(My original reply seems to have disappeared so redoing it)

Four years and a little over five months, but yes, this wasn't an appropriate criticism.

A better one would have been "They set up all this shit and didn't foresee the risks, and now we have a fascist in office salivating at the chance to abuse this information?"

The only thing you need is money, which Meta has. Hire good researchers and give them plenty of budget for hardware.

Hi person that uses AI, I have been asked an interview question. I happen to know that the answer is 42. What question do I ask my LLM to make it spit out the correct answer?

p.s. Please answer quick, I only have 10 minutes left in the interview!

I think we've finally found out what Phase 2 is.

???

Good. I need some underpants!

The post at the top of the thread was about "AI". The following posts were about AI. Don't be blinded by the current hype into thinking that;s the whole picture. Just because other developments get less press doesn't mean they aren't happening and aren't important. In the field of biochem, most AI is *related* to LLMs, but is significantly different.

LLMs are not equivalent to AIs, they are a subset. Don't take LLMs as a complete model of the capabilities of AIs.

Four years and a little over five months, but yes, this wasn't an appropriate criticism.

A better one would have been "They set up all this shit and didn't foresee the risks, and now we have a fascist in office salivating at the chance to abuse this information?"

Wi-Fi isn't exactly a solved problem under Linux either. You basically have a tiny number of chipsets supported by Linux itself, those made by Intel and one or two others (so, thankfully, the ones likely to be built into your computer) - but it all goes south the moment you try to use something less likely to come with your motherboard. Very often if a driver is available at all, it needs to be compiled from source and doesn't work with more recent kernels.

I think the FOSS community might do themselves some favors by working together on a common strategy to support Wi-Fi devices. Maybe device drivers in general (at a low level) but definitely Wi-Fi.

Critically though Mathematics is the only area in which it's defined that way. Science in general does not, and more or less uses sphere where "ball" might otherwise be used - for example, you'll find planets described as spheres, not balls.

FWIW I meant MATE, not Mint. But the Mint project begat MATE, so that's probably why my early morning brain conflated the two.

It's probably a good sign I did because it shows the MATE/Mint people are not shoving the branding in your face the same way GNOME and KDE do! At least that's my excuse!

And yes, the early SystemD releases didn't help its rep, but it's stable now and it's saved my butt multiple times. The "X is old" stuff is just insane, we're literally using an OS that's a largely compatible clone of something written in the early 1970s. And as I wrote elsewhere, X11 is arguably one the most far sighted display projects ever created in the history of computing, period. That we're throwing it out because most of the maintainers didn't understand it is absurd.

Yes. I went to check out buying an Apple recently, after an appointment with my ophthalmologist. I wanted a computer that would run reasonably with voice control, as the ads suggested was possible. I decided not to, or at least to wait another year.

Now I have no idea how many people are affected this way, but that is a sign that the deficiencies have caused at least *some* damage to Apple.

The AI to develop drugs is a fantasy, because the data is too corrupt. There already exist AIs that aid in suggesting possibilities, and they will improve, but one that would do the development cycle would require cleaner data (or better robots).

"Don't be evil" has not been rescinded, it's still in the employee handbook.

I ended up switching to Debian, which is more or less removing all the Ubuntu-ness from Ubuntu. The only major issue I've found is that Debian's installer is pretty crude compared to Ubuntu's and requires a lot of hand holding. For me, as a 50+ year old nerd, that's not an issue, but it makes it harder to recommend to others in an age where people don't use open, non-spyware, social media networks "because they have to pick a server". (Trump didn't win because people didn't have the ability to know what he is, Trump won because the entire world is objectively stupider than it was 20 years ago. The entire world, not any specific generation, before anyone gets offended.)

I see everyone plugging XFCE so I'll put in a quick mention for Mint desktop, which is basically what GNOME was before it went to crap. I have no idea what Mint's long term plans are for Wayland but thus far I've heard nothing suggesting they're desperate to switch to it - there's a project to support it, but last I heard it's still experimental. If they do switch rather than co-support, hopefully it'll be forked as it does seem to have the kind of community that would have a high proportion of X11 users. The problem for us is probably going to be the various "big" self-contained projects like LibreOffice or even Java, and the risks they'll drop X11 support too.

I cannot believe that SystemD, which was actually needed as Sys V Init was awful, is the one attracting the controversy, despite it slotting into any existing distribution and requiring no additional support, but Wayland gets boosted, and not just boosted, but boosted usually by Slashdot's old farts. Maybe there's a way to persuade Poettering to lead the Wayland project, as I suspect 99% of it is a personality conflict thing.

They don't need to go to court, all they need to do is to pass legislation (and maybe override a veto). They don't really even need to take powers back from the president, just more clearly define what constitutes an "emergency". Trump's most egregious actions are justified under statutes that grant him exceptional emergency powers -- which makes sense. When an emergency happens you want the executive to be able to respond quickly, and Congress is never fast. But those statutes assume that the president will only declare an emergency when there's actually an emergency because. Until now that hasn't been an unreasonable assumption.

But right now the GOP controls Congress, and the GOP is utterly subservient to Trump. They're not going to stand up to him. In the 2026 election this is likely to change, but probably only in the House, while the Senate will remain under GOP control, so Congress will still not stand up to Trump.

That said, it's increasingly looking like the courts will step in and declare that Congress is not allowed to abdicate its responsibility. There are existing Supreme Court precedents that establish that Congress is not permitted to delegate its authority to the executive. Congress can allow the executive to define detailed regulations after Congress defines the broad strokes, but they can't simply turn whole chunks of their constitutional authority over to the executive, even if they want to. Given the makeup of the current Supreme Court this is less certain than we would like, but I think it will go the right way.