Hm… Come to think of it…
Fact #1: Microsoft claims their codebase is now 30% AI-generated.
Fact #2: US courts are in pretty unanimous agreement that AI generated material cannot be copyrighted.
So… What percentage of AI-generated code does Microslop need to reach before their software copyrights become unenforceable?
Never get high on your own supply. First rule of being a slop dealer.
I heard once that Microsoft employees are not allowed to use Teams to communicate on the job. Not sure why. Probably because it sucks or is terribly insecure.
Who would join a microsoft-centric discord?
Microsoft devs, maybe? I hear they’re not allowed to use Teams to communicate at work, for unspecified reasons.
And non-commercial distros?
Honestly, I think Kubuntu is slept on as a beginner’s distro.
Yes, Ubuntu has its issues … but those sorts of issues are really not going to affect a newbie much. And it’s stable, easy to use, KDE defaults will be pretty familiar-feeling for Windows refugees, and it should be relatively easy to find help – 90% of the time, if you just type “how do I _____ in Linux?” into Google Duck Duck Go, the results you find will be perfectly applicable to Ubuntu. Want to install 3rd party software that’s not in their repos? In pretty much any software that offers a Linux version, the Ubuntu-compatible install method is the first one they list.
(Oh, and the installer is literally one click if you just let it do everything in automatic mode. No keyboard needed. The install image boots into a full GUI installer with mouse support, and if you want, all you have to do is click ‘automatic install’ and wait. Once it’s done and reboots, you’re in your new OS.)
Once you become an advanced enough user that you get annoyed by Snap packages or feel like you need more cutting-edge package updates … well, then you should also be advanced enough to do your own distro-hopping.
That’s the tricky part, innit?
A few good options:
A) Set up your backup/restore procedures immediately after setting up your fresh new system. And then immediately test them to see if you can successfully restore, before you’ve done anything important on the new system that you can’t afford to lose. If the restoration completely fails, no biggie. You just have to start over on setting up your fresh new system.
B) Attempt to restore your backup to a different system, not your primary one. You’ll need a second set of hardware to do that, but if you’ve got the hardware lying around, it’s a great way to test your restore procedure. If you’re upgrading your hardware anyway, it could be a good time to do this test – use your backup restoration procedure to move your data to the new hardware. (As an extra bonus, this doesn’t require any downtime on the primary system.)
C) Simulate a complete hard drive failure and replacement by replacing your primary system’s drive(s) with a blank new one. If the backup restoration fails, you should (fingers crossed) be able to just plug the old hard drive back in and everything will go back to how it was before your test.
D) Have multiple backups and multiple restore plans, and just hope to fuck that at least one of them actually works during your testing.
Option A can only be done if you’re proactive about it and do it at the right time.
Options B and C require extra hardware, but are probably the best choice if you have the hardware or can afford it.
And Option D will always have at least a tiny amount of risk associated with it.
Do you know how to transfer the files back if your OS has completely failed?
Verifying the files are there in your backup is only, like 10% of verifying that it’s a real, usable backup.
The important question is: can you successfully restore those files from the backup? Can you successfully put them back where they’re supposed to be after losing your primary copy?
I am looking forward to essentially all Linux desktop users being on Wayland so we can stop acting like it is not already the norm or even pretending that it is not going to happen.
Yeah … about that…
As long as X11 still works and does what I want it to, I’ll keep using it.
(And hopefully, by the time I’m dragged to a new system, kicking and screaming the whole way, Wayland will be fully mature and complete and it will be a painless transition.)
At some point, though, you have to come to terms with the power usage.
One or two modern machines could do everything a dozen shitty old ones do (even if you have to emulates some of them as VMs), and with a lot less power usage than running a dozen shitty old computers.
the question of whether evolutionary pressure on the timescale of human generations can keep up with our technological advancement
As long as people exist who could/would refuse it, and as long as there are enough of them to form a viable breeding population, evolution will bring the species through it.
Waiting for random beneficial mutations usually takes a long, long time. But if the beneficial mutations are already in a population, the population can adapt extremely quickly. If all the individuals without that mutation died off quickly (or at least didn’t produce offspring) then that mutation would be in basically 100% of the population within one generation. A rather smaller generation than the previous ones, sure, but they would have less competition and more room to grow. (Though, thanks to recessive genetics, you’re likely to still see individuals popping up without that beneficial mutation occasionally for a long time to come. But those throwbacks will become more and more rare as time goes on.)
That’s a vast oversimplification, though. Because it’s very unlikely that the ability to resist the temptation of ‘wireheading’ comes down to the presence or absence of a single particular gene.
Since mouse studies have already been done, it would be interesting to do it with a large, long-running experiment on an entire breeding population of mice, to see if there are any mice that are capable of surviving and reproducing under those conditions (and if so, do they show any evidence of evolving to become more resistant?)
That’s what I’ve heard. Completely hearsay, though.