Worst of all, root access is often granted to humans — a species known to be vulnerable to the most idiotic phishing scams you could imagine.

Debian is still the best at being Debian. I rate it the least likely to give me any unpleasant surprises.

I don’t know, there’s just something about it.

For a long time we had VGA for video cables. There was no VGA version 2.1.9, now supporting 1024x768 mode with 16-bit colour. Cables did not cost $29. There were no rent-seeking patent holders charging license fees, or at least they weren’t obnoxious enough that we knew about them. It didn’t have five different types of connectors. There was no VGA consortium constantly keeping itself in the news with periodic press releases. Companies didn’t need to sign away their soul to write drivers for it. There was no VGA copy protection trying to keep us from decoding our own video streams. Cables didn’t include enough microelectronics to power a space shuttle.

Somehow I think we could do better.

I hate HDMI with a passion that can not be explained.

Mostly I just install Skyrim mods manually because I’m insane I guess, but for some games I like to run Mod Organizer 2 under proton. Your whole linux filesystem can be made accessible to windows programs, not sure if it is by default. But anyway since we’re talking steam games here the game itself normally will be in the same place as usual, as far as windows programs know.

If they go through with this I’ll switch to Hannah Montana Linux.

You’re not really living with as much free software as possible until you’ve installed all of the 103818 packages in debian.

#!/bin/bash # Recursively rename everything in the current directory as necessary # to make it match the case of filenames in Skyrim’s “Data” directory,

from=`pwd -P`
to="${HOME}/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/common/Skyrim_1.5.97/Data"
tmp="/tmp/skydata_index"
filez="/tmp/skydata_from"

IFS='
'

match_case() {
    cd "$2"
    find . | grep -v '^[.]$' > "$tmp"
    cd "$1"
    find . -maxdepth 1 | grep -v '^[.]$' > "$filez"
    for j in `cat $filez`; do
        if ( grep -i "^${j}$" $tmp ); then
            name=`grep -i "^${j}$" $tmp | head -1`
            if [ "${name}xx" != "${j}xx" ] ; then
                mv "$j" "$name"
            fi
        fi
    done

    # going recursiv
    find . -maxdepth 1 -type d | grep -v '^[.]$' > "$filez"
    for j in `cat $filez`; do
        if ( test -d "${2}/${j}" ) ; then
            match_case "${1}/${j}" "${2}/${j}"
        fi
    done
}
match_case $from $to
rm $tmp $filez

Hm, someone claiming to be Vaxry says it’s real, it’s not April fool’s day, the link is to the domain that’s on their github page, it’s still up however many hours later… well that was unexpected.

(Apparently it’s Dave Cutler, who wikipedia reminds me is the crazy VMS guy “known for his disdain for Unix.” Apologies to both of them.)

Is that Donald Knuth? If so, “three guys taking a photo with Donald Knuth” might be a better title.

True enough — but for those few who enjoy such things I must point out that debian makes kernel builds very easy to do. When mesa gets too old there will usually be a backport.

Come on debian, maybe we can make it back into the top 5 when trixie gets an official release.

Paid and freeware but either way non-free, unfortunately.

It was patched in early 2023.

Federal agencies are required to apply the necessary patches by July 8, 2025

I think I’ve spotted an area in which there may be room for improvement in federal cybersecurity procedures. They should hire me as a consultant.

I’m sure It will probably be fine for at least a year or two before the new owners manage to ruin it somehow but anyway I’ll just go make sure I have a full backup of my 150 gigabytes of skyrim mods.

autokey — a recent “autohotkey” sort of thing for linux. It comes to mind since I recently had to find a replacement for the one I’d used previously which died of bitrot. Mostly I just use it for app-specific key remapping for Firefox so that I can disable its ^W which I only ever hit accidentally when it was possible.

GNOME continues its long journey from being the one-time linux standard to a occupying a quirky little niche for masochists and corporate IT departments.

This would’ve been great news to hear about if not for the stupid opinion about DEI being included to completely undermine any faith we might’ve had in the competence or judgement of the person responsible.

I’m shocked! — shocked to find that LLMs aren’t superhuman intelligences that will soon enslave us all. Other things they’re not good at:

• Summarizing news articles. Instead of an actual summary they’ll shorten the text by just leaving things out, without any understanding of which parts are important.
• Answering questions about anything controversial. Based on subtle hints in the wording of your question they’ll reflect your own biases back at you.
• Answering questions about well-known facts. Seemingly at random when your question isn’t phrased exactly the right way they’ll start hallucinating and make up plausible bullshit in place of actual answers.
• Writing a letter. They’ll use the wrong tone, use language that is bland and generic to a degree that makes it almost offensive, and if you care about quality the whole thing will need so much re-writing that it’s quicker to do it yourself from the start.
• Telling jokes. They don’t really get humour. Their jokes tend to have things that superficially look as if they should be punchlines but aren’t funny at all.
• Writing computer code. Correcting their mistakes is even more laborious in computer languages. Most of the time they’re almost as bad at it as they are at playing chess.

Still they are amazingly clever in some ways and pretty good for coming up with random ideas when you’ve got writer’s block or something.