All programming is a trade-off between what’s easy for the developer and what’s fast for the machine.

Sure, you could theoretically write everything in Assembly and it’d be blazingly fast; but unless you’re a particularly elite developer, that process would take forever for any program more complicated than a calculator, the result would be super buggy, and those bugs would be very hard to fix.

On the other end of the spectrum, you might imagine a natural language machine learning compiler which translated directly from human prose to binary. It would be dead simple to “program” anything in; but such an application would probably be unbelievably slow, and again, have a staggering number of difficult-to-fix bugs.

Somewhere in the middle are modern programming languages that abstract away all of the stuff that’s necessary but hard for humans to wrap their minds around (memory management, API interaction, network stack, etc) and let the human write clear and unambitious code to handle all of the business logic and displaying it to the user. The result won’t run as blisteringly fast as writing directly in Assembly, and it won’t be as quick to market as Vibes-to-ASM, but the application will be developed in a reasonable amount of time and be reasonably easy to maintain.

That’s kind of the conclusion this article comes to. The author likes Bazzite because it’s an immutable distro, which makes it feel like a console (in a good way), not because of any performance benefits.

It’s the same thing it’s always been. Since the early 2010s we’ve been using neural networks to do voice transcription. They just decided in the last five years that neural networks = AI (so they can get the investor dollars). But voice recognition is basically a solved problem, and that solution was neutral networks. Has been since the late 90s, with ANNs and then RNNs.

Same with language translation. Google Translate started using NMT in 2016.

Pay off a bunch of debt. Invest the rest.

It’s a boring answer, but it’s true. I’ve had a stable financial situation rug-pulled from under me three or four times already in my adult life. I’m sick of it.

I don’t even want to be financially stable for my own sake. I want to be able to tell my kids yes when they ask to eat at McDonald’s more than once a week. I want to be able to help everyone I know who needs it. I want to be able to pay for my wife to fly back home to her grandma’s funeral without worrying about if I need to sell a car to pay for it.

Bold words in the comments for an article talking about how it’s good now.

At this point, anyone who uses proprietary software when a good FOSS alternative exists is just asking to be rugpulled.

I’m not willing to put all my eggs into another proprietary basket. Fool me six times…

You can have me em dashes when you pry them from my cold, dead hands. This looks like AI for actual reasons, not meme reasons, and em dashes as a sign of LLM usage is pretty outdated at this point; most AI-brained people have their system prompts set up to tell the models not to use them.

The point of it is being able to play online with friends running the official version of the game on mobile or consoles. That means you need Bedrock Edition. If you don’t care about multiplayer or your friends all play on computer, then you should probably use Java Edition, which is natively available on Linux anyway.

Also, Pi Edition is thirteen years old and was massively hobbled from the main production version back when it was new, so if you want a free Minecraft experience, you’re better off using Luanti.

There’s a launcher for Linux that allows you to run the Android version of Minecraft Bedrock Edition. Is there a similar thing for Fortnite?

That’s a good question, and I absolutely don’t mind you asking. Honestly, I didn’t even make the connection between the “threenager” phenomenon and the fact that all three of our bad ones happened when they were new siblings until I was writing up that earlier post, so take my half-decade old memories here with that particular grain of salt; the real reason may well be “oh we never really thought about the connection.”

When we decided to go for our second, I think it was the fact that our first was a really easy one-year-old at the time, so we were feeling the hubris of new parents with an easy kid. He had been a slightly tricky newborn (medically), but then he turned into the sweetest kid, so we figured we were over the hump; he didn’t become difficult behaviorally until right around the time our second child was born. We also knew we wanted to have more than one, and had seen some research (and had some personal experience) that suggested a two-year age gap was best for sibling bonding and closeness, though I think I’ve heard that data has been questioned more recently.

And then our second was born, and life was kind of hell for a little while because she wasn’t sleeping and he was a threenager (and so you’ll note that the gap between the second and third is definitely bigger than between the other two gaps), but just like it got bad at the same moment, they both straightened up at more or less the same moment, too; he was potty trained, she started sleeping better, and they were suddenly really good friends, so we knew (or thought we knew) that the hard times would end and that we could make it through more or less unscathed.

At that point, we switched from the hubris of new parents to the hubris of parents of a big family, so after the third’s infancy was more or less fine and we made it through the second’s threenager phase, we went for a fourth, assuming we knew the drill. We didn’t; our third child’s absolutely horrible year from 2½-3½ was like nothing we’d experienced before or since. But it also ended, eventually. We had already decided even before the last one was born that we were done at four anyway, so we knew that it could only last for so much longer.

So I guess the tl;dr answer would be, ignorance at first, and after that confidence (hubris?) that we could handle it. In hindsight now, I don’t regret it. I honestly don’t even know if I’d warn new parents not to do it the way we did it if they wanted to, though I would give them the heads up that it’ll be tough for a while, and strongly recommend that they get a good community around them.

I don’t know you or your family at all, of course, so I wouldn’t counsel you either way; but I will say that the people who are unsure about whether they’re up to the task are, in my experience, the people who are most up to it. The people who are confident about it all are probably going to crash and burn, and the people who are sure they aren’t up to it are probably right. But if that worry about the first year overlapping the third is the only thing holding you back, maybe the assurance that it ends eventually will help.

(Sorry about the novel! Hope that helps.)

I’m a dad to an 11-year-old, a 9-year-old, a 6-year-old, and a 4-year-old. I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but I have felt all the ways you’re feeling now and so I do have some thoughts.

First of all, yes, it does get easier. You’re at or near the absolute hardest part of having a young child. For my kids, I won’t sugarcoat it, the hardest part was when they were three (we called it “threenagers”), so you may have another year or two yet to go (though if you look at our age span, you’ll see that we always had another baby right around that time, too, right up until the last one who was the easiest, so take that as you will). But after that phase, I will honestly say that my kids have become four of my best friends. It’s a weird friendship, but it is a very rewarding one.

Second, there are different kinds of hard. You mentioned the rut, the exhaustion, the amplification of existing depression and anxiety, and the feeling like you aren’t strong enough to do a good job; that’s a great summary of the four different ways it gets hard. Not all of them get easier all at once, but they do all get easier. Kids grow up. That’s both a blessing and a curse.

Third, part of the way it gets easier is that you just learn better ways to deal with the stuff that’s hard. I needed a routine so that my days didn’t become a rut, and I needed to journal (my form of journaling is heavy on photography right now) so that I could see all the ways I was actually doing a good job. It sounds like you’re already medicated and in therapy (it took me four times as long in parenting to get to that point, good on you). I will be honest, I still haven’t really found a good way to get enough sleep. But I have it on pretty good authority that teenagers sleep a lot, so I’m hopeful that it’ll sort itself out soon.

Overall…well, I’ll put it like this: Last year, my oldest beat me at chess, 100% legit, for the first time. My 9-year-old is maybe the most thoughtful and empathetic person I’ve ever known. My 6-year-old just learned how to read (a bit late), I think mostly so he can play Pokemon for the first time. My 4-year-old is just so excited about everything and anything. They’re making friends and having a life outside of me, they’re helping out around the house, and they’re coming together as siblings.

Being able to write a paragraph like that is what makes it worth it, and what really makes it easier in the long run. Sometimes the greatest accomplishment is just keeping them alive for twenty-four hours (and I don’t just mean right at the beginning), but eventually you get new and different problems and they start helping with the solutions.

At the end of the day, you obviously care a lot, and that’s the #1 clearest characteristic of a successful parent. So it sounds to me like you’re on the right track.

Agreed, but since it’s FOSS, I’m not worried. If it implodes, there will be forks available and the migration path will be fast. In the meantime, Bitwarden is (imo) the most polished option.

Bitwarden has been great.

Oh, I remember this one. I kind of buy it.

Ok, so in the TV show Stargate SG-1, the Stargate program is an Air Force initiative to use an ancient alien device to send teams through a wormhole to planets in distant reaches of the galaxy where they interact with aliens and humans from other worlds.

One of those humans, having become a refugee on Earth after losing a war to aliens, creates a television show which essentially “files off the serial numbers” of the actual Stargate program.

When the Air Force learns about this, they allow the show to remain on the air, because that way if the story of the Stargate program ever leaks, anyone who hears it will dismiss it as the ravings of a fanboy who got too into the show, or of a conspiracy theory who can’t tell fiction from reality.

So the first part is, I think that the US Government could totally be using this to hide something really wild. Maybe there actually is an Upside Down (“oh really? Like in Stranger Things? Suuuure.”) or maybe aliens really do exist (“bro, you’ve been watching too much X-Files.”) and maybe not only do they exist but they’ve formed this whole secret subculture on Earth (“dude, that’s literally just the premise of Men In Black.”).

But see, now we run into a truly Heller-esque bit of circular logic, because with me even saying that, now the government can just say, “come on buddy, that’s just the plot of season 5 episode 12 of a TV show you’re on the record as a fan of.”

This also helps to explain why Trump and his cadre hasn’t blabbed about aliens in the past decade. They were told about the secret government program, but then they were also told exactly which TV shows and movies have been made to discredit the truth, and exactly how the conspiracy would make them look like laughable idiots if they revealed the truth.

tl;dr: superheroes are real, they’re way more like The Avengers than you’d think, they have an airtight plan to discredit anyone who leaks it, and “Wormhole X-treme!” is part of the conspiracy

That might well be the best thing that any government could possibly do to drive open source adoption.

With their budgets as they are, absolutely.

I work in edtech, and the current landscape is something like 55% ChromeOS, 25% iPad, 15% Windows, 5% Mac. I might have the exact percentages wrong, but I’m pretty sure about the order. The old Mac advantage from the gifted computers is basically gone, and though a lot of primary schools do give students iPads, Windows isn’t really gone gone; a lot of edtech apps are either web-based or built for Windows. You’re right about Google undercutting the market with ChromeOS, though.

Maybe it’s unusual for any sort of authorities to advance a digital investigation to such a point where the would be able to definitively identify an IP address and a VPN provider.