Mice can often find ways you wouldn’t believe, but they still have to adhere to the laws of physics, so you might simply not have suitable holes in your apartment for them to enter. But yeah, also quite possible that they can smell the cat and don’t want to enter the lion’s den.

(Translation: A nappy is a diaper)

Thanks, I was wondering why the side mattered for and why, at 3 AM, you need to swap a napkin.

OpenOffice has seen essentially no development since 2011, when the trademark got transferred to Oracle after they bought Sun Microsystems.

The project got forked into LibreOffice to dodge the trademark issue, but it’s the same devs, practically the same project, but now under a non-profit organization. Well, and with 14 more years of development.

So, use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice. It will most likely come pre-installed on whichever Linux distro you go with. But you can also try it out on Windows beforehand, if you have concerns.

Makes sense to me, since the technology landscape has drastically changed since the project inception. You’d probably need to start developing from scratch anyways, if you wanted to bring that up to modern standards…

For what it’s worth, being a professional software engineer, I expected that list to be at least a magnitude longer. I guess, it doesn’t include all their internal projects. But yeah, you would not believe how much shit we throw at the wall and how little of it sticks, particularly not for more than a few years.

I once heard the figure that IT investors expect 1 out of 20 investments to pay out, which feels about right to me…

Yeah, after writing that comment, I was thinking, if I do promote it, that means there’s a certain expectation that I’ll integrate or implement functionality that others want. At that point, it becomes less of an egoistic thing. And I’ll be doing more communication and whatnot, therefore less programming.

Maybe that’s the puzzle piece that OP is missing? If you don’t promote it, you have practically no extra work compared to developing it under a proprietary license. In fact, it often reduces the workload, if you can just post it publicly without having to secure the repo.
And you don’t incur costs from giving it away either. So, if you make sure to only put in the work that you want to put in in the first place, you have no disadvantage from publishing it with an open-source license.

Many people enjoy programming, you know. I’ve got like ten reasonably-sized projects and I haven’t posted about them anywhere. Because I built them to scratch my own itch, both in terms of functionality I could use and the itch to build something, no matter what it is. I’m not wasting my time, because I’m doing something I enjoy.

The political renaming occurred in context of France’s opposition to the proposed invasion of Iraq.

Jeez, I understand that self-reflection isn’t the strong suit of these people, but you’d think at some point they would consider whether branding the bombing of a country as “freedom” really makes sense.

That’s definitely being done. It’s referred to as “tool calling” or “function calling”: https://python.langchain.com/docs/how_to/tool_calling/

This isn’t as potent as one might think, because:

1. each tool needs to be hooked up and described extensively.
2. the naive approach where the LLM generates heaps of text when calling these tools, for example to describe the entire state of the chessboard as JSON or CSV, is unreliable, because text generation is unreliable.
3. smarter approaches, like having an external program keeping track of the chessboard state and sending it to a chess engine, so that the LLM only has to forward the move that the user described, don’t really make sense to incorporate into a general-purpose language model. You can find chess chatbots on the internet, though.

But all-in-all, it is a path forward where the LLMs could just do the semantics and then call a different tool for each thinky job, serving at least as a user interface.
The hope is for it to also serve as glue between these tools, automatically calling the right tools and passing their output into other tools. I believe, the next step in this direction is “agentic AI”, but I haven’t yet managed to cut through the buzzword soup to figure out what that actually means.

It’s the same thing as ternary, just without the ? : syntax.

Man, how do you even get up there like that?

Those Spectacle changes look good. The old UI made some amount of sense, if the primary use-case was taking complete screenshots, but even for that, there’s probably a single shortcut to do that directly.
And I do find, I generally want a smaller cutout these days, because you can just fit more stuff onto modern displays, some of which is going to irrelevant.

It’s just the normal “Pager” widget, configured to show application icons.

I find “minimap” more descriptive for what I’m doing, because I don’t minimize, nor stack windows, so if a window exists, it has a location.
Which is also ultimately how I use this thing. Imagine a large desk where you need to jump between topics every so often. You’d put related sheets of paper next to each other and leave a bit of space between the groups. Sheets of paper are just application windows in my case (I will open one or more windows per task, I don’t mix tasks together based on application like people usually do). Well, and my desk also happens to be very long, so I can comfortably fit a minimap for it in my panel.

And because I really like multitasking, I’ve actually got multiple desks, in different colors:

For these, I use Plasma’s Activities. The different colors are done by having a transparent panel and then setting the wallpaper to different colors + telling Plasma to use the wallpaper for determining the accent color.

In this screenshot, you can also beautifully see a workspace with 5 Kate windows, which is genuinely where I shoved a bunch of notes, for me to sort through them later. 🙃

I’m guessing, this is what a drink carrier looks like, in case anyone else is wondering:

I get to use Linux at $DAYJOB and I have a rather customized KDE setup (basically window tiling, 20-80 workspaces, a workspace minimap in the panel).
Usually, I’m surrounded by other nerds, who’ll ask about it occasionally, but you know, they’ve heard of or used Linux before, they know that some crazy things can be done.

Now, yesterday, I was in a call with the legal department. I started sharing my screen and explaining my relatively simple problem. And the guy took longer than I expected to respond, which made me quite self-conscious, whether he needs time to process my explanation …or rather what in the fresh hell I did to my computer to make it look like that. 🙃

Damn, it’s like someone in the year 2082 read about pixel graphics, but they can only find high-res 3D models, so they try to emulate it by raycasting through a bunch of glass cubes.

People here are saying that Waydroid works quite well for running Android apps on mobile Linux.

I tried postmarketOS a few months ago on my SHIFT6mq and for me, the dealbreaker was that I couldn’t get my SIM card to connect, so no mobile internet and no calls. As I understand, this strongly varies between phone models, though.
Aside from that, I did like what I saw a lot. I used Plasma Mobile and that was a more competent UI than stock Android, because well, it is essentially just Plasma with some tweaks. Felt a lot more like the pocket computer I never knew I wanted.

Yeah, I don’t care to dunk on them, but you don’t exactly need a UI design degree to see that the contrast between background and foreground is far too low…

You can make external tools available to the LLM and then provide it with instructions for when/how to use them.
So, for example, you’d describe to it that if someone asks it about math or chess, then it should generate JSON text according to a given schema and generate the command text to parametrize a script with it. The script can then e.g. make an API call to Wolfram Alpha or call into Stockfish or whatever.

This isn’t going to be 100% reliable. For example, there’s a decent chance of the LLM fucking up when generating the relatively big JSON you need for describing the entire state of the chessboard, especially with general-purpose LLMs which are configured to introduce some amount of randomness in their output.

But well, in particular, ChatGPT just won’t have the instructions built-in for calling a chess API/program, so for this particular case, it is likely as dumb as auto-complete. It will likely have a math API hooked up, though, so it should be able to calculate a logarithm through such an external tool. Of course, it might still not understand when to use a logarithm, for example.

The problem is that corporations are not holistic organizations. In theory¹, a company could not have any juniors and always just hire seniors from the outside. And if your boss has reason to believe that this is more cost-effective, then they have to strive for that, even if they’re well aware that it cannot work when all companies strive for that.

¹) In practice, I’ve actually found that juniors are important, too. If you staff a project team with only seniors, you quickly end up in a situation, where they don’t talk enough to each other. They know how to solve things technologically, so they don’t need to tell each other about their challenges and what solution they chose.
Similarly, you likely end up in a situation, where only big problems are being tackled, because everyone can tackle big problems and they’re just very visible, highly prioritized problems. But when you add up enough small problems, they become just as problematic.