But 144 is better than 100, for the exact same reason that 12 is better than 10?

There’s a reason measured angles go to 360ths, then subdivided by 60 or even by 60 again.

100 is as terrible a base as 10, and you run into it all the time if you’re designing something in metric; you can’t divide by 3 evenly.

I’d be very, very nervous about using AI for a project that big.

One of the biggest issues with AI, when it “works”, is that it’s incredibly hard to catch its errors. We have layers of cognitive biases around content that appears “written well” is most likely authoritative.

That means LLMs sound very authoritative, since correct structure is something LLMs are very good at. LLMs can write text that uses advanced vocabulary and complex sentence structure correctly. Similarly, it can write well laid out code with detailed comments and include an explanation for how and why the code works.

It all looks really convincing. It takes significant attention and effort to critically analyze LLM output to notice the errors it makes, and it’s very easy to forget that the LLM is categorically incapable of understanding your prompt or its output—LLMs don’t understand anything! They’re just advanced word (token) prediction machines.

So, on a project the scale of refactoring the entire Windows codebase, with pressures to do the work quickly, the results are very predictable. They are going to introduce a lot of errors. And end up with incompatible spaghetti code that’s incredibly inefficient.

(Somewhat technical example: Anyone who’s studied algorithms/computer science knows how easy it is to write functional code that scale terribly because of missing a small logical step that makes one factor of code operate in linear time instead of logarithmic time. Multiply that by a few other factors in the same function and your code balloons from n or log(n) time to n² or even n³ time.)

We’re witnessing the beginning of the end of Microsoft as an OS company.

Exactly. Similarly for Office/Teams/SharePoint/(Enterprise) OneDrive. I need those apps to work or Linux is a non-starter. If people could install them and they “just worked”, that removes a massive barrier to getting people to switch.

Thankfully, they work great in a VM, and the web versions of the apps are good enough for like 90% of my workflows. So I made the switch easily enough… But I’m not recommending the switch to any of my (less techy) co-workers.

It’s fun doing half a workflow in my Windows VM and the other half in Linux, snapping Windows to half the screen, or forcing Linux windows “always on top” over Windows. Copying and pasting back and forth between the two.

We’re living in the future.

(FWIW: my Windows install is running ReviOS, so most of the bullshit’s ripped out.)

Which you’re going to rip as .flac and .mp3 and share/upload somewhere for preservation, right?

Thanks for making this. I haven’t tried it yet, but I think this would be great for playing a lot of more complex games cooperatively with my kiddos, like effectively adding back the “split roles” multiplayer of Cook, Serve, Delicious 1 to later titles in the series (one player controlling tickets, the other controlling cooking.)

I don’t think all Boomers are bad. Lots care about the climate, and (sadly) many younger people don’t care about the climate, too. Hence why I clarified:

a Boomer who doesn’t give a shit about the looming climate apocalypse.

The reason it matters they’re a Boomer is because anyone younger is going to be facing the reality of climate change regardless of what they care about.

I think you missed the bit that makes this sort of maybe make a tiny lick of sense: you use this to write code that you evaluate against tests, and put a maximum iterations counter in to make sure it doesn’t go infinite.

Yes, this is still going to melt the planet just a little bit faster every time it’s used. Yes, it’s most likely to completely fail and, even in cases where it eventually succeeds, it would likely have been orders of magnitude more compute efficient to vibe code it the usual way of actually, like, vibing the code. (Is that what re-prompting is called for vibe coding?)

But it could maybe, kinda, sometimes work. If you squint your eyes. And you’re a Boomer who doesn’t give a shit about the looming climate apocalypse.

Fuck Teams. The buggiest, most crash prone mess I’ve even been forced to use. They keep bolting on new, unnecessary “features” that only selectively work on some of their “supported” platforms.

I’ve copied and pasted other people’s Bookmarklets before. ;)

I’ve had a couple decades of eclectic, self-directed tech learning. There’s no money for technology in education, so I’m always kludging things together, and there’s nobody at any school I’ve ever worked at who can teach me much, so I need to figure shit out myself.

It’d have been nice to be a junior to a greybeard for a few years, but I’ve made it work.

Just FYI, ReviOS is a playbook (set of system changes) that strips all the crap out of Windows 11 while still being almost entirely functional (I believe it disables automatic driver downloads, but it still gets Windows security updates.) I use it in my VM.

It’s super easy—install Windows 11, run the ReviOS playbook, then a Ninite to install all the essentials (including Classic Shell I think? Although I prefer one called something like Start Back.)

I know enough to parse the code, especially with the comments. It was a logical algorithm, it worked, and it was just for reformatting a page to print cleanly, so there was basically no risk if it didn’t work. I code for work, I just don’t know JavaScript syntax or functions.

Anyway, I was impressed it actually worked. I’m an AI skeptic, which is why I thought it was noteworthy to get well documented, clean, functional code from vibe coding—even in such a trivial context as swapping a head tag and removing script tags.

I actually got really clean, well commented code from Copilot earlier this week.

I have no experience with JavaScript to speak of, but realized a Bookmarklet would be a perfect solution for reformatting a particular web app for printing. I already had a head replacement with CSS to do all the formatting, and I was using a RegEx to strip all script tags.

Anyway, I asked Copilot to write the Bookmarklet to replace the header, with full contents explaining the training behind the code, and an explanation of how the script functions below. When I got an error, I asked if to fix the error and or identified that Bookmarklets work better as single lines, so it fixed it. Then I added the requirement about replacing scripts, and it did that too, but for commented and a clean one-line version.

The one-live versions even up getting truncated, so I need to copy/paste from earlier (correct) endings, but otherwise it was an incredibly smooth experience.

I spent longer writing the guide for how to use it than the time it took to vibe code it and test it. I was super impressed.

(Granted, that’s a pretty easy coding task…)

Windows Search Service (or whatever it’s called). Every time my VM completely locks up, it’s that fucker.

Thankfully, I can then just switch back to butter-smooth Linux for a while to do another task while Windows un-fucks itself.

Are you running older hardware? Something Debian- or Fedora-based, or even “vanilla” Arch Linux might be more stable for you.

Regardless, that sucks. CachyOS has been great for me, as my first Linux distro install (just a few months ago) since my previous attempt around ~2007.

Way, way back (in the 90s or early 00s) one of my friends got involved in a project to systematically play every possible freecell game to find which ones were unsolvable.

That was back when the Internet was cool.

Which is WAY more economical.

Rebuilding packages takes a lot of compute. Downloading mostly requires just flashing some very small lights very quickly.

Sure, but OP was specifically running into issues with Bazzite and needed to tinker to get things working. Ironically, CachyOS likely would not have needed any tinkering in OP’s case because updates in CachyOS but absent from Bazzite likely contained the fixes.

OP also mentioned elsewhere wanting to self-host some services—also a task likely to be easier in CachyOS than in Bazzite. Wanting to self-host also implies that OP can likely handle the light configuration that’s needed in CachyOS.

I think “unless they’re happy to reformat every other week” is unnecessarily pessimistic, too. With brtfs (the CachyOS default), recovery is quick and relatively easy. It’s also very unlikely to ever be an issue; CachyOS is very unlikely to break, unless OP really messes things up. Updates almost always “just work” in Arch Linux.

Probably not a helpful suggestion, but CachyOS might be a better fit for you.

Bazzite is an immutable distribution. This means that most things on the system are static between major Bazzite versions, at which time everything updates at once. This can be great; for someone who doesn’t want to tinker, or for someone who’s worried about breaking things—it’s very hard to break.

On the other hand, it also means that everything is running on an older version, with bugs that have been fixed in newer builds.

CachyOS is Arch-based. You can configure everything in the system, and can update all your packages to the most recent versions as soon as updates are compiled in the CachyOS repo. The CachyOS repos are fairly extensive, but you can also install most other things from the Arch User Repository (AUR). The AUR is a bit of a “Wild West” where packages may not install or work dependably, but in most cases they work great… albeit sometimes with a bit of tinkering required.

Your example of getting a “Deck Verified” game to run is what prompted this for me; CachyOS comes pre-installed with 2 versions of Steam (native and non-native), a bunch of versions of Proton (Valve’s stable/experimental, GE, and I think more?), Heroic launcher, and Lutris launcher. So, you have like 8 different configurations to try just from toggling things that are pre-installed, lol. I haven’t had a game not work for me yet.

You also mention self hosting; in CachyOS you can install Docker or Podman from the CachyOS repos and then run a Docker image. They almost always “just work” without any tinkering needed, so you can jump right into setting up your configuration/settings. Or, if your prefer a more integrated solution, just about everything will be in the CachyOS repos or the AUR (but expect to put more work into it.)

Bazzite might be holding you back a bit, and it sounds like you might not need the “safety” of an immutable distro, while its limitations might be getting in your way.

Nothing on the OP is talking about honey bees. There are many species of bees. I’m a big fan of mason bees; they pollinate like 20 times more than a honeybee, iirc.