Podcasts have always pissed me off: I can read the same text in 1/3rd the time it takes to listen to the podcast. They are good only when driving. Caveat emptor: my wife listens to hers at 16x the speed but I can't do that.

I havenâ(TM)t swapped distros in a long time. Whats it like? Any useful utilities for making the transition not awful, or do we still just make backups and restore?

Am I the only one noticing a huge escalation in the number of seemingly rookie mistakes at large companies that are leaning into AI the hardest? The internet has seemed a lot more feeble lately. I encounter pretty large bugs on a regular basis, downtime seems to be going up across multiple respectable services. I do try to not pin a convenient narrative on a series of anecdotes but it is definitely standing out to me.

Yes. And 3 days ago he fired the entire National Science Board...

How can you move the cursor in less than 10 minutes with a trackpoint ?!? I just noticed for the 1st time there's one on the keyboard I'm currently using and I tried it. And that's really the time it takes me to move the cursor anywhere.

Yup, been running like that for well over 20 years. Windows is shit and I'll retire long before I am forced to use Win11.

I don't understand why there's not more choice in laptop options. Keyboard with/without numpad, with/without Windows or Option or AltGr key, with/without Home/End/Insert/Del/PgUp/PgDown/Arrow key. Touchpad with/without bottom buttons, top buttons or nipple. I'm typing this on a 13 year old Dell 19" with a fantastic keyboard that still runs Kubuntu perfectly. I recently bought a used laptop for a family member and I had a hard time finding one with a usable keyboard.

Anecdote time: when working in the US a couple decades ago, we used to go eat lunch downtown and would take turns driving with colleagues filling our car. Once I rode with a secretary. She backed out of her parking spot brutally and without looking. It was scary. A colleague, trying to stay polite:

• Why don't you look before backing up?
• And how exactly do you expect me to do that?
• Well, you could turn your head, or look into your rearview mirror...
• Ha! they do that in the movies!

Needless to say I never set foot in her car again.

I wonder if humans are less sensitive to lung cancer than other animals: we've been sitting around campfires or in smokey huts for hundred of thousands of years, long before we started smoking tobacco/cannabis. There must have been selective pressure to survive it better, no ?

Yes, that's the one. I remembered it was a famous author. It's not as good as the Forever War (what is ?) (where is the movie BTW, it's been in the pipe for years ?) but it was an interesting read.

I remember this Sci-Fi book a couple years ago about a guy who invents a time machine that travels only in the future and when he gets to the circa +100 year mark the US is a hellhole ruled by the Returned Jesus who is clearly just an AI with violent autocratic tendencies; and the country is basically back to 30AD Palestine. And some people still want to build the Torture Nexus.

On the early 2000 I was managing several family computers, regularly full of Windows viruses and got fed up. I installed Kubuntu on them and told the users "it's just a new windows update, things might be a bit different" ! There were absolutely no issues except for a few "I can't find this program" "let me ssh in and install this out that". Still ongoing.

"If you don't verify your age, then you'll be treated as a child or teenager, meaning that both the web content filter and communication safety features are switched on."

How can this go wrong? [roblox]

Gene Kranz's book "Failure is not an option" is one of the best reads a geek can have; it's about all the technical problems they had during the Apollo project and how they solved them.

Erlang is... weird. 15 years ago I wanted to learn a new and different language and I tried it but i could not wrap my brain around some of its constructs. Then I read a paper by a guy claiming that some things were impossible to do with Erlang (with examples in other languages) and since I didn't have any projects to do with it, i basically forgot all about it.