These things go in cycles. I remember when “Fedora Core” — they dropped the “Core” part of the name — was the cool new distro. I remember when Ubuntu was the cool new distro. Just ignore it and play around with distros until you find one you like.

In my opinion, new users should use a very popular distro so they have documentation and message boards. After a few years, you get your legs under you. At that point, start distro hopping using weird desktop environments. Then, someday, you get a lot of experience and use a very popular distro because software is a tool and you don’t care. (If something has buzz, I throw it in a VM and go “Huh, that’s interesting.”)

It’s sort of like how the target audience for Nike Air Monarchs is people buying their first pair of Nike Airs and dads who aren’t trying to hear the word “colorway” and just want some shoes.

Very rude to call Elon Musk “chemical sludge” even if that’s basically what he is nowadays.

I was in New Mexico recently and Google Maps gave me a route from Bandelier National Monument to Santa Fe that included a “shortcut” through the Los Alamos National Laboratory campus. I got to meet a security guard.

So, yes. I would say I have experienced this.

I had to move from a dorm to another dorm once and “borrowed” a grocery cart because I had like 12¢ in my checking account and had to just push all my shit in a grocery cart on a major city’s downtown sidewalks on a business day.

I imagine they assumed readers of PV Magazine would be photovoltaics enthusiasts.

Meta should probably never be blamed for innovating when all they do is steal ideas from potential competitors and crudely duct tape them onto existing products. Instagram was once a useful, good app and now it’s 80% features from Snapchat and TikTok and you maybe see a friend’s post a week late.

I think it should be 16 or so. If you can wreck my car, you should be able to vote.

Multiple electronics stores caught on fire. I doubt Mossad found a specific box that said “To: terrorists” on it and only rigged those pagers. They just don’t care about killing civilians.

Because the U.S. government gave them $6.6 billion to do it under the CHIPS Act: https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-wins-66-bln-us-subsidy-arizona-chip-production-2024-04-08/

With TSMC, it’s insurance against China invading Taiwan but Intel (and probably everyone else) got a load of subsidies too. After the chip shortage during the pandemic and Russia invading Ukraine, chip production became a national security issue.

We lived in a house where the previous owners had it exorcised and I’ve never slept better. I’d take living in a cursed/haunted house over a shitty roommate any day.

I had my suspicions before but the moment I realized for certain Elon Musk couldn’t run a software company was when he judged people by lines of code written.

You make a good point about using it for documentation and learning. That’s a pretty good use case. I just wouldn’t want young developers to use it for code completion any more than I’d want college sophomores to use it for writing essays. Professors don’t have you write essays because they like reading essays. Sometimes, doing a task manually is the point of the assignment.

If I was still in a senior dev position, I’d ban AI code assistants for anyone with less than around 10 years experience. It’s a time saver if you can read code almost as fluently as you can read your own native language but even besides the A.I. code introducing bugs, it’s often not the most efficient way. It’s only useful if you can tell that at a glance and reject its suggestions as much as you accept them.

Which, honestly, is how I was when I was first starting out as a developer. I thought I was hot shit and contributing and I was taking half a day to do tasks an experienced developer could do in minutes. Generative AI is a new developer: irrationally confident, not actually saving time, and rarely doing things the best way.

Probably Janelle Monae - Archandroid. I love Afrofutrist funk like (Parliament-Funkadelic). It appeals to my 2 identities as a space nerd and the funkiest of the funky. Archandroid was sort of the peak of her sticking close to that genre. (Her three early works called the Metropolis Saga — Metropolis, an EP, Archandroid, and The Electric Lady — form a whole story.) The albums have multiple Suites like classical works so the themes change even within the albums. But Archandroid is my favorite part. And you can totally nerd out on it forever and still find new things.

As there’s no responses, I’ll offer that my friends’ kids in dense parts of NYC, LA, SF, DC, etc. do all those activities. (Maybe the ones in LA don’t go sit by the LA “river.”) There’s usually loads of neighborhood parks and less formal places in cities where kids play (like playing soccer in an alley). And I know my friends in urban centers have their kids in just as many organized sports leagues as my friends who live in the suburbs. (It might actually be easier on the parents in the cities because my suburban friends are like youth sports taxi services every weekend whereas the ones in NYC have enough population density where the league is in the neighborhood.)

So, my impression (from the parents’ childless friend’s side) is that kids, like Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs, find a way. They’ll play hide and seek in a desert and try to hide behind tumbleweeds.

Again, sorry if I’m talking out of turn but this is Lemmy and there were no responses yet so I thought I’d toss in what I’ve seen as an adult. Gotta feed the content maw until the Fediverse grows up to be an uncontrollable beast.

For some reason, seeing a Prada logo on the side of a train car is the thing about the video that surprised me the most. I was like, “Oh, you can do backflips on a bike on a moving train? That’s neat. Wait, why the fuck is Prada involved?”

For a long time — like probably into the 2000s — LSU’s Tiger Stadium had dorm rooms because when Huey Long couldn’t get funding approved for a football stadium, he got money for dorms approved and built one dorm in the shape of a football stadium.

Anything Elon Musk can track is probably a security risk until he stops being the most divorced person to ever exist.

Laziness is the number one skill anyone innovative should have. Whoever invented the wheel definitely didn’t do it because they liked work. It was because they hated it knew there had to be a better way.

So, what we really need is lazier inventors. Only then will we get lazier robots.

This is ancient history and will probably make me sound older than dirt but when Ubuntu first came out, it felt so easy to install and use. I don’t know that any of the innovations were wholly theirs as other distros were trying the same stuff. But it was the first distro I used that really tried to make it all easy and it felt like a complete OS.

Fedora Core was doing the same stuff and now, we have tons of tools but whether you like it today or not, the early Ubuntu releases were like, “Holy shit. I can partition from the Live CD? What is this witchcraft?” Debian obviously was the core project but little niceties were rare on Linux back then. I did want to install multimedia codecs when I was a teen. I did need guidance and documentation.

Not defending Snaps or whatever here but early Ubuntu was user-friendly and made it easy to transition off Windows ME or whatever was dominant and shitty back then.

A separate shoutout to Chrunchbang for customization and minimalism. That was probably the distro that got me hardcore hooked on Linux. I had enough experience at that point to not need hand holding but it was cool out of the box.