Take your pick from the Linux family tree

Books of Blood haunted my late teenage years

Upskill. I’m not ‘upskilling’ someone, I’m training them.

Would you settle for a single clergyman?

I’ve consistently enjoyed and come back to the following for years:

• “Make it Sweet” by Milkcan (Um Jammer Lammy soundtrack), 35 mins
• Forgotten Worlds arcade OST by Kawamoto Tamayo, ~45 mins

I also like to boot up and listen to the Amiga title music for SWIV and the Mega Drive/Genesis soundtrack of Revenge of Shinobi.

This was also my first Linux distro after having used Sun’s Solaris while at uni. I think I tried out Slack and Suse at around the same time, but stuck with RedHat and related distros for about 6 years.

Why propel spacecraft when we can dream big. Shift the whole planet! Muahaha.

Key Points

• A rocket team reports the first successful detection of Earth’s ambipolar electric field: a weak, planet-wide electric field as fundamental as Earth’s gravity and magnetic fields.
• First hypothesized more than 60 years ago, the ambipolar electric field is a key driver of the “polar wind,” a steady outflow of charged particles into space that occurs above Earth’s poles.
• This electric field lifts charged particles in our upper atmosphere to greater heights than they would otherwise reach and may have shaped our planet’s evolution in ways yet to be explored.

The culture novels, such a good pick!

I played the game back when it originally came out. Like any media based on a book, it was slightly frustrating for a while that the graphics didn’t match the visuals I had imagined whole reading the book. I still have the discs somewhere, might see if I can get it running somehow. I suspect I’ll find the game mechanics to be clunky but today’s standards.

I’m surprised there hasn’t been a movie made yet.

Other people who’ve read it and who I’ve talked with seem to be split over whether the first book is better than the sequels, or the other way around. I prefer the sequels, my wife prefers the original. Do you have a preference?

Game: Super Mario Galaxy
Book: The Rama series, Arthur C Clarke
TV: The West Wing
Movie: The 5th Element

If you’re not using GNU/Hurd are you even trying?

Time to ditch the Guy Fawkes mask for a powdered wig instead

One of the critical differences between FOSS and commercial software is that FOSS projects don’t need to drive sales and consequently also don’t need to immediately jump onto technology trends in order to not look like they’re lagging behind the competition.

What I’ve consistently seen from FOSS over the 30 years I’ve been using it, is that if a technology choice is a good fit for the problem, then it will be adopted into projects where relevant.

I believe that there are use cases where LLM processing is absolutely a good fit, and the projects that need that functionality will use it. What you’re less likely to see is ‘AI’ added to everything, because it isn’t generally a good solution to most problems in it’s current form.

As an aside, you may be less likely to get good faith interaction with your question while using the term ‘luddite’ as it is quite pejorative.