Vim/Neovim has orgmode too, these days 🤪

At times, I’ve also juggled (in addition to vim and tmux) hotkeys for my current tiling WM of choice and extra hotkeys to swap between machines via barrier. I’m not sure how I’m able remember what I had for breakfast, much less someone’s name.

Only community I truly care about that hasn’t budged is the Neovim subreddit still going strong without a care in the world. Everyone’s still highly motivated and active there, so it’s really the only place to go where I can keep up the the community’s momentum.

Honestly? This hole in the wall food store in my home town managed to pick up a pretty early release of the arcade game Robotron. I was instantly enthralled, visiting arcades any time I could. From there, I played on friends’ Atari 2600s and Commodores until I managed to get my own C64, and I’ve never stopped since. From there, I migrated through their products and stayed a diehard fan till the mid-90’s - C128, Amiga 1000, Amiga 500, and Amiga 2000.

I played a few early x86 games on demo machines in stores, but I didn’t finally relent and build my own x86 rig until the release of the Descent 1 demo, which single-handedly destroyed all of my remaining resolve. I already considered myself a pretty consistent gamer, but that was the nail in the coffin. The rest, as they say, is history. It was only 4 years later that EverQuest came out, too, and that swallowed me whole.

Legit. Piracy related to home PC software has been around since the advent of home PCs. Before the concept of LANfests or LAN parties even existed, there were copy parties. I still have vivid memories of 8+ 1541 drives daisy-chained to a single C64. University servers hosting warez… Usenet… there’s likely earlier examples I’m not aware of.

Before that, people were hacking phone systems in order to call long distance for free. This ain’t nothin new.

Not something I’ve indulged in for 30+ years, though. I pay for everything, now. Guilty conscience, I suppose. 😁

The logical fallacy here being that, based on that context alone, you should care because you will have something to hide in the future. Saying you have nothing to hide is always used in the context of one’s sense of guilt, or lack thereof, based on past actions. A counterargument would then be to ask why you should be allowed to hide your future wrongs.

For many, the subject has nothing to do with that. It’s about not wanting to be monetized without consent. There’s also benefits in the form of protection against identity theft or social engineering. For others, the simple right to fundamental personal privacy itself is important - it’s about not having all of one’s life’s details on public display.

Also known as “none of your goddamn business.”

As a tangent, because it’s now stuck in my head and needs expression - the more thought you give to the problems introduced by technology that blur or step over this line, the more you realize how much harder it’s becoming to prevent outcomes where privacy is lost.

Only engaging AI under tightly controlled circumstances is one thing; having it in the background perceiving everything you say and do on your desktop is a very different conversation. No matter what assurances are given that your privacy is protected, almost every situation like it that’s arisen since the advent of personal computers has resulted in a loss of control through duplicity, intrusion, sabotage, bad design, or floundering integrity.

I feel this. The most disgusting thing I’ve ever had to do was clean my chain-smoking parents’ house after their passing so we could put it up for sale. I can vividly imagine what the inside of a smoker’s PC must look like, just based on that experience.

This is the most insidious conundrum related to AI usage. At the end of the day, a LLM’s top priority is to ensure that your question is answered in a way that satisfies that model. The accuracy of its answers are a secondary concern. If forced to choose between making up BS so it can have a response that looks right versus admitting it doesn’t have enough information to answer, it can and often will choose the former. Thus the “hallucination” problem was born.

The chance of getting your answer lightly sprinkled with made up stuff is disturbingly high. This transfers the cognitive load of the AI user from “what is the answer” to “I must repeatedly go verify everything in this answer because I can’t trust it”.

Not an insurmountable obstacle, and they will likely solve it sooner rather than later, but AI right now is arguably the perfect extension of the modern internet - take absolutely everything you read with at least a grain of salt… and keep a pile of salt cubes close by.

AI happened. The promises, benefits, opportunity for massive financial gain, and the clear and present danger of how transformative it can be have all caused internet-bases companies to throw out the rulebook and lose their collective minds.

Real nerds use Ctrl [ instead so they don’t leave home row.

I LIKE ASCII graphics done well. It tried playing the version of Stone Soup that uses tiles and couldn’t do it.

I didn’t expect to find a Stone Soup entry so early in the list. It’s perfect for me because I can just spawn a new window inside my tmux session, type soup, hit enter, and etch-a-sketch my brain for a few minutes.