Side thought/my own ramblings here: Has there ever been hosting where the information is scattered across the world rather than one localized spot? That seems like it might be helpful, but I honestly don’t know enough about site hosting

In a certain sense we are using a system like this, due to federation. I don’t think the exact same model would work well for Wikipedia, but it could try something similar.

“What I can tell you is that over the years, conservatives, libertarians, were just pushed out,” Sanger said. “There is a whole…army of administrators, hundreds of them, who are constantly blocking people…that they have ideological disagreements with.”

“Oh noes, people in Wokepedia aren’t willing to accept my opinion that gravity doesn’t work on Fridays!”

“Wikipedia is losing its objectivity @jimmy_wales,” Musk posted in 2022.

If you’re really, really invested on 2+2 being five, then 2+2=4 becomes “subjective”.

In my opinion Wikipedia being hosted in USA is a liability. Or even being hosted in a single place, whichever it is.

If a megacorporation could profit nine zillions and fifty dollars, and instead it’s profiting only nine zillions, its shareholders are already screeching at the CEO “YOU INCOMPETENT FOOL, YOU’RE ROBBING US FIFTY DOLLARS!”.

The answer is simple: Linux falls behind Windows when it comes to hardware support and software compatibility.

And as usual for simple answers, it’s dumb and assumptive and wrong.

The core issue is cost of switch: learning new things takes time and effort. This would still apply if Linux and Windows had equivalent hard/software support.

For contrast, consider language learning. No language is so hard you won’t see a bunch of 6yos speaking it; and yet a lot of adult L2/L3+ learners fail to go past the basics.

The slippery slope of dual-booting

Dual boot is not a “slippery slope”. It’s simply paying that cost in instalments vs. paying it all at once.

And if the user is not willing to pay that price, they’re likely to fail migrating even without dual boot. They’ll instead struggle frenetically with Linux for a week, burn out, and say “I got shit to do with my computer, I’m not some basement dweller to waste time with this shit”.

Some users may also believe that Linux is inherently more complex than Windows, so instead of even attempting to take a deep dive into the system, people will try to follow the path of least resistance, by making the transition less costly and less scary by providing a safety net of familiarity.

Emphasis mine. The author is being assumptive, again. About something they cannot reliably know: what others “believe”.

This approach seems wise and therefore appealing because it reduces the perceived cost of switching, but in reality, it’s a form of procrastination

Yeah, just like poor people “procrastinate” their debts. It’s all laziness. /s

…I’m being cheeky to highlight something here: doing things slowly is not procrastination, as long as you do them.

And believe me

Stopped reading here. If your arguments don’t hold merit on themselves, calling the reader gullible through a “chrust me lol lmao” won’t change much.

If you want to encourage someone to migrate consider tutoring them. Just having someone patient to help you out is a godsend.

Even then, for cloud storage; cryptography is an additional layer of protection, but all this data should be kept offline as much as reasonably possible.

It’s a feature when you use it, but a bug when your competitors do it.

If I were in charge of the defence department of a government, there’s no way I’d ever allow closed source software to even touch machines with sensitive data. Or even pre-compiled software. Because the problem is not what you see, like personnel; it’s what you don’t, like bribery and backdoors.

Let alone use “cloud” computing. Come on… it’s someone else’s computer.

Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Pokémon Emerald, and Fire Emblem.

Turn-based makes awful phone controls more bearable, and since those games are RPGs it’s easier to pause and resume without breaking the “flow” of the game.

Fuck yeah! I mean, I already knew it (since… well, where’s Haunted Chocolatier?*), but it’s nice to see confirmation.

*either way it’s a win in my book.

My first “test” was Conectiva. I lasted a few days with it, then ditched it. (I think this was in 2002? Conectiva would eventually merge with Mandrake.)

Then a few years later I went for Kurumin. It was a local Knoppix derivative, focusing on ease of use. Eventually Ubuntu became popular enough that Kurumin’s maintainer saw no reason to continue the project.

Frankly, based on what people in this thread are saying, the developer is unable to follow proper procedures to submit code. I personally would not trust someone like this.

That is only possible thanks to ““a very involved community””; he noted that most of the edits on the ArchWiki were made by contributors outside the maintenance team.

there were some basic rules that should be followed, starting with ““assume good faith””.

The second rule, he said, is ““when in doubt, discuss changes with others before making a hasty decision””.

they wanted to avoid edit wars: ““the worst thing that can happen on a wiki is a few people just reverting their changes after each other””.

The team tries to encourage contributors to not only make one change, but to learn the guidelines and keep contributing—and then help teach others the guidelines.

I think his points can be summarised as “build a welcoming community, that encourages users to contribute”. It’s solid advice for any wiki, not just distro wikis.

I should apologise - I didn’t catch right off the bat that you were playing along the analogy.

Distro choice matters less than it looks like, and it’s fairly subjective. As long as you stick to a serious and newbie-friendly distro, you should be fine - for example, you could simply keep using Pop!_OS, why change it?

That said, a few distros you might want to try:

• Mint - another newbie-friendly Ubuntu derivative. If you feel like you must try something else, but you don’t want it to be too far from your comfort zone.
• Debian - because it’s the grandfather of Pop!_OS (and Mint); it has some rough edges, but it’ll be a good learning experience. Note Stable tends to stick to really ancient packages.
• Fedora - it’s also newbie-friendly, but from another different family. If you feel like stepping outside your comfort zone.

Also note you can dual boot different Linux distros, just like you’re dual booting Pop!_OS and Windows. Or even multi-boot.

If it is not a parody, the user got a serious answer. And if it is, I’m just playing along ;-)

(If it is a parody, it’s so good that it allows me to actually answer it as if it wasn’t.)

You don’t get it.

I do get it. And that’s why I’m disdainful towards all this “simulated reasoning” babble.

In the past, the brick throwing machine was always failing its target and nowadays it is almost always hitting near its target.

Emphasis mine: that “near” is a sleight of hand.

It doesn’t really matter if it’s hitting “near” or “far”; in both cases someone will need to stop the brick-throwing machine, get into the construction site (as if building a house manually), place the brick in the correct location (as if building a house manually), and then redo operations as usual.

In other words, “hitting near the target” = “failure to hit the target”.

And it’s obvious why it’s wrong; the idea that an auto-builder should throw bricks is silly. It should detect where the brick should be placed, and lay it down gently.

The same thing applies to those large token* models; they won’t reach anywhere close to reasoning, just like a brick-throwing machine won’t reach anywhere close to an automatic house builder.

*I’m calling it “large token model” instead of “large language model” to highlight another thing: those models don’t even model language fully, except in the brain of functionally illiterate tech bros who think language is just a bunch of words. Semantics and pragmatics are core parts of a language; you don’t have language if utterances don’t have meaning or purpose. The nearest of that LLMs do is to plop some mislabelled “semantic supplement” - because it’s a great red herring (if you mislabel something, you’re bound to get suckers confusing it with the real thing, and saying “I dun unrurrstand, they have semantics! Y u say they don’t? I is so confusion… lol lmao”).

It depends on how good you are asking the machine to throw bricks (you need to assume some will miss and correct accordingly).

If the machine relies on you to be an assumer (i.e. to make shit up, like a muppet), there’s already something wrong with it.

Eventually, brick throwing machines will get so good that they will rely on gravitational forces to place the bricks perfectly and auto-build houses.

To be blunt that stinks “wishful thinking” from a distance.

As I implied in the other comment (“Can house construction be partially automated? Certainly. Perhaps even fully. But not through a brick-throwing machine.”), I don’t think reasoning algorithms are impossible; but it’s clear LLMs are not the way to go.

You don’t say.

Imagine for a moment you had a machine that allows you to throw bricks at a certain distance. This shit is useful, specially if you’re a griefer; but even if you aren’t, there are some corner cases for that, like transporting construction material at a distance.

And yet whoever sold you the machine calls it a “house auto-builder”. He tells you that it can help you to build your house. Mmmh.

Can house construction be partially automated? Certainly. Perhaps even fully. But not through a brick-throwing machine.

Of course trying to use the machine for its advertised purpose will go poorly, even if you only delegate brick placement to it (and still build the foundation, add cement etc. manually). You might economise a bit of time when the machine happens to throw a brick in the right place, but you’ll waste a lot of time cleaning broken bricks, or replacing them. But it’s still being sold as a house auto-builder.

But the seller is really, really, really invested on this auto-construction babble. Because his investors gave him money to create auto-construction tools. And he keeps babbling on how “soon” we’re going to get fully auto house building, and how it’s an existential threat to builders and all that babble. So he tweaks the machines to include “simulated building”. All it does is to tweak the force and aim of the machine, so it’s slightly less worse at throwing bricks.

It still does not solve the main problem: you don’t build a house by throwing bricks. You need to place them. But you still have some suckers saying “haha, but it’s a building machine lmao, can you prove it doesn’t build? lol”.

That’s all what “reasoning” LLMs are about.

What’s interesting IMO is that it got the first two and the last two digits right; and this seems rather consistent across attempts with big numbers. It doesn’t “know” how to multiply numbers, but it’s “trying” to output an answer that looks correct.

In other words, it’s “bullshitting” - showing disregard to truth value, but trying to convince you.

It’s completely off-topic, but:

We used to have a rather large sisal fibre mat/rug at home, that Siegfrieda (my cat) used to scratch. However my mum got some hate boner against that mat, and replaced it with an actual rug. That’s when Frieda decided she’d hop onto the sofa and chairs and scratch them.

We bought her a scratching post - and she simply ignored it. I solved the issue by buying two smaller sisal mats, and placing them strategically in places Frieda hangs around. And then slapping her butt every time she used them, for positive behaviour reinforcement (“I’m pet when I scratch it! I should scratch it more!”)

I’m sharing this to highlight it’s also important to recognise each individual cat has preferences, that might not apply to other cats. She wanted a horizontal surface to scratch; so no amount of scratching posts would solve it.

…she doesn’t actually scratch it any more, but I still use this analogy because it’s a light-hearted way to say “bullshit”.