Jedd

Ubuntu offered a slightly prettier installation experience.

Sure, no matter which distro you were installing you still had to provide a hostname, a domain name, some IP info (maybe), and an opinion on partitioning - there's only so many ways to ask the user these questions - but the ubuntu installer was prettier.

Around the time it was gaining popularity, almost every 'reviewer' (blogger) seemed to waste about 85% of their distro reviews talking about the installer - as though this was somehow important. The big sell of Debian, and Debian-derivatives, is that you install once, and then it's just in-place upgrades forever. The distro-hoppers, Microsoft evacuees, content-creators, etc - didn't really get that.

Anyway, once Ubuntu was installed it was much the same to operate as a Debian box. Obviously there were some surprising differences. Unity. Mir. One Cloud. Wubi. Upstart. Bazaar.

Does that '100s of billions' come from a big bucket somewhere called 'spare cash', or does it correlate to a commensurate reduction in the 'around $500 billion in ad revenue' that Google and Meta are extracting?

Do your assumptions - " if you look at the trajectory " - factor in a slowing economy, a slowing growth in quality improvements in the tech, and/or the asymptote of market saturation for punters happy to stump up more than $50 a month?

Generally speaking the local crowd is anti-hype, and so it's easy to get the manifestation of that conflated with with what you're describing.

(I fit your literal description, but primarily from a nomenclature perspective - I'll call them generative models and LLMs - and I appreciate this puts me in the minority. BUT I do believe part of the hype feedback loop was the intentional mislabelling of these technologies from the outset. AND I understand why the marketers did that.)

I suspect the older crowd has lived through the hype playbook enough to recognise it early, and that the pattern this time around is becoming a bit a bit more obvious now, so I expect increasing levelling out of expectations & understanding.

Couple of Australians have been doing this since the 90's - I think they coined the term 'pooktre' to describe the form - https://www.pooktre.com/

Searching `Peter Cook Becky Northey tree furniture` gets you some nice pictures of their work, as they don't just 'do chair' -- though I suspect plenty of people have been doing this in various forms for centuries.

> I truly believe

I read through TFA and was impressed at the number of citations they offered. I had assumed (but not strongly) that there'd be a correlation, so this was enlightening.

Do you have any citations apart from your own experience?

Are you referring to parent's or TFA's 'argument' here?

I had to look up black grass, as we don't have that particular weed in AU. I don't have any answers, of course, but a search on 'permaculture response in europe to black grass' gives some fairly unsurprising responses.

Broadscale monoculture invites its own range of problems, and herbicide-resistant highly-competitive (when in a single-other-species ecosystem) weeds are one such.

If the starting position is 'we must grow the same variety of wheat in the same field every year', then indeed, you're going to have some challenges.

> But how do you kill the cover crop so you can grow wheat again? How do you kill the weeds? ... The only viable answer today is...Roundup (glyphosate).

I don't agree, and I note that you also answered your question differently later in your post with the note about 'mixed farming' (grazing it off).

There are, of course, other answers than herbicides. Seasonal crops, harvesting and then seed-sowing amongst the stubble (provides some mulch & eroson protection), intensive strip-grazing (bovine, ovine, caprine, or fowl, all effective options), or even a cycle or two of fallow.

Gaia theory - James Lovelock.

You find it difficult to accept, or is it just your brain that finds it difficult to accept?

1995-ish. Telstra (Australia Telecom). Probably about 50k desktop computers across the organisation. One day a small file turned up in everyone's network home directory called null. A *nix person had evidently had a go at writing a .bat file.

Why do we need to adopt extant standards? (I was going to ask, why standardise? But realised that might confound the North Americans. : )

> US is because it's functionally illegal for it to exist.

This feels like one of those 'burying the lede' situations.

Can you explain what's functionally illegal (and I admit that I'm mildly curious about the distinction of functional illegality and non-functional illegality) about this existing?

I'm as breathless as you are, after reading that second paragraph, but I nonetheless remain ignorant about the nuances of the legality of this situation.

aha - they've added colon.

I notice that ( still goes into emoji mode though.

So, the worst of both worlds. I should not be surprised. (And I am not.)

Do you mean the way that Microsoft hijacked open-parenthesis, and you can't choose a different character to trigger an emoji call?

> Please go to the equivalent of hell.

> Disabled people are allowed to call ourselves by the correct labels without apologising that our suffering is less severe or less obvious than someone else sharing the same label.

I think you guys are perhaps talking past each other.

The fact you acknowledge and recognise 'less severe' (a significant understatement when comparing ASD to Downs) suggests that you do understand parent's point.

Parent, I also note, was not seeking or implying an apology was sought from people with less severe genetic conditions. Rather, that the implications on QoL, lifespan, social / familial imposition etc of Downs, is nothing at all like so called high-functioning ASD.

It's a source of minor, but persistent, annoyance that security people have tried to abscond with the prefix cyber, morphing it into a synonym for security.

Having grown up reading cyberpunk novels about life in cyberspace, a passing interest in cybernetics (though not of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation variety), it's frustrating to lose a 'this means computer or internet related' prefix.

Haven't people 'done' something about the original wording about 27 times now?

It was the fact you started using units the world knows - albeit misspelling metre - but in the next sentence, comparing that same dimension, you used an apostrophe to allude to a unit that only 5% of the planet uses.

"Justice must be seen to be done."

Without consequences for illegal behaviour, there's no incentive for bad actors to not continue acting bad. This, in no small part, explains why we are where we are today - a misplaced attempt to 'move forward' by ignoring illegal actions.

This sounds like something criminals would say / want.

> The solar energy you can collect is about 750W/sq meter.

> A car roof is about 5’x5’, and if we are generous and include a trunk and hood area, maybe you are getting 60 sqft?

We must think metric, every inch of the way!

Anyway, PVCs currently max out at about 300W / square metre - and that's in ideal conditions.

I believe theoretical maximum energy per square metre (when light actually arrives at the planet surface) is conveniently pretty close to 1000W, assuming you're in the right place, but maximum efficiency of contemporary panels is only about 30%.

Yes, absolutely. I move between two sites, and also run some gear at my sibling's home, so I have the 3 separate sites thing sorted. ECC + RAID1 + borg at each site gives archival capability on top of standard backup.

Syncthing has the 'untrusted peer' feature, which I've only used once, accidentally, but I believe provides an elegant way of providing some disk for a friend while maintaining privacy of the content.

> solar only runs during the day and when it is not cloudy

Solar PVC output directly and immediately correlates to sun landing on the panels.

Solar thermal runs well into the evening, and its output is not impacted by the occasional cloud.

> but are awful at UX

This is such a weird trope.

For those of us who've used microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce, or basically any insanely popular (in the commercial if not upvote sense) products, it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.

FWIW, starting a sentence with "Honestly ..." always makes me think the rest of what this person has to say is dishonest.

Your BIO on HN is:

> I HAVEN'T SHOWERED AT ALL! THAT'S WHY I REEK! WORKING IN FINTECH! AIN'T SHAVED IN WEEKS! POUR CRUMBS FROM MY KEYBOARD! THAT'S WHAT I EAT! WROTE A CURRENCY LIBRARY! 3RD TIME THIS WEEK! LURKING HN! I PREFER /b/! IN MOM'S BASEMENT! I'M THIRTY THREE! IT'S 3'O'CLOCK AM! THAT'S WHEN I SLEEP! AH!!!! COME ON FUCK A GUY!!!!

What level of credibility are you seeking?

Oh, I got the implication, but I think it was such a common mistake back then, that I don't think it's age-related now - it's a bit of a trope, to assume baud and bps mean the same thing, and people tend to prefer to use a more technical term even when it's not fully understood. Hence we are where we are with terms like decimate, myriad, nubile, detox etc, forcefully redefined by common (mis)usage. I need a cup of tea, clearly.

Anyway, I didn't think my throw-away comment would engender such a large response. I guess we're not the only olds around here!

As someone that started with 300/300 and went via 1200/75 to 9600 etc - I don't believe conflating signalling changes with bps is an indication of physical or temporal proximity.

> several 56k baud modems

These were almost definitely 8k baud.

> ... is growing really exponentially.

Or geometrically?

> It is a kind of cheat on the fair market ...

I am very curious on your definition and usage of 'fair' there, and whether you would call the LLM etc sector as it stands now, but hypothetically absent deepseek say, a 'fair market'. (If not, why not?)

> So I'm either not literate, not engaged, or not people?

Technically you're one or more of those things.

Either would indicate one of two options. (Common usage proponents, keen to reduce nuance in communications, notwithstanding.)