Very true. I have plenty of CDs that are highly compressed with very little dynamic range. Wall of loud sound. LPs, despite their crackles tend to have pretty good dynamic range.

Wow in-place updates between point releases used to require a complete reinstall? Yikes.

Sorry I mispoke. "dnf update" not "upgrade." As for "upgrade" I assume that's a full OS replacement. dnf update just updates packages[1] like apt does on debian and ubuntu. Always the latest point version. AlmaLinux 9.7, etc. On Mint though apt sticks within the minor version near as I can tell unless you change the apt.sources.

I guess I just don't see the logic in the way Mint does it. I think they'll have to abandon this practice of supporting older point releases going forward as it just burdens developers who are already maintaining the older LTS versions of Mint anyway (such as 20). While we're on the topic of Mint being trouble.

[1] full system upgrades are possible with dnf... I've used dnf to upgrade continuously from Fedora 37 through 43, usually skipping one or two versions at a time, and using ZFS on root. Yes I like to live dangerously. I do it in single user mode usually, and always ZFS snapshot the root file system.

Well go to mint's website. They have no less than four versions of 22 listed. Why? Why should you need backups to go from 22.1 to 22.2 to 22.3? Why do I need an "in-place upgrade?" Doesn't make any sense to me. As far as I know the last computer I set up for someone with Mint 22 is probably still on 22.1 or whatever it was when I set it up. I don't understand at all the need for a manual step to bump between minor versions. Ubuntu has no such thing. And the RHEL world where I spent my professional career does have minor versions but a simple dnf upgrade always means you've got the latest point version without any scary warnings. Like I said I've never understood why Mint does it this way.

I never did figure out Mint's versions. Like what's the difference between 22.1, 22.2, and 22.3? Seems like all three versions exist at once and most updates are within the minor point version. Last I had Mint it wasn't an automatic one-click upgrade between, for example, 22.2 and 22.3? That kind of gave me pause when installing it for people.

My laptop is in dire need of a refresh (Ubuntu 20.04 believe it or not). I'm thinking of going back to LMDE instead of regular Mint. Although would be nice to have ZFS support, so maybe Mint 22.3?

You were there this last year? Achieving a 95% reduction in air pollution over 2013 is pretty darn good and it's mostly from the government pushing EVs. Downside is the poor rural areas freeze in the winter because they can no longer get coal and the CCP doesn't care.

Not that many years agon air pollution was horrible in Beijing. Not so much anymore. Air quality is quite good I am led to believe. Electric scooters displacing dirty two strokes certainly helped a lot.

Same story in a few other major cities in China.

Sure as soon as a developer at Anthropic uses a couple dozen parallel Claude agents and burns through $50k of compute time. No problem. It's the future.

Sure. A less popular browser like Firefox.I get blocked for no reason by cloudfare at least once a week.

It's all about gate keeping. More and more of the internet is behind cloudfare, so if cloudfare blocks you from accessing a site, there's very little you or the site you're trying to access can do. There's no one at cloudfare that a mere browser user can talk to to find out why they were blocked. So between the big search engines and cloudfare, they essentially control the modern internet. Cloudfare solves one of the problems of internet vandalism by absorbing and blocking DDOS attacks, but it comes a pretty high cost.

Possibly, but it definitely means he hasn't spent any significant time with it. Pay $20 and try it for a month and then post about how awful it is.

My initial experience with Claude wasn't great. In fact it completely failed at the task I gave it. But later on I began to use it in more specific ways---here's my code, can you modify it to do foo, and add a feature bar---and it really began to work for me. Was pretty incredible actually. And I began to use it to teach me and explain parts of the API to me, complete with examples based on the code I already had. And it's pretty good at helping you quickly get up to speed with code you've never seen before. Plan mode is also a key to success. I now use Claude regularly as an assistant.

Claude is also a pretty good debugging tool. Over the past couple of months I've run into problems with my code that I banged my head against for hours, knowing it was probably something simple and obvious but I couldn't see it. Finally I told Claude what was happening and had it analyze the code and more often than not it found the problem with my logic, even pointing out something in another part of the program that I hadn't considered that caused the problem.

I do very little vibe coding, but I have used Claude to add features I needed to an OBS plugin. I also used it to modify a flutter app to add complementary features to communicate with my modified OBS plugin. I have no experience in flutter or dart. But I did review the changes Claude made and they were quite reasonable.

Claude isn't perfect or all that creative, but it still is a game changer. 90% of what programmers do isn't novel or ground breaking, but just putting together existing parts in new ways that fill a need. Claude is very good at assisting in this. The only downside is Claude is fairly expensive. I can only use it for about 1 hour before I hit my 5 hour limit. And if I was to use it heavily the Pro account wouldn't last very long in a week. $100 for the max account is pretty expensive.

I'm looking at other models that are improving all the time. OpenCode cli (not too bad) with Kimi 2.5 Thinking, Qwen3. Not quite as good as Claude but still darn useful. I'm tempted to get hardware to run Qwen3 locally. Probably AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395-based system. Seems a bit ludicrous how expensive they are for what is basically gaming laptop hardware. And I expect the price to jump in the next month, maybe even double by the end of the year.

Have you actually used Claude Code?

In my experience Claude is more efficient and better at coding in some languages more than others. For example, C#, Python, anything javascript (react, frameworks, etc), Rust work well. A combination of a lot of source material to steal from, and expressiveness of the languages make Claude more efficient.

While Claude is quite good at C++ and Qt also, it burns a lot more money there. I think that's because every thing you want to do involves working with two or more files at once (header files, cpp implementation file, CMakeLists.txt). Burns a lot of tokens very quickly just reading in all the files it needs to to analyze the code and make changes.

That said, I still find Claude very valuable, but I am actively looking at the competition such as Kimi K2.5.

In the west we're used to driving with relatively little driver to driver communication other than signal lights and brake lights. In countries where drivers use horns more, it really does increase communication between drivers about intention and whether or not another driver is willing to accomodate. For example in one country spent time in, to change lanes you signal (sometimes) but you usually just put your nose into the gap and honk. If the other driver is okay with that---and courtesy and etiquette means they most often are, they will let you in. If not, they honk twice back. It makes for a more orderly system in heavy traffic, if more noisy.

If you come to North America and do that, it will not end well. Horns mean little to North American drivers other than FU or get out of my way, idiot. And they are always in a hurry to get to the next light. Courtesy and etiquette are just not a thing, although maybe self-driving cars will fix that!

I'm not convinced we'll get to 1 million satellites before kessler syndrome is triggered. Kessler's group just barely released a report using updated numbers and it's not looking good at all. We're way past the threshold. It's just a matter of time now, for the 500km zone.

It's very interesting that supporters of this administration have been saying loudly for nearly 10 years that the epstein files indict prominent Democrats including the Clintons. Because democrats are all pedophiles. You'd think they'd be champing at the bit to get even highly selective evidence of that out there. But they continue to resist doing even that, which is quite telling about the guilt of one man in particular.

As for Gates, Clinton, and every other rich and powerful person to have associated with epstein, I have a hard time believing anyone could associate with epstein without getting a pretty strong whiff of a putrid smell. They had to know at least some of what he was up to, if not buying some of it. They might not have know the full extent of his abuse of children, but they had to have known some of it. No one who associated with Epstein is innocent or completely ignorant.