huge number of overseas engineers are pulling the results down but in my neck of the woods 105K is less than what we pay juniors.

Self-replying to add a couple other classics that aren’t already in the thread:

• Penguin Land: A Mr-Driller-like puzzler where you are trying to carefully bring an egg safely to the end of the level - but it can only fall one block distance without breaking. Also, there are polar bears you can crush with boulders.

• Zillion: This game has no business being as good as it is. Side scrolling adventure game where you are tasked with rescuing your captured spy-buddies. You have to loot secret codes from the bodies of fallen enemies, use them to unlock laser doors and progress further into the enemy base. It uses exceptionally large and detailed sprites for the time and is a surprisingly “mature” game for the Era. (Not meaning nudity, just that it is more interesting to someone auth the patience to map out a base and write down secret codes)

Skip the sequel, however. Zillion 2 sucked. a lot.

True, true… yet still more reliable than LoZ’s “hold the reset button and hope” method of saving the game…

GOLVELLIUS

This game is a blatant… homage to OG Legend of Zelda. But IMHO it does almost everything better.

The game begins with Link Kelesis entering a cavern where an old woman tells him to take a sword - and some boots because our boy can’t even dress himself.

After that, you know the drill. Top-down action rpg mode, slaying monsters, leveling up, finding secrets and better equipment.

Where it improves on the original LoZ is that the Master System was more powerful than the original NES, so the graphics here are brighter and more detailed and the audio is crisper.

The structure of the world is more linear than LoZ - but that means it’s a lot harder to get lost. Also, as you unlock gear and powers you can backtrack to discover new secrets in old locations.

The game’s characters vary wildly in tone from angry old ladies berating you for lacking the funds to shop to meandering fairies commenting on snow cones.

I replay Golvellius every few years on whatever the handheld platform dujour is. …I think it’s about time to give out a spin on the steam deck again.

Anyway. If you like that classic Zelda vibe, give Golvellius a spin. It’s seriously one of the best games I played on the old Master System.

Argh. I hate that argument.

Yes - “Rewriting history” is a Bad Thing - but o argue that’s only on ‘main’ (or other shared branches). You should (IMHO) absolutely rewrite your local history pre-push for exactly the reasons you state.

If you rewrite main’s history and force your changes everybody else is gonna have conflicts. Also - history is important for certain debugging and investigation. Don’t be that guy.

Before you push though… rebasing your work to be easily digestible and have a single(ish) focus per commit is so helpful.

• review is easier since concerns aren’t mixed
• If a commit needs to be reverted it limits the collateral damage
• history is easier to follow because the commits tell a story

I use a stacked commit tool to help automate rebasing on upstream commits, but you can do it all with git pretty easily.

Anyway. Good on you; Keep the faith; etc etc. :)

Though they are often synonyms, simple != easy.

Simple is uncomplicated.

Easy is unchallenging.

Super Mario Bros. is a simple game, but not necessarily an easy one.