thomask

Some thoughts/predictions about how open source developers will be forced to choose their path with GenAI.

Full disclaimer: my own post, sharing for discussion and to find out if anyone has any brilliant ideas what else could be done. It looks like self-posts are okay here but let me know if I'm wrong about that.

Some rambles predicting what might be in store for open source developers who accept pull requests

I realise this is supposed to be a dystopia but I can't help but notice that the workers are not being bothered by Outlook or Teams/Slack pings. They get to focus for hours at a time on their mysterious and important work, and what's more, they are unambiguously rewarded for executing that specific task well.

Is anyone else just the tiniest bit jealous? Maybe Jame Eagan read a lot of Cal Newport or something.

One of the most frequent criticisms about the Gemini network is that there’s no content on it. When I hear that, my answer is always the same :

"That’s the very point".

Nearly two years ago, I put into words the dream I had for a durable computer. A computer that would be built for a lifetime. A computer that would not do everything but could do 80% of what I expect from it. I called this idea the Forever Computer.

I expected to launch a conversation about what we really expect from computers. What do we really want from them? What are some limitations that could free us?

How to create the long-lasting computer that will save your attention, your wallet, your creativity, your soul and the planet. Killing monopolies will only be a byproduct.

You've probably heard of the famous 'thank you for playing Wing Commander' story. It claims that a programmer on the original Wing Commander was stuck getting an error message when the game unloaded its memory during a quit. Pressed for time, instead of fixing the issue he simply hex edited the memory manager's error reporting to print 'thank you for playing Wing Commander' instead. A funny and relatable story!

...

Wing Commander I fans, meanwhile, have been understandably cautious about the anecdote and particularly the included screenshot. For one thing, Wing Commander I's default install direction isn't c:/wc1 and the game doesn't actually print "Thank You for Playing Wing Commander!" when you quit. Is the story even real?

From their intro post:

The fictional situation is the following: there has been some sort of social collapse and the Internet infrastructure is gone: there’s no more Internet for us. Now imagine that in this situation we still find value in our computers; how would we operate them now that we don’t have Internet?

I would like to analyze which Operating Systems would be suitable to for this imaginary scenario. In particular I would like to evaluate the Operating System at the following points:

• Can I store a software repository with the programs that I or someone in my area may need?
• Can I store the source code corresponding to the software repository so that I or someone else can fix potential bugs or extends the programs that we may need to use?
• Can I create new installation images from the OS itself, so that I can install it in other computers?
• Can I store the OS source code so that I or someone else can fix potential bugs or extend the OS funcionality / support and from it build installation images of the OS? And can I achieve all this offline?

There is also a NetBSD version

As a grumpy old man who wishes his computer would stop changing I've been trying to get on board with XFCE for a while and the big blocker has been making things work well on my 4K screen. (For the record this post is based on Debian testing = trixie, X11, and nvidia proprietary drivers god have mercy on my soul.)

For a while XFCE only supported the type of scaling that makes things smaller. Understandably IMO this confused a few people and happily this has been upgraded and now it also makes things bigger. However in my experience this also makes things blurrier.

In my latest round of testing it appears that the situation can be fixed with a single setting: font DPI.

Settings Manager > Appearance > Fonts (tab) > Custom DPI setting > I chose 150, and logged out and in to have everything take effect.

From this single change everything is looking good in both GTK and Qt apps. I did also increase the size of my panel through the panel settings, and title bars are kind of tiny, but mostly I use maximised applications so I'm not stressing about this too much.

Hope this helps anyone else who is stuck in an "ohgod why couldn't we just stop after Windows 2000" love-hate relationship with computers.

I was thinking back to the first episode when Mark nearly ran over Helena in the car park, providing a confirmation "oh hey he really doesn't recognise her".

Knowing what we do now though,

1. Did Mark not realise that he nearly ran over one of the Lumon leadership? He acts as if she was just some random employee.
2. Why is Helena walking to an old car in the outer reaches of the car park when she is so senior and tends to get driven around? (Maybe the flowers she's carrying are a clue?)