stevenaleach

Having not run DOS/Windows since 1995 I haven't needed to. I can't imagine dealing with an OS without the kind of enormous and comprehensive software repository of Debian or pretty much any distro.

It's been more than a decade since I paid for any software, Mathlab for Linux. It was a requirement for a class I was taking - Ironically, I never did have to use it. Octave proved more than adequate. Before that... well... I think the only other software I ever paid for was a shareware game (Commander Keen) when I was a kid in the early 90's. Generally I'm always surprised when I hear a reference to commercial software thinking "That's still a thing?!"

*nix specific: tmux, clipit cross platform: jupyter-lab, vim.

David Brin's Existence. I could list a lot of others, but that is the one I'd list at top by a wide margin.

What would make the most difference in the quality of life for those on the street would be public showers, public restrooms accessible 24/7, and access to secure and affordable temporary storage in order to leave possessions temporarily without losing them. Boxes installed along sidewalks which could accept change like a parking meter and be set to a combination to unlock - and would remain locked until the time runs out. That would make a huge difference, enormous. The loss of paperwork and documentation as well as clothing and other possessions is a constant problem for those on the street - and the inability to leave the bags behind and not be immediately recognizable as homeless is a huge barrier and trap.

It surprises me that laundromats in the bay area do not have pay showers similar to truck stops. When you must carry all of your possessions it would be nice to be able to be free of dirty clothes (and body) after doing laundry. There are, of course, a few shower facilities which open and close at specific hours and people must stand in line to shower in a shared room with others without control of the water temperature. It is an experience to be avoided. I assure you that 'bird baths' in public restrooms are a far better option. Dignified public showers. That would make an enormous difference in quality of life.

And of course, restrooms. It is absurd and repugnant that the bay area, with the enormous homeless population fails to provide public restrooms accessible at all hours. This, again, is an issue of human dignity and it is also an issue of sanitation and health.

Those are the three things that would make the most difference - restrooms, showers, secure temporary storage - and would prevent homelessness from being an inescapable trap. It would allow people to be functional and presentable in the world, to be able to find employment and have options.

Jupyter Notebooks + Theano + Lasagne + Matplotlib + [the pip package ecosystem]. For my weird little niche (Machine Learning / Computational Intelligence), it is the perfect tool. It's also the perfect language for basic management scripts - a handful of lines of Python made setting up a shared machine learning server with Slurm/Jupyter-Hub/IPFS/Theano+Lasagne+Tensorflow (the last of which I've not personally used) easy. I work with a tmux session with scripts running training nets, and a Jupyter notebook open to evaluate and explore parameters and behavior at save points each epoch. Python/Theano/Lasagne allow for concise easily readable code that documents and describes the concept at hand such that my code cells wind up containing few, if any, comments - instead writing anything that needs to be written in markdown with any inline graphic needed in cells between code cells. For real-time work like mine, scripts are likely to be run once (or rather several times, changing meta-parameters along the way), and most code written will be notebook cells either soon to be deleted or as part of a record that should ideally be in clear readable language.

I've never clicked on an ad other than by accident on any site. Of course I use adblock, but even if ads were to be displayed I can't imagine anyone directing any attention to them once they are recognized as ads - which would be at the first glance at the page. I am certainly never aware of what ads are for or what they say any time one slips onto my screen.

A machine learning laptop doesn't make a lot of sense - you won't find a laptop with a comparable GPU. Really, the answer is whatever you are comfortable working on - you'll be connecting to a server or AWS GPU instance to actually train any large net and generally writing and testing on a laptop. That being said, get anything with an NVIDIA card (for the time being everything runs on CUDA) or that testing will be done on the CPU, though perhaps there will be libraries supporting OpenCL down the road.

Debian.

Funny.. The majority of AI research is currently using open source libraries (Theano, Lasagne, Torch, Keras, Scikit-Learn, Nolearn, etc. etc. etc.)

Now Google does have access to a whole lot of data that the rest of the world doesn't. and FB, Google, and etc. have more than a bit of a hardware advantage... for now, at least. Distribute a shared system over a P2P infrastructure, and you can change that. Perhaps rather significantly.