AnyOldName3

They’re still safer (at least for certain kinds of injury) than horses, so if your young daughter wants a pony, get her a racing bike instead.

When they added directories to DOS, they decided that the colons used as a separator on the DEC system they were basing it on were silly, and the forward slashes used by Unix were nicer. Forward slashes were already the character used to identify something as a command line option rather than a filename on DOS, though, because the world hadn’t settled on Unix’s dash convention yet, and lots of existing software just checked whether an argument contained forward slashes to decide whether or not it was a filename. That software would break if paths could contain forward slashes. However, there was a tempting character on the keyboard originally used to type ∨ and ∧ before unicode that was also a slash, so they used that.

Just replies to this two-comment-long chain where we’re now talking about elephants. Did you know that it’s theorised they’re the largest surviving land animal mainly because they’re the only large land animal that co-evolved with humans, so had appropriate fear and awareness to avoid being hunted to extinction, whereas other similarly-sized creatures wouldn’t see humans as a threat, so would be vulnerable.

Once you’re replying to me, someone who’s said their sure Earthwormjim’s comment was specifically referring to a specific kernel patch, you’re in a conversation about that specific kernel patch, whether or not I’m right about that original comment being about that specific kernel patch.

Most of this particular comment chain (and it’s the post-Earthormjim comment chain I said was referring to that one patch, not the whole thread) has been you replying to me after I started talking about it, so it’s been the topic whether or not it’s a non-sequitur from the thread as a whole. When one of the participants in a two-person dialogue thinks something’s the current topic, that’s enough to make it the topic.

Plus a bunch of people will look at the thread, so one of them googling it and explaining saves a bunch of other people googling, and saves them all more time in total than the one person spent.

It’s been headline news (at least by Lemmy standards), so it’s a safe bet that Earthwormjim91 was alluding to it when he initially brought up Torvalds, and I was referring to it when I initially brought up optimisation. It wouldn’t have been clear to you if you hadn’t known about it already, as no one linked an article or said explicitly that that’s what they were referring to, but for someone who did, it would have been obvious. You wouldn’t expect someone to explicitly say they were referencing Shrek if they said that something had layers or something was sacrifice someone was willing to make when it clearly would only affect other people, and you wouldn’t expect someone to explicitly say they were referring to Trump’s infamous COVID-era press conference if they mentioned injecting bleach.

This comment chain is specifically referencing a single LLM-assisted patch that Linus Torvalds posted to the mailing list for review a few days ago that solves a longstanding performance problem that interacts with enough things parts of the kernel that there are only a handful of people in the world qualified to deal with it, and that none of them have had the time to investigate and fix properly until just now. https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linus-torvalds-posts-his-first-llm-assisted-patch-to-the-linux-kernel-after-issuing-clear-pro-ai-directives-the-bossman-makes-use-of-ai-tooling-himself

It only needs to save a few hundreds of seconds on one computer, or one second on a few hundreds of computers, or a tiny fraction of a second on the number of computers that actually run Linux to save trillions of cycles. A trillion cycles isn’t very many at all. A hundred-word prompt on a frontier model running on GPUs in a datacentre burns much more power than a trillion cycles on a CPU, so for a large Linux kernel patch, trillions is the wrong number by many orders of magnitude. There are also a lot of computers spending a lot of time running Linux, so it kind of balances out. There’s only one Linus Torvalds, and he’s very busy, so it’s likely that if he’d not used an LLM to get this work done, it simply wouldn’t have happened, even if someone had been willing to fund a different human to do it.

Either way, the original point of the post was that LLM-generated code is always shitty (even when it’s not immediately obvious to whoever’s responsible for it that it’s shitty) and so having any amount of it already makes things worse, even ignoring the huge environmental cost. With that context, it is the case that there’s a huge difference between Timmy and Torvalds as Torvalds is famous for having very high standards, so if he’s using it, he might be able to make something that isn’t shitty.

Both things are going on at the same time, as Torvalds and Timmy are both paying Sam Altman to pour oil into the river as a byproduct of the service he’s providing. For something as important as the Linux kernel, it wasting fewer CPU cycles as a result of LLM-aided optimisation work might even be net beneficial for the environment once you take into account that it’ll affect billions of computers for years to come. If the end product is shitty, though, there’s no question that it wasn’t worth the environmental damage.

Some Markdown renderers interpret two dashes as an en dash and three as an em dash, so on some Lemmy clients, that might show up as a real en dash.

If you’re forced to use Windows, you can minimise the amount of disruption from updates by remembering:

• they’re only released on Tuesdays, so you can make sure you get several days without interruption by installing them on Wednesdays
• there’s a pause updates for seven days button in Settings that you can use if there’s a Tuesday between now and when you’re going to definitely need the computer to be available

It’s much easier to plan around them when you know when they’re coming.

They never have any signs of wear, and children are always a destructive force, so this is unlikely.

Some youths were throwing rocks at trains going under a bridge, so one of the engines purged soot from its chimney as it went under the bridge as revenge, covering the youths in sticky black stuff.

They don’t have a Linux version of their launcher, and don’t have a system to automatically configure Wine/Proton for games without native Linux support, which is most of their library. There’s nothing in the licence of Wine or Proton that would stop them just reusing Valve’s work, which is why third party launchers like Heroic can do it.

Legally, you own a copy of a book if you buy the book even if you don’t also buy the copyright for the book, so wouldn’t be allowed to make copies (beyond the single backup copy your allowed to make in case the first is damaged that you’re required to destroy if you ever stop owning the one you bought). This also applied to physical copies of video games, at least when they were new. In the US, this is part of what’s known as the First Sale Doctrine, but other territories typically have stone equivalent even if it doesn’t have a name.

About a century ago, book publishers tried putting a licence in copies of books and claiming that if you bought them, you were only buying the licence, but stopped after courts decided that you’d still bought a copy of the book and a copy of the text of the licence, but hadn’t become party to the licence. When game (and other software) publishers tried it later, they were basically just allowed to, even though there’s not really anything that makes the First Sale Doctrine any less applicable to games than books.

Matrix is fine with an alternative client. I use Commet, and it’d pretty much serve as a total replacement for Discord for me if not for the fact that nearly none of the communities I’m in are bridged there.

Anyone who’s been on Lemmy for more than a month will either recognise exactly the group of users they’re referring to, or themselves be part of the group. You’re right to think they’re attacking a group that you’re part of, as you’re the first person who’d come to most people’s mind if asked to suggest an example of a user with those traits. You’ve also managed to contradict one of your earlier comments in this thread where you claimed the comment was against the entirety of leftist thought, as you’ve correctly deduced that they’re not complaining about anarchist instances like db0 that don’t describe themselves as Marxist-Leninist.

They call out a cluster of traits as being bad. The only sane way to parse their comment is to interpret it as only applying to people who have all those traits. You’re doing something equivalent to demanding someone clarify that they didn’t mean they hated all food when they complained about not liking things that are sweet.

In rare cases it also causes permanent erectile dysfunction, so probably isn’t the best thing to be recommending everyone takes.