FWIW (not much), around the time of that article, I reversed this: I used Arity Prolog for a morphological parsing program, with C calls for the bit fiddling (because I needed 64 bits, and the Prolog I was using only handled 16 bit strings).
"Steam is liquid water droplets suspended in gas": You clearly did not work on steam-powered ships (or land-based steam power plants). I was Main Propulsion Assistant on a steam powered destroyer, and I can assure you that every effort is made to prevent droplets being suspended in the steam--because such droplets erode the blades on steam turbines. To that end, steam coming out of the stem drum (the upper part of the boiler) is run through superheaters, which raise the temperature of the incoming steam to evaporate any droplets. On our ship, the steam coming off the steam drum was a bit over 1200 psi and 600 some degrees Fahrenheit. After it goes through the superheaters, it's about the same pressure but 975 degrees.
And there's effectively no other gas in the steam, because dissolved air in the boiler's feedwater (particularly oxygen and carbon dioxide) has to be removed to prevent corrosion. To that end, water going into the boiler is first run through a deaerator, to remove any air that dissolved in the water as it came through the condensor.
> You clearly did not work on steam-powered ships (or land-based steam power plants
Well, that's true, I haven't, BUT still I went back and forth writing and deleting and rewriting and eventually deleting a whole digression about the special case of the jargon of steam power and how it uses “wet steam” (or “saturated steam”) for “steam” in the general use sense and “dry steam” for “water vapor” and “superheated steam” for dry steam created by heating wet steam away from contact with water, before deciding that was way too much, but, yeah, that's all true. (And, in details about the actual processes used, a lot more than I knew or would have gone into even if I had and had decided to keep the digression.)
> LLMs do not bring us closer to literate programming...
Without saying that I agree with the person you're responding to, and without claiming to really know what he was saying, I'll say what I think he was suggesting: That a human could do the literate part of literate programming, and the LLM could do the computing part. When (inevitably) the LLM doesn't write bug-free code snippets, the human revises the literate part, followed by the LLM revising the code part.
And of course there would be a version control part of this, too, wherein both the changes to the literate part and the changes to the code parts are there side-by-side, as documentation of how the program evolved.
To be technical: the term is phonemic, not phonetic. If we spelled phonetically, we'd have different symbols for the p in 'spin' and the p+h in 'pin'. Similarly for 'tick' and 'stick', and 'scale' and 'kale'. Native English speakers generally don't notice the differences, just like speakers of many oriental languages don't easily recognize the difference between English /l/ and /r/.
I hadn't heard the "rot" one, but I imagine it's referring to composting. We have a county-run composting site (https://www.princegeorgescountymd.gov/departments-offices/en...), and apparently when done right it produces a whole lot less methane than letting organics get buried and decompose in landfills.
In addition to the volume issue, there's the composition issue. When I was a kid, we recycled all our flint cores. Well, not quite that far back... Milk came in glass bottles, and the person who delivered the bottles of milk to our house picked up the empties to take back to the dairy. There were also steel cans for canned food and soft drinks (which eventually rusts away), and of course lots of other glass bottles. Now more and more of those kinds of things come in plastic, of which little gets recycled. And cans are often aluminum, which doesn't rust away.
Furniture was wood and fabric and (maybe) springs, with a little bit of pressboard (which was itself recycled paper and textile, usually used on the back of desks etc.). Now furniture is particleboard (made from sawdust), with lots of glue and some kind of plastic veneer if it's in a place that shows. Wood is genuinely recyclable (or re-usable as antiques!); I don't think particleboard is recyclable, although I could be wrong.
Automobiles were steel, fabric, glass and copper wire (with rubber insulation); plus of course rubber tires. Now they are those things plus a lot more plastic. Tires, both then and now, are essentially un-recyclable (although occasionally turned into artificial reefs).
I could go on, but there are probably more authoritative (= better) studies of this. But I suspect in general that we have lots less recyclable "stuff" these days than we used to.
(Replying to myself...) I should have added that back then, automobiles started recycling themselves even before you were done using them: they rusted something awful, at least where I lived (in northern US). My parents owned one car where if you were sitting in the back seat, you could watch the road go by under your feet.
When I grew up in Sweden, soda was sold in standardized glass bottles. All brands used the same bottles and they just put paper labels on. You'd return the glass bottles for a deposit, they'd take them in, remove the label, wash then and refill them. You could tell how old the glass bottle you were drinking out of was by how scratched the label was.
In the 90's, they were all replaced by PET bottles. We were told at the time that this was because the oil used in the plastic bottles was still less than the extra oil used to ship the heavy glass bottles back and forth.
> ...he should have been able to laugh at a funny project but he saw it as
> insulting an important deity.
He may have been an outlier. I know that I've heard god-jokes from the pulpits of evangelical (using that in the sense it was used 30 years ago). The one I remember best is about the difference between a dog and a cat (based on evidence of how their master treats them, the dog thinks its owner is god, the cat thinks he is god--that's a synopsis, it was much funnier in the full version).
No. My mother also told me I shouldn't joke about Jesus when I relayed a pretty harmless joke to her. It's a thing in the midwest.
I recognize the pet-God joke. I shared a meme pic with my partner that had that. Regarding cats and dogs, it's completely accurate. Our cats are in charge more than we are (or so they think).
I switched from Windows (11) to Linux (Xubuntu) back in November, mostly because of all the AI stuff I didn't trust. While Linux is working ok for me, I can see why people complain about its not being user-friendly, particularly if you're not a Real Programmer. I've had to go to forums too many times to figure out why this or that doesn't work. The latest is the fact that 'apt update' has stopped working today for Vivaldi--it worked ok yesterday, but I have not been able to get it working after spending an hour or more. (If you're interested, there's a thread here: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/115133/public-key-is-not-ava....)
Also the fact that some apps update via 'apt', some by 'snap', and if you don't watch out some might update by 'flatpack'. While I think snap is updating automatically, it's hard to tell; some mornings I wake my PC up and only hours later do I discover that there's an update pop-up hidden behind other windows.
Oh, and every day I get a 'system problem' popup that asks if I want to submit a report, but won't tell me what the alleged problem was. I thought only Microsoft did that sort of thing?
I'm also not happy about the malware protection. Apparently the only anti-virus still available is ClamAV (and Kapersky, but for reasons I won't go into I don't trust that). But the gui for ClamAV has not been supported for several years, and running it from the command line is not so straightforward, never mind keeping it updated. (And don't tell me that Linux doesn't need antivirus protection. That's just whistling past the graveyard, particularly if you sometimes log in on public WiFi networks.)
I guess there are distros that are better about some of these things, but life is too short to try all of them, and hope that some bug (like the Vivaldi update thing) doesn't show up months later.
So yes, I'm using Linux, and I'm not planning to go back to Windows. But Linux sure could work better.
Can't help you with AV but otherwise your issues and confusions are all Ubuntu and Canonical and nothing on there is representative of other Linux dists.
Ubuntu is highly opinionated. Great for some/many people but not the best fit for everyone or even an obvious recommendation for newcomers (anymore). For your consideraion: Mint is basically a project that repackages Ubuntu to adress those issues to make it accessible for people not onboard with the Ubuntu idiosyncracies and more casual users who just want their desktop. Should be an easy migration for you.
Your Vivaldi problem comes from that you trusted gpg key for their stable. release repo, and fail verifying package from their archive. repo. Change repo to stable (that's prob what you want) or get the key for archive.
Your Ubuntu experience as told is not representative of desktop Linux experienced outside of Ubuntu. "But Linux sure could work better" is a misleading conclusion to share when that's all you know.
You're right that I mixed up the Vivaldi repo (maybe you are the one who pointed that out on the thread I linked). But even after fixing that, it's still not working---slightly different warning message, but still about gpg.
I've installed the Xfce Mint (you wren't the only one suggesting that). I don't have the same problems I had with Xubuntu, but I have different ones, like tearing on one of my two monitors. I initially had that with Xubuntu, but was able to find settings to fix it there-- IIRC by changing the refresh rate on that monitor. No luck so far on Xfce Mint. I've tried all seven of the Window Managers it offers, and both the configurations and most of the tweaks.
Also can't find the red mouse cursor theme that I had on Ubuntu. (If I could remember the name, I might be able to find it, but the "after market" mouse cursor themes I've found are so much eye candy--I just want an ordinary set of cursors, but red. Yes, I could probably generate my own, but I shouldn't have to.)
And when I reboot, the windows don't come up in the same place they were when I closed them. Some apps couldn't do that under Ubuntu either, but most could. I think it has to do with Wayland, but I'm not sure if it's even possible to go back to a purely X-windows system in Mint.
I recommend Mint over Ubuntu, the snap issue does not exist there.
> And don't tell me that Linux doesn't need antivirus... you sometimes log in on public WiFi networks.
This is a misunderstanding of the threat model of Wifi. Stick to software from the signed repos and SSL. Avoid attachments, keep updated. I've never used antivirus with Linux, despite working on symantec antivirus back in the day.
> particularly if you sometimes log in on public WiFi networks
If you're on Linux and have a firewall, so there are no listening ports, there is no threat from using public wifi. TLS encrypts your connection on ~all websites these days.
I'll just point out that while Ubuntu ships with a firewall, it's not enabled by default, and at least in Windows the firewall is enabled by default. I have since enabled it in Ubuntu.
I've spent a long career getting good at Linux. Real good. But I'm only human. Over the decades, the number of how-tos, wiki pages, Linux distros, Linux kernel source, other programs documentation and source; all of that which I've ingested and used in practice and gotten good at, doesn't hold a candle to AI having been trained on every single last one of them. The solution to your apt/Vivaldi problem is easy: install Claude code, and paste in the error. Hit ctrl-o to gain insight on how it fixes it.
You used to be able to charge a decent hourly consulting rate to do some Linux, but because Claude code is so good at it, there's no market for that anymore.
(for one, your URI is wrong, resulting in apt looking for
.../deb/dists/stable/dists/stable/Release )
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