Ah but we’ll never run out of electricity. We will run out of oil.

Furthermore, adding new electric capacity is easy in comparison to adding more oil infrastructure.

Want gas to be cheaper? Get more people to buy electric cars!

If it relies on SIM cards that means it doesn’t work at all with regular computers or when the device connects over WiFi, right? Seems kinda useless.

Of course, all age verification checks on the Internet are useless regardless but this Japanese method seems extra useless.

In short: The anime left a scientist bamboozled.

Milk protein can be grown in labs now:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daphneewingchow/2025/02/24/first-lab-grown-whole-cows-milk-to-debut-in-the-us/

Whoah there! I was talking about communism, specifically. Not socialism (which isn’t well defined).

Generally speaking, communism usually starts off great for the majority of people. Brings people out of poverty and whatnot. Very, very bad for the rich and upper middle classes but overall the public benefits.

Then authoritarianism kicks in and everything goes to shit really fast. People very quickly lose equality and equal treatment as a result.

Corruption is the biggest, inevitable problem because people naturally want to improve their position relative to their peers. Since that’s incredibly difficult under communism, you end up with lots of quid pro quo. Underground, black markets for anything and everything take hold and become just as important as the main economy.

Basically, it never works out. The end result is authoritarianism and deep corruption every time. Just like other forms of government! Except with communism, the pressures of the system force these sorts of problems to arise much faster.

The other side of its page in the catalog.

Some day, a lucky archeologist will unearth the one true archive from an innocent-looking tarball.

Every decade since 1999 (the year of the Linux desktop—for me) I spend a few weeks trying out all the hot new shit in terms of desktop environments. I’ll switch to Gnome for a few days, get disappointed at how much I miss from KDE, and then try one of the newer ones like Cosmic. Then I’ll play with the latest versions of the classics (xfce) and marvel that they still make you configure everything in a single file or they still lack basic shit that normal people want like a clipboard manager.

All the actually useful or just plain really, really nice/handy stuff is built into KDE Plasma. I’ve been using so many of those features for so long, I can’t fathom having to go back to a world without say, being able to navigate the filesystems on all my other PCs via ssh:// (and other KIO workers).

I remember when KDE 2.0 came out and it added support for kioslaves (now called KIO Workers) and it completely changed how I viewed desktops. That was in the year 2000. How is it that literally nothing else (not other FOSS desktops nor Windows or Macs) has implemented the same feature?

It’s not just the file manager, either. I can access ssh:// (or any other KIO worker) from any file dialog! The closest thing is shared drives in Windows but even that isn’t nearly as flexible or feature rich (or efficient, haha).

Then there’s the clipboard manager (klipper), Activities, and a control panel that lets you customize everything to extreme degrees. It even supports fractional scaling and has supported that since forever. I remember when they introduced that feature over a decade ago and it still blows my mind to this day just how forward thinking the devs were.

Monitors since forever have had a different X DPI than the Y DPI. Yet only the KDE devs bothered to both query the monitor’s DDC info to figure that out and set it correctly when the desktop starts.

There’s other features that drive me nuts when I don’t have them! For example, the ability to disable global shortcuts on specific windows. So if I’ve got a remote desktop open to my work I can send Super-. (Win-.) and that’ll open the Windows emoji picker in the remote desktop instead of the KDE one (locally). And it will remember this setting for that application!

I can make any window I want stay above others temporarily to take notes, enter values into the calculator, or just turn any window into something like a HUD (you can control any window’s transparency on the fly!).

It even supports window tiling! A feature most people aren’t aware of. Like, if you’re already running KDE, why bother with a tiling window manager? You’ve already got it (though the keyboard shortcuts to manage the tiling layout in real time are lacking).

TL;DR: KDE Plasma is the best desktop in existence across all platforms and this is easy to prove with empircal evidence.

Bismuth oxyselenide? You mean it can cure both indigestion and get rid of dandruff‽

Working on (some) AI stuff professionally, the open source models are the only models that allow you to change the system prompt. Basically, that means that only open source models are acceptable for a whole lot of business logic.

Another thing to consider: There’s models that are designed for processing: It’s hard to explain but stuff like Qwen 3 “embedding” is made for in/out usage in automation situations:

https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B

You can’t do that effectively with the big AI models (as much as Anthropic would argue otherwise… It’s too expensive and risky to send all your data to a cloud provider in most automation situations).

This doesn’t make sense when you look at it from the perspective of open source models. They exist and they’re fantastic. They also get better just as quickly as the big AI company services.

IMHO, the open source models will ultimately what pops the big AI bubble.

There’s going to be some hilarious memes/videos when these get deployed:

• Dominoes!
• Someone walking up and kicking one over in protest, only to be surprised AF when another one trips over it and they start to pile up.
• News story that reveals the “AI” behind these things stands for “Analog Intelligence” or “Actually Indians”.

Atoms lettuce break the iceberg.

This has happened to me three times:

1. 2 AM: We had left our car door open and the officer was concerned that someone had broken into the vehicle and left it open in a hurry when they saw his police car coming down the street. Nope, we just got home real late from a long flight (an hour prior) and were tired AF when unloading.
2. My neighbor’s truck was stolen; twice (the replacement was stolen a week after he got it). The officer wanted to know how sketchy my neighbor was and if it was likely insurance fraud. Nope: That guy washed and polished his truck every week. He loved that thing.
3. The officer was investigating Medicaid fraud and wanted to interview our autistic daughter to see if she had taken part in it (it involved a taxi service that she used regularly to go to appointments). When he found out she was (mostly high functioning) autistic he was basically done because she obviously wasn’t mentally sophisticated enough to have intentionally participated in any such scheme. He went from "obviously* suspicious and skeptical to all smiles and applauded us for adopting and taking care of an autistic adult (my wife met her though the Big Brothers Big Sisters org).

From a legal standpoint, my home is the most boring place possible. If we’re doing something illegal, it’s news to us! LOL.

I have had my phone tapped by the FBI too! They must’ve been bored out of their minds, being forced to listen to my exceptionally boring conference calls at work for weeks on end 🤣

How do I know it was tapped?

1. The phone company fucked up the tap. My totally stable phone line suddenly went to shit after a big news event at my previous employer. I could hear static regularly, cross-talk with police radio, and even an, “oops I hope he didn’t hear that!” Moment (LOL).
2. They sent me a nice letter a year or so later saying they did it as part of an investigation with the most terse language possible.

Yep! There’s really only ONE operating system that doesn’t do rsync over SSH. Can you guess which one? 😁

BTW: FolderSync does it on Android for free… https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.android.foldersync.lite (only OK-ish GUI but it works).

I just use rsync over ssh via a cron job 🤷

It’s been working fine for over 20 years on all my various PCs.

I want to see an Isekai where a female protagonist gets reincarnated as a male.

You’d think that after all these years of Isekai shows/movies that there must be something where a female becomes a male… Nope! Doesn’t exist.

Have them drafted into the military or something. I dunno. Any way you slice it, it would be different enough that it should be interesting.

AI adds too many details. When a person draws an anime/cartoon character they will usually put in minimal details or they’ll simply paste the character on to an existing background (that could’ve been drawn by a different artist).

AI doesn’t have human limitations so it’ll often add a ton of unnecessary details to a given scene. This is why the most convincing AI-generated anime pictures are of one or two characters in a very simple setting (e.g. a plain street/sidewalk) or even a white or gradient background.

Humans can tell when art was put together by different artists. Such as when the background is a completely different style. AI doesn’t differentiate like that and will make the entire image using the exact style given by the prompt. So it’ll all look like it was “drawn” using the same exact style… Even though anime/cartoons IRL aren’t that uniform.