That’d make a great switch to Linux billboard.

I snagged a Chromebook back in 2016 and used it for 9 years. It wasn’t speedy, but for small time browsing, terminal use (I rooted it and put a real Linux distro in there), and media watching it was just fine.

Again? It used to be called something else even further back.

It must be part of the “security through making it hard to search for online” strategy.

The real elites shall forever be the Plan9 group. There’s dozens of users! Dozens!

I’ve begun speaking more with people in my goal language. It’s scary, but when it works, very rewarding.

We were on the road this weekend, so I had to navigate some hotel staff interactions. I was able to understand much of the language, but my ability to speak is quite limited still.

My reading is soaring forward. I finished my A2 learning book (pass #1, I’ll read it again soon) and am working through some other children’s books for basics practice.

“Risk” You mean waste, kill, demolish, guarantee the loss of, wreck, harm, fuck over.

The US has seen incredible increases in physical harm to people from these monstrosities. They’ve been seeing damage to cities as roads are widened. Families consistently lose family memories or have someone harmed by injuries due to oversized vanity vehicles being significantly more dangerous to everyone around them.

Add in the increased pollution, road wear, plastics in the air from tires, new waves of loan debt to finance that shit, and the noise pollution that’s just starting to be researched (the results to date demonstrate massive issues for communities from the noise alone). Allowing these shit box machines into the EU would be horrible for the continent.

Source: yes, I do pay attention to the research. Yes, I do work with advocacy groups to improve city infrastructure and reduce car dependency. Yes, I did live in the US for 45 years. Yes, I did have family and friends lost to these oversized vehicles. Yes, I moved out of the US, partially to escape the road-car-truck-storad shithole my cities became ot accommodate cars over people. Don’t let it happen here, EU.

In the words of the Australian Transportation Secretary: “when deciding what to do, look at the Americans and don’t do that”.

Having PERL be a shell style environment was hilariously slow. Entertaining, but slow.

I feel bad that I read that page in Chrome. I’m a failure of a techie.

Tomorrow I must atone by teaching more students terminal commands. Maybe using web API calls with cURL. Or get and some eviloverlord.com quotes?

“I tried switching to Hannah Montana Special Arch Edition and it wasn’t easy!” – Is it ever easy? I dunno, but computers are complex things so trying any new approach is expected to take work. Picking a weird, unsupported, and possibly out of date software package isn’t going to help the effort.

People not knowing when to use ‘is’ and ‘are’ in English.

For reals, though? Mostly energy put into conversations, who spends the effort to initiate topics, and whether someone actually has hobbies other than just watching TV.

I’m glad they’re still working on the support ecosystem. I’ve never used these tools but I’m sure they help people get into SBC computing projects.

As long as dd keeps working, I’ll be using it for all of the imaging needs.

I finished my translation of multiple children’s books in German. The basic language structure is making more sense.

We’ve been talking more with the Doner guys on the street. My ability to understand spoken numbers is getting better. I really need to have people just count in German lots around me so I can keep learning the digit order not as a translation, but as a concept.

I double checked and I have 18 months to get to B1 German (certified). With that in hand, I can get my permanent residency, so there’s a real goal and a timeline now. Los geht’s!

You’re sitting on the Chinese Translator problem, and to some extent the basis of the Turing Test (mostly the translator problem).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

Knowledge != Intelligence

Regurgitating things you’ve read is only interpolative. You’re only able to reply with things you’ve seen before, never new things. Intelligence is extrapolative. You’re able to generate new ideas or material beyond what has been done before.

So far, the LLM world remains interpolative, even if it reads everything created by others before it.

Thank you. It’s helping that I’m more immersed in the language than ever before. Actually living in Germany makes it much easier to start learning, and re-learning, the language. I’m around Berlin, so English is quite pervasive, but I do try to erste Deutsch in conversations.

I managed to pick up a crime novel off a free pile this week. I’m not able to read it outright, but the percentage of the prose I’m getting is about 60-80%. That’s a huge win for me.

In more formal practice I’m nearing the end of translating book 95 of Die Drei ??? Kids - Geheime Zeichen (secret signs). I’m thinking about getting another one of those since the vocabulary level and prose difficulty are about right for me at this point.

I did manged to order food a few times during the week entirely in German, though I bailed when trying to describe how much of a cheese wheel I wanted to purchase.

This post feels like a bot wrote it as pro Microsoft spam.

Or else?

I did some translation of children’s books. It went well. I learned some new vocab surrounding medical topics (still seeking care in a foreign country, sigh).

I also got some ear training listening to numbers at stores.

Oh! And I realized I can almost understand the train arrival loudspeaker at the main train station for the most common announcements. That’s very helpful.

It relies mostly upon people feeling shame about being denounced. Being impeached is mostly about an official denouncement.

If you don’t care, then it means nothing to the individual. It then falls upon the citizens to actually give a fuck about their country having leadership who is more positive than negative. What we’ve learned in the last handful of years is that about 30% of voters would vote for a king if that king hates the same people they do. Another 30% don’t care who runs anything, so a king is fine with them.

So… A ruling monarch the US will have. It’s nearing the end of the Republic and Orange Fürher has crossed the Rubicon. Apparently no one cares enough to really deal with it, but we’ll surely see lots of walking around on a weekend as to not cause any inconvenience.

Yes, I feel No Kings is the right message, but the actual wherewithal to enforce the Republic isn’t visible yet.

It’s kind of a vote of no confidence that then requires the US Senate to hold a “trial” on whether to remove. Essentially, the House (a more general populace representative body) says "he is bad and should be reviewed’. Then the Senate (which more represents the states, not the public) decides whether to agree and then a removal happens if they do.

Otherwise? It’s just the Senate saying “he’s fine and we’re okay with it”, which is what the Republicans are. They’re okay with crime and hatred of fellow Americans as long as it’s their people doing the hating and criming.

Windows 95/98 sucked shit. I liked the games, but the kernels were terrible.

I dual booted or ran two machines Linux (RedHat 5.2 to 6.2, wtf was up with 7?), then whatever worked (usually Debian based) for a while. Mostly used Linux alone for years, but used Win7 for a bit. That one was okay, but Microsoft can’t build dev tools on their own OS to save their lives.

It’s been Linux Mint for a long time now on desktops and Debian/Armbian on servers.

Basically, I’ve been mainlining Linux since about '97 and it’s doing me just fine. Works great for my kids and wife. We’re a mostly Linux household. It saves me a ton of headaches. Easy to install, patch, and almost no other maintenance.