• 0 posts
  • 60 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: August 22nd, 2023
  • Linux, MacOS and Windows have been completely rewritten multiple times across their existence.

    So it’s not like the original decisions are all still in play.

    Windows and Mac OS were rewritten under some particular weird duresses of closed source profit driven engineering; so it has been a mix of improvements and seemingly illogical setbacks.

    Linux developers still need to eat, so some of the same (corporate) influences are there.

    But the average engineer who sets out to create a brand new completely modern operating system - usually decides to reuse any components of Linux that they don’t have any concerns with…

    Which usually gives us yet another cool new Linux variant.

    But sometimes we get…

    something very different

    A cool new FreeBSD variant!

  • Thought about a couple cases of his favorite beer. Still might do that. Any other ideas?

    Consumables that the person already likes make great gifts, since they will get used up and not sit around.

    I usually avoid abusable substances, just in case the person has a carefully balanced relationship with that substance.

    But you know your friend.

    Sometimes I just ask first. No real reason this needs to be a surprise.

    “I know you said you won’t take cash, but I’m going to grab you two cases of X as a thank you, on my way back.”

    Then they get a chance to call me off, or redirect me if it would be a problem.

    And I’ll always let them call it off with even a mild “no thanks”, since they might not want to say to me “I have a real problem with X and I can’t safely have thay much on hand.”.

  • Thanks. I think every data point helps people.

    I can’t say that particularly shocks me. I imagine that Chat GPT has probably swallowed dozens of Physics textbooks.

    The bigger part of the problem is knowing where we are on the human knowledge novelty / training data available curve, or rather, when we need to get off of the ride.

    Edit: Any chance your chosen AI has access to Wolfram Alpha as an MCP Tool? Because that would be very different, too.

    If it’s successful at math, there’s likely much more than a learning model in play.

    Which brings us back to the opacity problem. :(

    If the answer machine has been cleverly rigged (and weighted) to pass off math questions to more capable software, things can be great.

    But a person who just hears that AI can do math now can have a very bad time if they go blindly use a brute force pleasant answer machine on a math problem. :(