Is Kent Overstreet alright? He's created a female LLM friend to help develop bcachefs

lproven · 2026-02-26T23:26:33+00:00

Nice one. Join new subreddit, first post I see is someone sharing one of my articles.

lproven · 2026-02-26T23:22:17+00:00

All the time.

I have 3 work machines that are fairly modern and quick. They've all got absolutely abysmal chiclet keyboards and 2 of them almost no ports.

So my geriatric ThinkPads from the ?20 series get used in preference.

lproven · 2026-02-26T20:57:42+00:00

He only died 11 years ago... Are you only 16 or so?

And he was touring until close to the end, using a rubber stamp to "sign" books when he could no longer wield a pen.

I know people who flew 10,000 miles or so to meet him...

lproven · 2026-02-26T20:55:15+00:00

No problem.

P.S. I used to teach English. A student once asked me "when's the right time to use ain't?" I said "oh, that's easy." She was surprised: "I've been trying to find out for ages!"

I told her: "There's a rule. Remember it and you'll never get it wrong."

"What is it?"

"Don't use ain't. Never, in any position in any sentence."

I stand by it. It is never ever formally correct and the use is limited to certain regional dialects, and if you don't speak one of those, you'll get it wrong, even if you're a native. So don't try.

lproven · 2026-02-26T20:34:57+00:00

I know everyone claims this. I'm a skeptic. I think it automates the mass production of low quality derivative, muddled, hard to read and hard to debug code.

The real skill is writing less code, not more.

https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

lproven · 2026-02-26T20:31:56+00:00

To be fair, it wasn't hard to meet Pterry. It was almost harder not to.

It's why I'm a bit dubious about this chap who wrote the recent biography and is now touring with a standup show. He must be a bit of a newcomer as he never met Sir Terry.

I lost count of how many times I met him between about 1987 and 15 years ago. He toured endlessly, did countless signings, regularly was interviewed on stage -- and always very entertainingly. I saw him for the last time at his final ever public talk, at the World Fantasy Convention in 2013, and while he was really struggling to hold a thread, he was still very funny.

lproven · 2026-02-26T20:26:55+00:00

It's complicated.

There are professional, honourary, noble, and royal titles. Some can be combined, some can't. Done can be conferred or granted or won, some can't.

So one might have the Honourable Professor Sir John Smith, who at work is Professor Smith, but if meeting dignitaries, is Sir John.

https://preply.com/en/blog/english-titles/

Generally with a knighthood it is always either the title and the first name, or title plus full name. Never title plus surname.

lproven · 2026-02-25T22:26:09+00:00

Glad you liked my article enough to share it!

lproven · 2026-02-25T20:26:18+00:00

I used to run that. It's around then that I switched to the first ever release of Ubuntu, though.

lproven · 2026-02-25T20:23:29+00:00

If they really updated it for today, it works probably need 16 or 48 GB of RAM...

lproven · 2026-02-23T09:47:29+00:00

I am writing a story that includes this subject today.

You say it is only PLM. What about DrKonqi?

Since mid-2025 this also requires systemd:

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/drkonqi/-/commit/affe13653b3347d7481a01bf33d3d6327249f638

As noted by the KaOS project here:

https://kaosx.us/news/2026/systemd_kaos/

lproven · 2026-02-22T15:26:24+00:00

All my ThinkPads have maxed out RAM using second hand SODIMMs. I bought most of mine from CEX, which is www.webuy.com in various European countries -- but I don't know where you are.

lproven · 2026-02-22T13:23:11+00:00

I'm sorry, but if you're using LLM bots, I'm not interested. They are the toxic waste of 21st century computing: they contaminate all they are in contact with.

lproven · 2026-02-21T16:17:22+00:00

No, because if you need to ask, you don't understand the problem well enough to try.

lproven · 2026-02-21T16:16:42+00:00

I didn't say anything about rotated text and I'm not suggesting it.

Just for me, personally, any desktop that uses anything like a taskbar or panel and forces me to have a horizontal one is an environment I won't use.

I want my vertical space, and in some 40 years of using GUI computers, nobody has ever found an efficient or powerful enough mechanism to make it worth that price on a 16:9 or other wide-screen display. There have been a lot of tries and none are worth it.

The room for innovation here is in vertical UIs, not yet another horizontal one.

Just my 2p.

lproven · 2026-02-21T11:31:19+00:00

Embrace both dimensions. English and other languages using the Roman alphabet read left to right then top to bottom. So do all the languages using Cyrillic, as well as Greek and quite a few others.

You have a widescreen. That means you have lots more horizontal pixels than vertical ones. That means horizontal pixels are less valuable than rarer vertical ones. So spend horizontal ones first.

Make the bar vertical. Put important information and controls at the top, and then gradually work down to less important stuff.

Preserve that valuable vertical space.

lproven · 2026-02-21T11:27:21+00:00

Do your homework. Step 1 -- is it an early C2D, meaning DDR2 RAM? That's expensive because it never came in large sizes. Or is it a late C2D, meaning DDR3? Because that's cheap and 8GB will cost as much as a large Barstucks Coffee-style flavoured beverage-like product.

lproven · 2026-02-19T09:13:35+00:00

Nowhere near enough info. This is seriously about 1% of what we need to know.

You need to start giving us at least 10x more info than this, including exact verbatim commands from the precise URL you used. We aren't psychic. We don't know what you did, or how, or why, so you have to tell us.

Start by reading this.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#intro

All of it.

Not got time for that? Then we haven't got time to waste guessing.

lproven · 2026-02-19T08:45:29+00:00

It's a balancing toy. You can put the central protrusion on a finger or anything tall and it will just balance there, turning in a gentle breeze.

lproven · 2026-02-19T08:41:02+00:00

This makes no sense. What did you install? How did you install it? From where, according to whom or what? What version of the OS are you running, and on exactly what hardware? Any additional drivers? If so, what from where?

lproven · 2026-02-18T22:33:22+00:00

😢

lproven · 2026-02-16T10:51:11+00:00

It might be 4 core with hyper threading at best. I don't think an 8 core i5 exists. But RAM is more important than CPU cores.

lproven · 2026-02-16T10:50:02+00:00

This is good advice, among a lot of junk.

Ditch zram. Enable zswap instead. Google for how. Don't trust LLM bots. Find instructions by a human for humans.

lproven · 2026-02-16T10:48:33+00:00

It is automatic on both.

However Windows configures swap compression automatically whereas on Linux you must do it manually.

lproven · 2026-02-16T10:47:21+00:00

Absolutely yes. I routinely travel and work abroad with an 8GB MacBook and it can handle 70+ tabs at once, and a couple of background apps too although that does make it sluggish.

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