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.

Danke für die Gedanken.

Nein, ich habe kein Oktoberfestbier getrinken. Ich trinke fast kein alkohol. Aber, ich bin in Berlin und Oktoberfest ist klein hier.

I feel it’s a reasonable level of use. Some of the big hurdles they have are pronunciation, idioms, and complex grammar. I’m operating at a text only 2 year old level, so it should be okay. :-)

The immediate feedback on why my German isn’t totally correct is invaluable. The big ones are conjugation and the variants on implied motion (a huge part of German ad a language), which it’s helping me a ton with.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen!

I learned some more vocab and did some context learning.

I also started using GPT for some really basic story translation. I’d been using children’s board books (18 month old kid kind of materials) for a while, but with GPT it can give me some tailored short stories, then some feedback on my translation.

My prompt:

“I’d like to do some german to english translation practice. Could you please write a 3 paragraph story in German. The language level is 18 months, like a board book kind of level. I’ll try to translate it.”

The feedback after I type in a translation is usually about like this:

Good work! You caught most of the meaning correctly. A few small notes:

“Der kleine Hund Max läuft in den Garten.”

You wrote: “The small dog Max ran in the garden.” Better: “The little dog Max runs into the garden.”

Two things:

läuft is present tense (“runs”), not past. in den Garten means “into the garden” (motion toward), not “in the garden.”

“Die Sonne scheint.”

You wrote: “The son shines.” Just a slip: Sonne = sun, not son. So: “The sun is shining.”

Is it better than in-person work? Nope. Can I do it on the train while I commute? Yup. Is it better than many of the tools I’ve run into? Naturlich.

No one who survived the attempt to require others to use it.

Show me an ad in my own kitchen and that screen is going to be broken.

I moved to Germany. It’s been an experience because the tech status dialed back about 15 years. One area I don’t miss is the ever pervasive drive to have screens with ads on every surface.

The Linux Mint GUI updater is an interesting bit of code, or at least it was about 5 years ago. I looked at updating it a bit with a status bar for a stage I thought could use it.

I opened up the code…Python that just uses a shell call to apt. No muss, no library calls. Okay, that’ll do.

It was a functional wrapper on the command line calls, exactly as you’d hope for a tool.

Awesome follow through. Thank you.

Got a source on how they hid the body? It’s very not cool if that’s what was done. I know the Nazis are trying to turn him into a martyr, and having the body both to hide from the investigation and to make it mysterious so they can tell any lies they like is classic.

Ich auch!

We moved to Germany a few weeks ago (well… moved to Berlin). Immersion here is sorta immersion.

I read some new children’s books. Spent time translating government documents (the never ending array of government documents). Learned a few new words in conversation and got a bit better at people’s names.

Deutsch jeden tag!

It should just be that the government doesn’t patrol the high seas, of course! Every ship should enter into personal 1-on-1 contracts with each pirate for a market appropriate rate to ensure they don’t get attacked. The Libertrian way won’t cause any issues of scale, rampant loss of merchant ships, and an eventual ending of all oceangoing shipping outside of the handful of ships that can afford their own navies to escort them… /s

Come to the Open Source community for ideology, stay for the better life. It’s a learning curve to get in. After that it’ll open more doors and be much more relaxing to run OSS operating environments than you think.

The real fun is when you’ve been on Linux for a few years and are forced to do some tasks on a Windows machine. It’s amazing how bad the Windows UI and tooling is, but it’s hard to see until you can look with some perspective.

I usually start a desktop on Mint since it’s got at least some new drivers and a few more tools with Cinnamon desktop.

If the hardware is finicky or there’s odd devices a distro doesn’t handle, I often just try a different distro instead of driver hacking. It’s a very big hammer, but I’d rather have things work with the distro configs instead of maintaining it myself.

Servers? Debian.

Desktops? Mint (prettier Debian out of the box)

Otherwise? Use what works with the least effort.

Since 1998, baby! Found my RedHat 3.0.3 install CD recently. It’s been such a long road, but it keeps getting better.

I haven’t had broadcast or cable TV for at least a decade now. The major news/media outlets hold very little interest given their approach to generally being informative in any serious way. So, no, our household doesn’t watch TV.

There it is. Thank you for the great summary of the tautology that is reveleation-based religion. In the end, it all boils down to a presup argument with no basis and dries up under even a modicum of analysis.

That’s the Fox News (or similar) pus leaking out of OP’s head. Up until that line they were sorta on a basic “I don’t understand why people value reason over superstition” track, but then veered into crazyland.

Here, I’ll give you some balm for the wounds of time:

http://www.eviloverlord.com/

Use it wisely.

https://youtu.be/W8tRDv9fZ_c

They may or may not be used here. You could use LLMs to parse the content of sites being visited by web clients on your network. Then, ask the LLM whether the content includes certain topics or is work related. Based on the results of that, you add/remove the site from a blacklist.

Is this better than just string matching? I would say likely so, though more stochastic in the results. It would let the LLM provide summaries/context of the pages, and not by just confined to specific strings in a list. It might be better ramble to handle context and complexity of the desired outcomes.

For example, there was a paleontology conference at a hotel once that was stuck behind a firewall blacklisting all sites with the string ‘bone’ in them. Completely ridiculous. The string ‘bone’ has different meanings based upon context, which simple string matching cannot provide, but an LLM might be better and identifying and acting accordingly.