A teacher has a potential answer for dealing with AI-poisoned students. An actually hopeful read, for once!

Semi-topical, there’s a new Local 58 and even the moon demon hates AI, I guess.

I see people recommending Debian but you also said you enjoy tinkering, so I’d recommend SpiralLinux. It’s basically Debian but it uses BTRFS so you can roll back to a previous snapshot if you break something. I don’t think Spiral has updated to Trixie yet so you’d need to manually upgrade but that’s not too big a hassle if you do it immediately.

So the NVIDIA graphics card is not as big of an issue as it would have been even five years ago. Just use the proprietary drivers. And for my money, Linux Mint is the best distro for beginners, hands-down. You never have to touch the command line and everything just works.

I second this, with the addition that you can also use DistroSea to test-drive distros in your browser. Also, DistroWatch has a search that you can filter by “Beginners” to find some that might be easier.

A friend of mine is working on an internal AI chatbot at their company, so that the Least-Productive Team will have something to answer the same 5 questions that they keep asking to Friend’s (extremely productive) team, instead of wasting Friend et al’s time.

So I guess that’s the one use case of AI bots: to dangle keys in front of MBAs who are too stupid to do their own jobs. Which explains everything, really.

California is not the center of the universe, but in the US, a fair amount of companies have to tailor their practices to accommodate California law, because A) it’s so weird a lot of the time, and B) California is huge and rich, so there’s a lot of business to be had. It just makes sense to accommodate the outlier. What happens in California has knock-on effects for the rest of the country, and occasionally the rest of the world; case in point, the recent systemd debacle. It’s not certain that they added the age thing in response to the California law specifically, but it was certainly a factor.

A slightly more positive way of putting this is “choosing the set of problems you want to deal with.” I vastly prefer the problems that Linux hands me over the problems with Windows.

Every time I hear about people using chatGPT as a therapist, I want to scream

“Could a depressed person do THIS?” [brandishes Harry Potter fanfic]

Apparently he’s a Quaker, so maybe that’s how the euthanasia stance can pass muster. But Quakerism might also make even less sense with his views on race? I don’t know enough about the reality of Quakerism to say.

Quakers have a history of being anti-racist, but views on stuff like abortion and euthansia cam vary a lot. Quakerism is big on both individual conscience but also social justice and activism. It’s an interesting denomination.

Finally, some good fucking news.

Nearly laughed out loud in a waiting room

There’s a couple new things being worked on; namely, Wayback and Phoenix.

I don’t see what the problem is. It’s a perfectly cromulent word.

If she knew about this list, she’d figure out a way to get herself to the top.

To be clear: there are actually Christians being persecuted or killed for being Christian, just not in the US or anywhere else in the West. The people that Trump and Nicki Minaj are talking about are in Nigeria (and I’m sure Trump would want them deported if they sought asylum in the US, of course). Trump and Nicki both suck but we can at least not make light of religious persecution in other countries, just because Christianity is more dominant here.

I doubt I’m the first one to think of this, but for some reason as I was drifting off to sleep last night, I was thinking about the horrible AI “pop” music that a lot of content farms use in their videos and my brain spat out the phrase Bubblegum Slop. Feel free to use it as you ses fit (or don’t, I ain’t your dad).

I cannot post the picture for obvious reasons, but the CEO of [Company My Friend Works For] has a fancy pair of AI sunglasses he keeps wearing to Teams meetings. Friend got a screenshot of it and the guy looks like, as they say in France, “a total fucking douchebag.”

You’re probably right