I fear with Mental Health we are falling into the trap of assuming people are more uniform than they are. For any aspect of health other than the brain, we can e.g. assume for the most part that two different people's biceps work in roughly the same way, two people's kidneys work in roughly the same way, two peoples blood likewise (though one must take care with e.g. blood type). This is the case even up to the level of individual neurons, which basically sum their inputs and ping if a threshold is exceeded. But when things depend upon how those 80bn neurons are configured, this changes. We hit a combinatorial explosion of possibilites, far too numerous to contemplate having any kind of representative sample of them. So scientific approaches that assume a representative sample will fail when one cannot ignore the complexity of the brain and the degree to which two different brains, even if trained on identical training sets (and with each person's life taking a different course, we don't even have that), can be wired very differently.

Just my thought at least. So when it comes to efficacy of microdosing, it's a case of either do the experiment or don't. But it may not be possible to predict the effect of Alice microdosing, given only observations of what happened when Bob and Charlie did. It may, but one should be careful not to assume a uniformity that isn't there.

I only use free AI like Gemini and ChatGPT, and only for small programs (generally Python or bash, at most a few 100 lines long). It's great as a timesaver, and as a search and learning tool.

The thing is, you have to learn how to precisely tell the AI what you want, if you want to get what you actually want. Then, if you want to modify it, you basically have to prompt the AI to make changes. In the case of e.g. Gemini, once your session is done, you kind of have to start from scratch with the prompts. Hence I record what prompts I use at the start of every script.

Modifying AI output is akin to making changes to the output of a transpiler. Say your compiler takes some high level language and outputs C, and you modify the C. If you want to go back to the high level language, then you have to make your C tweaks all over again. Which is time consuming.

I guess Linus is using this project as a means to have a play with vibe coding on a project where it doesn't matter in a critical way if it works or not. But I think it worth looking at AI prompting as a bunch of new programming languages. You still have to carefully think what you want the computer to do, it's just that the AI saves you a lot of time googling around for packages and looking things up in the docs. Provided you can read and check, or somehow test, what an AI gives you, there's not that much of a problem. It's when you are really vibe coding and don't know how to read the AI output, nor test it for correctness. that the problems seep in.

Standard markdown I'm not sure. But many implementations have features hacked in. My wiki uses Parsedown as the renderer, which passes raw html through. Then it's wrapped in a preprocessor for things like turning WikiWords into links in the old school Wiki way, and a growing list of other tasks.

As an exercise, try typing 10 headers using
## Markdown
and then the same typing
<h2>HTML</h2>

I find Markdown far easier to type. And far easier to read the source format.

A bad movie in a different aspect ratio is still a bad movie.

A problem many developers for Linux have is what distros to target and test for. Steam OS has the potential to be _the_ reference platform for porting games to Linux. Then, once something runs under SteamOS, other distros can work out what they need to do in order for those same games to work on their distro, assuming they're interested in games.

Some of the bad HP's non consumer stuff, like Z workstations, aren't that bad. They can't peddle rubbish to IT departments as easily as they do to customers in places like PC World.

In the case of this, the experiment will be done. If it works well, better ones will come along. This one looks like it has a terrible keyboard: unlike Thinkpad T's, which are lovely, this thing doesn't look like a keyboard I'd like to do much with. So I'd plug another keyboard into it to work, which is silly. But that's kind of the story with HP's elite stuff, like Dell's office stuff. And anything marketed to your average consumer is always rubbish anyway.

It's not beyond them to add the missing OO stuff to Rust, or at least their fork of it.

KDE isn't so bloated that it doesn't run on a 2010 laptop with a first gen i5 and 4GB RAM. Sure that laptop struggles with Chrome and heavy websites, but that is an issue with modern websites, not KDE. I do think there's plenty of room for improvement but when on Windows or Mac, I miss the various KDE and Linux niceties and customisations I'm used to.

An interesting experiment I did on a Lenovo T450 (4th gen i5, 16GB RAM) was to disable all but one core and throttle that core to 800Mhz. Still usable, if a little sluggish. Overall KDE is a nice balance when it comes to features and bloat.

I have KDE under Wayland (kubuntu) on this laptop, and KDE under X11 on others. I barely notice the difference (the main one being that this is KDE 6 whereas the X11 ones are using KDE 5).

I did most of my window manager hopping in the late 90s. Before KDE got the point where I jumped to it, I daily drove Windows and only ran Windows on server machines. Then about 3 years ago I gave KDE another spin and things rapidly changed. Now I only use Windows for creative apps for music and graphics which don't exist on Linux.

I'm no economist. But the way I see it, companies making 100m's out of such trading are extracting 100m's of realisable value from the economy while contributing nothing materially back to it. What does society gain in return for the 100m's these traders make from trading?

Previously you had to engage image mode to do an image search. Now you can Ctrl-V an image into the normal search box.

One thing in favour of Windows 10 adoption was how badly Windows 8 sucked. I mean, people were buying PC's with a license to downgrade to Windows 7. Windows 10 doesn't suck as badly as Windows 8, and arguably doesn't suck as badly as Windows 11 either.

Imagine a headline: "Car driven by human hits dog, igniting safety concerns over allowing humans to drive cars."

It's silly. You'd laugh. It is equally silly to talk of 'self driving car hits dog' in the same way.
The question that matters is whether or not a self-driving car is less likely to hit a dog than a human driven car.
Improving standards of self-driving car software and hardware is in the same bucket as improving driver discipline.
And there are many drivers with poor discipline who are more likely to hit a dog than a self-driving car.

Companies more interested in their own profit than the defence or their country. What a shining example of loyalty, and asking 'not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country'. Corporate greed will be the death of America.