Utah has some weirdness about it but they’re nice and have amazing parks. My culture (New Orleans) is pretty far from Utahn’s but it’s fine. We’re all sincere and nice and don’t expect to be understood. I don’t want to live in Provo and they probably think I’m a shiftless, drunken buffoon (fair; I am that). But nice people enjoy antics here and there. I enjoy people who got all their vitamins and have morals here and there. We have no problem breaking bread.

Class. The news pretends otherwise but material conditions are, if not everything, a lot. There’s no House of Lords where we store our drunken perverts but it’s similar to England.

It gets different the further you are from DC. Money is always involved but no one in Oregon gives a shit what you wear and lots of places in the South and West make folk heroes out of hard working and even rebellious people. (Rebellious in this case can be good resistance or just the worst shit ever.)

Typically with Debian distros, I set security updates to be automatic and I just go in every now and then and update the rest. But I pretty much only use it on servers and Raspberry Pi side projects.

To be clear to people who find this, none of these distros we’re talking about are for massive scale. We’re talking personal stuff, side projects, small businesses, etc. Don’t put Kali Linux on your laptop. It’s made for a specific purpose.

Linode. I don’t trust the parent company but who can you trust? It’s super easy to setup and like $5 a month for a small scale project that isn’t mission critical.

Note: I would never use it for a paid or really important thing. If you expect your Boy Scout group to have 50,000 users one day, it’s not fit for purpose. It’s more than fine for a little league schedule or whatever.

I always go back to Fedora. Different strokes for different folks and I’m definitely not trying to have a “Which distro?!?” conversation. Maybe you have philosophical reasons to hate it. (I do sometimes too.) But that’s my home base.

It’s partly because I learned on WhiteHat/CentOS/RHEL for work. But even today, it’s my stable, baseline distro. They don’t change Gnome or push updates without at least some testing. (I know.) Drivers almost always work. There’s (usually) documentation written by paid professionals. It’s just a good, solid OS that I can make mine without uninstalling shit or worrying it’s unstable.

Debian is perfect for that too, obviously and I’m eternally grateful for Arch’s wiki and community. But for my needs, Fedora strikes a near-perfect balance.

I’d like to think so. When we read 1984 in high school, a friend and I were studying together. I remember saying (in my naïveté), “I loved the book and I get the history but why would you want to be in charge of a place that sucks?” She was like, “You’re just going to have to get used to the fact that a lot of people care about power more than beaches.”

Well, I still think those people are foolish. I’d rather be in charge of my own tiny slice of paradise than rule over some wack ass dictatorship where everyone else is miserable. Not wanting to be in charge is probably the basic pre-requisite for being a benevolent dictator. I like to cook for people and stuff. I’d use my power and wealth to do that.

That being said, I’m a dirtbag. I’d have a cool house somewhere with mountain and ocean views. Probably 3 or 4 beauty queens who also have Ms. Congeniality pageant sashes who are in charge of laughing at my jokes and charming me. One or two rhythmic gymnastics team that delight us all by throwing ribbons to each other with their feet. (Other apparatuses are cool too. Hula hoop. Clubs. Ball. Variety is the spice of life.)

Thank you. I was trying to remember and my brain was like, “Not emu. What’s the ratite from S. America called again? Fuck! I just saw a whole science YouTube video about ratite evolution like 2 days ago.” And then I just assumed it would be exotic.

Don’t worry. Satellites reentering the atmosphere fucks up the ozone layer little by little. It hasn’t mattered much before but Starlink alone will be like 30,000 satellites. Between consumer-facing competitors and every major military bloc planning their own constellation, we’ll be back to fucking up the ozone layer soon enough.

The most hospitalized man in history does it again! He’s the Da Vinci of hospitalizations! Who but Bolsonaro could get bit by an exotic bird while quarantined for COVID?

This isn’t a Jordon vs. Lebron or Pele vs. Maradona type debate. There can be no debate. He’s the illest to ever do it.

The article says it could result in a fine that’s based on the value of the damage. You’d think having a famous artist’s work would increase the value of the building.

We can always bury it deep down inside and never deal with it like we do with atmospheric CO2. Maybe transition 3 or 4 coal plants to “natural” gas and have brands sponsor logging company efforts to “plant trees.”

It won’t be the first time COP attendees struggled with impotence only to leave partners frustrated or indifferent.

Is anyone in A Clockwork Orange Amish?

I don’t think there’s many consumer use cases for things like LLMs but highly focused, specialized models seem useful. Like protein folding, identifying promising medication, or finding patterns in giant scientific datasets.

New Orleans might as well just send him the phone book.

At this point, I don’t think Russia could win a conventional war with France, much less one they attack France first and it triggers Article 5. I might not have thought that before Ukraine but once you start relying on North Korea for bullets and personnel, you’re down bad.

You can give your info to the registrar and then make it anonymous to whois domain.tld searches so it’s not public. Cloudflare is the registrar I use these days because it’s a one-stop shop and used the company address but, at least in the U.S., they need your info for both credit/debit card processing. (Processing fees are cheaper the more info they provide but usually any address with the same zip code is enough.)

If you have nefarious plans, I don’t have a good recommendation. But if it’s just about privacy, I don’t know if it’s really possible to be completely anonymous anyway. I guess you could use a gift card or something but at least in the U.S., if you own or buy a house, your address is public info already anyway. Shit, city hall will probably give you blueprints of any house.

We did that in New Orleans for confederate traitors and everyone under 60 adjusted within a few weeks. Older people still fuck it up but whatever. You forgive grandparents for calling street names by the wrong name. They call half the buildings in the city some name I never even heard of because it changed before I was born. And the building names aren’t even offensive. It’s just whatever company owned it in 1970 to them.

Super Soakers were invented there.

The Blackberry era was my favorite. You could do all the important stuff and even check sports scores or breaking news or whatever. You couldn’t really doomscroll because no one had done that yet. Even Facebook — which was just for college students at that point and was legit useful. You could find people in a class you were taking and lived in your dorm and get notes from them if you missed class. And you could just download any song you wanted on Kazaa or whatever. No one’s boss emailed them outside of work hours and expected a response.

Probably 2003ish? I don’t know what year it all went to shit. But the Internet seemed like a world of possibilities then.

I’d have also advocated to heavily restrict tlds. Like .org only for real, recognized non-profit organizations.