rozodru

a few years ago I had a really stupid issue with my laptop. about twice a year, for whatever reason, Windows 11 decided my internal wifi card wasn’t worth existing and would just wipe it off the face of the earth. Just completely remove it, delete the drivers, everything. hard resetting the laptop didn’t work, physically unplugging and replugging the card back in didn’t work, manually installing the drivers didn’t work. the ONLY way Windows would accept the card again was on a fresh OS install. So twice a year, like clockwork, i’d have to do that except the last time I couldn’t because I needed an MS account. well I couldn’t get online. for whatever reason it wouldn’t allow me to connect to wifi and I didn’t have access to an eithernet connection. So I gave up and finally decided to give this Linux thing a try. Installed Mint within 15min.

The added bonus of installing Linux on the laptop was it suddenly brought my battery back to life. on Windows I MAYBE got 30min out of a full charge. On Linux with a WM like Niri it’s now a few hours. Linux also made me fall in love with the PC again. Now I’m on NixOS and i just love configuring my system or doing more dev work with ease thanks to nixshells.

yeah I’m not sure how it works in the US if you take the severance you forfeit unemployment but with the way the tech sector currently is I would be in favor of taking the unemployment instead because god damn is it rough out there.

Also not to knock Oracle employees but that place doesn’t have the most glowing reputation for “quality”. that right there might hinder their job search. Unless they go to Amazon. they’ll just hire anyone with a pulse as long as you agree to working on call.

I worked with a guy that used to work at Oracle and he pretty much said the same thing. Essentially if you sneezed anywhere within a 10km radius of Oracles code base (and it didn’t matter which product) you ran the risk of it all crashing down. dudes spent more time talking about how to theoretically fix something as opposed to actually fixing it.

also note that the site https://minerva-archive.org/ isn’t quite there yet as I imagine it’ll take time to get fully going so don’t get hung up if you can’t search/browse for anything.

yeah this isn’t suspicious at all.

I subscribe to TWiT cause I grew up on The Screen Savers and Call for Help and regardless of what people think of him I still like Leo Laporte, the guy is my childhood. Anywho I listen to all their podcasts and I’ll sometimes listen to their weekly Mac one and it is absolutely insane the cult like behavior with these mac fans on this show. Oh they’ll complain about the monitors and everything else but will still continue to defend it all by the end. There is one woman on the show that just rants and raves constantly about the dumb decisions Apple makes but openly admits that she’ll continue to buy their products.

At least on the Windows podcast the one dude will go ham on Microsoft weekly and I feel is pretty much just on the podcast to make fun of them. Then you have the Linux podcast where those guys just make fun of everything and it’s honestly entertaining. Plus they have one guy who is in his 80s on there who is an absolute gem.

to be fair the beauty of Plasma is you can quite literally make it look like anything you want. Want to make it look like windows 98? it’s easily doable. CDE? yup if you want. something like windowmaker? sure thing.

I would suspect with a bit of work and the use of widgets it wouldn’t surprise me if you could make Plasma mimic GNOME.

I’m more concerned that apparently 6 people read that and then not only A. understood it but B. agreed with it.

imho in a weird way cassettes were better/more fun. Like wanting to record a song you like so you’d sit in front of the tape deck for hours on end listening to the radio waiting for that ONE song to come on so you could record it. It would take you hours, maybe even days, to make that mixtape of songs you didn’t own.

Also when I was a kid I had one of those fisher price tape decks that had the microphone attached to it. I wanted to make a mix tape of all my favourite songs from my NES games or games that I would rent (like the Battletoads theme song, or the music from the Batman videogame) so I would pop the game in then hold the microphone up to the TV speaker and record the songs.

yup in the early to mid 10’s every company, startup, etc offshored to India and the drivel that came back was about on par with today’s AI/LLMs. just complete garbage that either needed heavy refactoring or just start over from scratch with competent devs. So seeing all this with AI today I can only think “I’ve seen this episode before”

honestly as much as you can tolerate it. But once you start gaining traction then get off it.

like it or not linkedin and replying to tech bros posts calling them out. eventually a desperate upper manager or cto or ceo will notice and contact me to fix their fuck up. I used to just do contract dev work but I got tired of constantly reading bullshit on linkedin while trying to get work. so I started replying to the bullshit. eventually people seeing my replies figured I knew what I was talking about and would contact me for help. Now I get gigs purely from word of mouth.

as someone who deals directly with these CEOs and their startups/small companies, no it doesn’t surprise me. I deal with them on a daily basis. they’re all collectively idiots that somehow fell into a barrel full of thumbs and came out sucking tits. They learned catch phrases and linkedin buzzwords and have the ability to con investors who are arguably more stupid than the CEOs.

My entire lively hood is based purely off their collective idiocy. they utilize AI/LLM’s for builds, they fire virtually all their senior dev teams, then when things naturally go south they hire me to come in and pay me, honeslty, WAY more than I should be paid to code review their AI slop and tell them how fucked they are. that’s literally my job now. All they know are buzzwords and the ability to throw money at a problem that will then hopefully vanish but it never does.

I’ve had conversations with some of these morons where they’ve openly admitted to me that they “asked chatgpt and it said we should do this and this” so this CEO asking chatgpt for legal advice does not surprise me at all.

What i’ve learned is to get ahead in life all you need to do is abandon all your ethics and morals, learn some catchy buzzwords, and be a complete moron. The world then rewards you for it.

I use this: https://github.com/xddxdd/nix-cachyos-kernel

Word of warning though, if the guy maintaining this decides he doesn’t want to maintain it anymore than you’re boned.

I have my NixOS set up the same way, with the CachyOS kernel and the CachyOS Proton for Steam.

on another machine I have regular Arch but also uses the CachyOS Kernel and I also use the CachyOS repos for that. Honestly it’s CachyOS without all the extra bloat. And that’s my own gripe about CachyOS itself. its’ great, it just comes with a lot of crap attached to it making the install one of the longest out of any distro I’ve ever used. they really need to trim the fat on it.

What I would suggest to people is install Arch with the CachyOS Kernel and Repo. you’ll essentially have CachyOS without all the crap.

yeah last week I tried Nobara again after not using it for several months. wanted the KDE Plasma 6.6 update. nope. GE hadn’t done the monthly sync yet. when is the monthly sync? whenever he feels like it. Sorry I can’t use a distro that’s based on the whims of one guy. don’t get me wrong I like GE, I like his Protons, but Nobara needs a team behind it.

for repacks it’s mixed. some work fine, others not so much. Generally you want to try and install them via Lutris or Heroic Game Launcher. Like the newest Star Trek Voyager game I couldn’t get installed at all. I’m on Arch Linux and tried it via Lutris. The fitgirl repack just doesn’t complete the install for whatever reason. I think I just need to fiddle around with different proton versions but I got tired of dealing with it.

if you talk to it long enough it will tell you to do stupid shit.

Every time an LLM responds it reads the entire conversation over. from original prompt to last entry, just constantly reading the entire log over and over everytime you add something new. So after awhile, a long while, it’ll “break down”. Hallucinations will be come common, context will get jumbled up, it’ll sort of degrade over time because it has to re-read everything over and over so it will naturally fuck up.

It’s like if you were reading a book and every time you read a new sentence you had to go back and start the book over. every time. after awhile you’d likely lose context, start messing stuff up in the story, etc. this is what happens to LLMs.

So for cases like this or others where you read stories about AI telling people to do weird or stupid shit chances are the person using the LLM has been talking to it for A LONG TIME at that point. It was even worse on the previous versions of GPT where if you hit a limit on the free tier it would just drop you down to the previous model thus the further likely hood of hallucinations.

there are a couple youtube channels I recently discovered that do just that. take REALLY old computers and parts and try to make them semi-viable for modern computing. and I’m talking stuff that is easily nearly 30+ years old.

BoomerTec and Action Retro. BoomerTec I really like as he’ll just pick up random old PCs and explain all the parts inside and even give a history on them. His vids are like really awesome relaxing sunday morning watches. He even finds FOSS stuff that will still work on really old pcs. because of his channel I even discovered forks of firefox that are still actively developed for 32bit or community builds of Windows XP that are still updated today. For example his recent vid he bought a PC from 1998 off Ebay and got Firefox, Photoshop, and OpenOffice working on it. even games.

Action Retro pretty much does the same thing but with a focus on Linux. He’s done videos of taking like old Compaqs from the 90s and getting linux running on them. Really impressive stuff.

Veronica Explains is also good for this. Her video of taking old chromebooks and getting linux working on them is very detailed and thorough. Extremely easy to follow even for first timers. Also what I like about Veronica Explains is her videos remind me of old TechTV Screen Savers and Call for Help.

this is like text book definition of Anthropic. they ONCE had a great LLM, it was reliable, great solutions, Claude Code was pretty good.

now? it’s all garbage. all of it. Sonnet 4.6 hasn’t improved a damn thing. If you use Code you’re literally shooting yourself in the foot now.

All it knows how to do now is hallucinate. that’s it. They should pivot Claude to being a creative writing LLM because man it’s FANTASTIC at making stuff up and making it sound believable.

They should have died the hero.