Yep.

There's especially the people who say "you can get a refurbished mini pc for less".

Well cool. That's also not comparable!

Absolutely, and by "meh", it's often "fine" or "adequate". And there's nothing wrong with adequate it is by definition good enough. Would I like a machine that's 3x as fast for half the price and fully open source? Well of course. Do I need one? Well... no. I don't think I've ever been in a situation were one of those would be necessary and a Pi would be inadequate.

I've used NVidia Jetson Orin AGXs, but nothing is comparable to them anyway, even a 5x faster pi wouldn't match it.

It's a real pity that the ARM world is such a shitshow compared to the x86 world, which is funny to say. Broadly speaking the first and last time I have interaction with the vendor is when I buy it and the hardware will run for decades if it lasts that long with quite possibly excellent support across the board.

You still need a working Raspberry pi to do that :)

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fobsolescence.wixsite.c...

I have indeed now keyed a few basic programs in at boot time (well for the emulator not the pi obviously!). It's amazingly good fun and I then understood why octal rather than hex has such pride of place in unix and C.

My advice is to not be a cuck.

My advice is not to use weird dated MAGA terms.

The raspi people made it harder for you to tinker with your own hardware

Yeah generally I don't like this. On the other hand we now have massive widespread acceptance of online scamming where legally sound companies get to cream off the scam profits so basically encourage them.

This puts manufacturers between a rock and a hard place. If the channels are filled with broken re-badged raspi's that is in the world as it is right now Raspberry Pi's problem. And RasPi customer's problem. So what would you have them do? Just shrug and say "lol sux to be u"? In this case 99.999% of their customers will never change the RAM.

They've been customer-unfriendly from the beginning, when they were selling boards with dumb mistakes that ruined them for many purposes (remember raspi A USB fails? remember the MANY power supply failures?

And yet I've been happily using them for various tasks for years. Bugs or design flaws aren't customer hostility and it's dumb to conflate them.

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

Have they chucked out that steaming pile of crap that is SurfaceFlinger yet?

Everyone loves to say "BuT x11 iS sO bAd" and then always build something that is worse. See also: Wayland.

Yes. That Agile approach has really never worked.

Kind of depends if you mean Agile(tm) or agile-small-a.

This isn't really the generic defense of "if your scrum isn't working, you're doing it wrong/it's not scrum or a true scotsman". After all, scrum is a bunch of large sweaty men (or women) all pushing against each other scrabbling after a moving target and then often just collapses in a mess. Kind of like Agile-scrum so maybe it's well named...

But really agile is an attempt to capture how small teams work on smaller projects with good people on large projects with mediocre people. Naturally it never works because (a) the teams are big and (b) the people are mediocre. It's meant to also offset some of the worst excesses of insane project management by doing things differently but unfortunately if you have an insane project manager who ran things in a crazy and unproductive way they are not going to become not crazy with a new framework of rules.

So in conclusion: agile is great if you can do it, but you can't do it for exactly the reasons why you need it in the first place. It is I believe therefore doomed by its very definition.

Wait, what's the gag?

I mean I would say it's user friendly but very very picky about its friends! I think it's good, but I would not say it's good for general use exactly.

As a far left radical cat hating bike riding commie hippie, I'd dearly love to increase everyone's fuel costs. Unfortunately it appears Trump got in on the act first so there isn't much left for me to do.

Jesus christ, a quiz and a slide show? Are they trying to turn reading a book into a parody of a bad educational experience??

When reading Tacitus, I'd like a tool that helps decipher Roman naming conventions that continuously evolved in the early AD years.

That's called a "translator". Unless you're reading it in the original Latin, that's what a good translator will do in footnotes. It even exits in English. Take "The life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman". Written in 1760, so modern English and so perfectly readable... in theory.

Except it's basically wall to wall slang, memes and pop culture references in a kind of post-modern (predating modernist!) ramble which makes it basically unintelligible without more footnotes than the entire book has text.

Hmm. I don't know about that. If an AI distilled all of Robert Jordan's or RA Salvator's or Brandon Sanderson's books I think AI could most certainly produce another short book that sounded like the individual author

Well that's the failure right there: you cannot produce a short anything in Robert Jordan's style ;)

Digs at Jordan aside, I think an LLM could probably do a reasonable job at small scales: if you were to pluck out a random paragraph from the author vs the LLM it could do a reasonable job of aping the general word choice and structure.

I'll admit I've not read much AI generated text (because it gets boring to read real fast) but have red a lot of code. It works, but is often long winded, pretentious, overblown, poorly structured and mises the underlying points. I can't imagine the writing is much better.

Writing style is so much more than just paragraphs pasted together.

So I ask you (everybody): Is anything good?

FVWM obviously.

But joking aside: I have FVWM because I like it. I regularly use machines with XFCE on and its absolutely fine, perfectly usable. Not sure if I've used KDE recently but my recollection was it was also fine, but by default a little cluttered and also a little heavy. I used LXDE on raspberry pi's and it was fine.

I try gnome every so often because it's often there and frankly it's weird and wonky. Every time I end up switching it over to something else. With XFCE, unless the machine is my daily driver I would not bother, and even then I take a while to get round to it. I keep bumping into GNOMEisms like the file dialog, and it's frankly bad. This guy explained it well:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwoltman.com%2Fgnome-bad%2F...

I stumbled across the one in the section "Child Window Behavior is Incomprehensible" myself and after a stream of WTF I eventually found that article.

And on top of all the weirdness and lack of functionality it's a massive hog.

Uh huh, you "hired trump" Anna he's doing what you told him to do.

Did you hire him to lower prices? Said he would and hasn't.

Did you hire him to "close the border"? Are you really stupid enough to think he has? I mean yes you still believe things a pathological liar tells you so you are clearly a complete idiot. But humour me, I would like you to rationalise away the net migration statistics:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdata.worldbank.org%2Find...

In the real world, not fantasy trump land, net migration cratered in 2020, due to COVID. It first sharply again in 2021 and 2022, but under Biden didn't return to the same level and started to decrease YOY. Anna in trump's first year in it dropped by the same amount as Biden's last year.

So Trump has been no more effective than Biden, but yet you love trump for things he hasn't done. Anyway please rationalize that away including excuses about how it's everyone else who's the really racists really because if you shout that hard enough you might just believe it. We won't though.