• 4 Posts
  • 73 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Yes, it’s possible. Some things might be challenging, like keeping the system up to date without the user having access to an app repository, but it’s possible e.g. by running a script as a cron job.

    Whether it’s a good idea is harder to say. Linux distributions for phones are not especially mature and polished compared to desktop Linux. You might get better advice if you explain why you want to do this and who the intended user is.





  • I had an inverse experience after an adult beverage or two and talking to someone about a third party’s script they found unsatisfactory. It went about like this:

    Zak: filename.py sucks

    Claude: What’s wrong with it? Bugs? Code quality? Features?

    Zak: yes

    Claude rewrote it, claiming it had “multiple issues”. It found and corrected a major bug, added error handling, and improved command line argument handling.


  • A senior engineer obviously needs (and knows how to handle) considerably more access to their workstation and company IT infrastructure than the average employee. On the other hand, I’ve occasionally read complaints from IT security types about engineers being way too eager to install sketchy stuff.

    There’s some truth to those complaints. I might need to try out several libraries and tools to see what works best for a certain use case. Is that new one with 15 stars on Github actually safe? Are all of its dependencies? How many developers perform a task like that in a sandbox? How many of those perform a thorough audit before taking it out of the sandbox?


  • A useful video would be a bunch of people beating on stuff (off-screen or in an extended cut) to figure out what’s actually easy and reliable for beginners, then presenting that information. It would get approximately 237 views, which is roughly a million fewer than the linked video has at this time.

    What succeeds on Youtube is entertainment first and information a distant second. A video where everyone sat down in a quiet environment with no pressure, installed a reasonable Linux distribution, and had a smooth experience wouldn’t be very entertaining.


  • Why?

    It makes sense to try to give users an idea of how robust a project is, but the exact details of the tools involved in its creation rarely add much to that. It gets a little weird with LLMs because they allow someone with no programming skill to create software that appears to work, which ought to be disclosed; “I don’t know what I’m doing and I asked a robot to make this” does indicate unreliable code. A skilled developer having an LLM fill in some extra test cases, on the other hand can only make the project more robust.


  • I’ve used several iterations of Gnome, several iterations of KDE, Mate, Cinnamon, Hyprland, XFCE, LXDE, Fluxbox, and several other things I can’t be bothered to remember. I can be productive on any of them given some time to set them up.

    I do have preferences though, and I like KDE on a laptop/desktop and Gnome on a tablet. I just wish Gnome would do something about its horrid onscreen keyboard.