I’ve heard people say things along the lines of “the Linux revolution never happened”.

Utterly false. Linux is, by a huuuuuuge margin, the most popular OS kernel in the world. It’s the most popular kernel for mobile phones. It’s the most popular kernel for servers. It’s the most popular kernel for SBCs. It may be the most popular kernel for embedded applications, but it’s hard to know that. The only place it’s not the most popular kernel is desktops/laptops.

You wouldn’t duplicate a car.

Can you imagine your grandparents trying to use Linux and then looking stuff up on their own and then doing something wrong because they don’t know what distro they’re on? Nightmare.

My mom is in no way technically inclined. Quite the opposite in fact. (She’s in her seventies, so it’s understandable.) She’s been using Ubuntu since 2015. My dad used to try to switch her back to Windows once in a while, and she’d yell at him that she hated it, then he’d switch her back. My dad finally came around a couple years ago after getting a Steam Deck, and now he uses Fedora.

Funnily enough, since Ubuntu and Fedora both use Gnome, they have the same interface. I also use Fedora and Bazzite. All of these OSes use Gnome. They all have the same interface (when Bazzite is in Desktop Mode).

So, really, I don’t know what you’re on about.

It works exactly like a piglin. You toss Microsoft some gold, and maybe they’ll give you the right setting.

Literally everything? Hardly anything requires a terminal these days. The only reason tutorials tell you to use a terminal is because they don’t know what GUI you’re using. You can usually do the same thing in the GUI.

This is called a PD Trigger or a PD Emulator. They come in adapters too with a female USB C port and are only a few inches long.

Like this:

I’ve used several of them before. They’re super useful.

Yep. When I was a cashier in a grocery store, I had every code memorized except some of the less popular bulk nuts. A human cashier is way faster than a self checkout.

I can’t answer that for you. I’ll tell you, I don’t think a computer science degree is a waste.

I live in California, so any place that sells alcohol needs at least one real cashier. A lot of places took that “at least one” to be an upper limit, not a lower one. For a while there, going into Albertsons was a nightmare. Twenty minutes shopping, another twenty waiting to check out because everybody had alcohol.

Any place that is replacing junior devs with AI is probably going to really regret it when they have no senior devs in a few years. Being a junior dev in a team is kind of like an apprenticeship. You learn the trade, but you also learn the shop. Then when the senior dev moves on, you have all that knowledge and can step into the role of senior dev. If a team decides to not have junior devs anymore, then they’ll have no one to take over when a senior dev leaves.

So the answer is yes, it is already replacing junior devs, but that’s only because management hasn’t learned how bad of an idea that is yet. Ultimately, it will cost them more through losing foundational team knowledge.

You also have to hold an AI’s hand the entire way through coding something, whereas you can kind of just let a junior dev go do their own thing, and eventually they’ll probably get it right. An AI “agent” tries to hold its own hand, but that doesn’t seem to work out usually when I’ve tried it. It starts making changes that are really bad, then just seems to always double down and eventually make a huge mess.

Yeah, that’s probably true. Remember how all the execs decided to replace cashiers with robots, then the stores started losing money because a. it made stealing a lot easier and b. people would avoid stores that only had self-checkout robots and never had anyone to help you because a robot doesn’t know where the flour is. Now the self checkouts are being decommissioned and we’re going back to regular human cashiers. It turns out cashiers do more than just scan barcodes. But, upper management didn’t get to where they are by being smart.

I’ve been a professional software developer for over two decades. There is zero chance my job will get taken by an AI any time soon. Anyone who thinks my job is to write code doesn’t understand my job. That’s like saying a bus driver’s job is to turn a steering wheel.

My job is to turn vague ideas and nondescript feelings into APIs and (sometimes) UIs, then turn those into specs, then split those into tasks, then sometimes I’ll write the code for them and sometimes someone else does. About 90% of my time is turning ideas into plans, and about 10% of my time is turning those plans into code.

When I was young and was a junior engineer, my job was more to receive the specs from the senior engineers and turn that into code, but even then, I was still designing my own stuff. Maybe more like 40/60 time instead of 90/10.

Now that I’m a grizzled old man forged in the fires of task management software, I’m doing almost all of the design work myself. I manage a project that has about 250,000 lines of code. An AI isn’t going to be able to build new features into that, let alone decide which features to build in the first place.

What would it even mean to “sell” Canada? Whatever deal they make, the US could just back out of once Canada became a state, and Canada wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. It’s a non-sensical idea.

Selling territories makes sense, but selling your own sovereignty does not.

I didn’t say the code didn’t work. I said it was dog shit. Dog shit code can still work, but it will have problems. What it produced looks like an intern wrote it. Nothing against interns, they’re just not gonna be able to write production quality code.

It’s also really unsettling to ask it about my own libraries and have it answer questions about them. It was trained on my code, and I just feel disgusted about that. Like, whatever, they’re not breaking the rules of the license, but it’s still disconcerting to know that they could plagiarize a bunch of my code if someone asked the right prompt.

(And for anyone thinking it, yes, I see the joke about how it was my bad code that it trained on. Funny enough, some of the code I know was in its training data is code I wrote when I was 19, and yeah, it is bad code.)

I honestly don’t see a way out of this other than a war against the fascists. Something like the American civil war where the racists got their asses thoroughly beaten, or WWII, where the Nazis got absolutely crushed. I feel like it’s just one of those things that pops up once in a while. Basically, fascists are the herpes of society.

Why the fuck would anyone listen to what a CEO has to say about education? Or, really anything for that matter?

I meant more like the one instance, rather than the software.

No, because I can’t see anyone’s posts outside of Bluesky.

Sometimes I forget there’s even a homepage, after months of never seeing it. Then I’ll need to login or something and see it and be like, “wtf is this? Did I go to the wrong website?”

Legitimately, no. I tried to use it to write code and the code it wrote was dog shit. I tried to use it to write an article and the article it wrote was dog shit. I tried to use it to generate a logo and the logo it generated was both dog shit and raster graphic, so I wouldn’t even have been able to use it.

It’s good at answering some simple things, but sometimes even gets that wrong. It’s like an extremely confident but undeniably stupid friend.

Oh, actually it did do something right. I asked it to help flesh out an idea and turn it into an outline, and it was pretty good at that. So I guess for going from idea to outline and maybe outline to first draft, it’s ok.