What is now, cow?

Yesss... I'm so glad somebody else is still referencing this. Made my day.

I saw the mention of BEAM in the article, and immediately wanted to know more. But I don't have any specific questions unfortunately...

Well. Either "software archaeologist" appears as a profession before the time you pass away, and you get paid. Or, you die first, and then your friend doesn't get paid. I don't think they would have gone for that...

One would hope that I'd die with at least a few dollars in my estate!

You'll need to write it into your will or probate (can't remember if that's the right word) will never let it through! :)

Why would you want LLM content to masquarade as non-LLM content? I think I'd rather have it be obvious if people are going to be using it anyway.

A synthesis here is to include a "Written by Claude/GPT/whatever" at the bottom but still make it read non-slopfully.

That does seem like a prosocial approach.

ignorance is bliss. all LLM text reads same-y. that way, we at least have an illusion that this is not a LLM

I always assumed that any output from a generative model would be uncopyrightable.

And hence, if a company produced, say, notebooks whose only distinguishing feature was being decorated with a generated image, then anyone else would be within their legal rights to copy it wholesale and put the exact same image on their own notebooks.

Therefore, if a company wants to manufacture actual intellectual property, then they need to hire an actual human to produce it.

I'd love to hear if anyone knows: a) Is this interpretation accurate in any relevant jurisdictions? b) Has it ever been tested in court?

I, for one, enjoy watching the goalposts shift in real time...

For me, boot environments are the killer feature. I think it's the only mainstream OS to really support the concept. Void linux (which is great) and (probably?) the Illumos distributions are the other open source choices, but those are much more niche. Or you could bolt it on to another linux distro using ZBM, but then you're on your own.

Every update I clone the current boot environment, execute it as a jail, run upgrades in there, and then once upgrades finish I set it to "boot just once", all using the built in bectl. At no point during an upgrade is the running OS in an inconsistent state. Powerloss during upgrade? no problem, since it wasn't activated yet your server comes up with the previous version. And you can either junk the partial upgraded env and start over, or jail it again and continue.

I only wish laptop support was a bit better. But since my laptop is more of a pet, at least it can have Void.

That's a really compelling workflow. On the Linux side I've heard of openSUSE's MicroOS doing something conceptually similar with BTRFS snapshots and atomic transactional updates, though I haven't actually run it. Different mechanism but it sounds like the same instinct. Never let the running system get into an inconsistent state during an upgrade. The "boot just once" plus jail-the-clone-to-upgrade combo you described sounds genuinely clever, hadn't realised the bectl integration was that smooth. Void Linux is just a name to me at this point, might be time to actually look it up.

> On the Linux side I've heard of openSUSE's MicroOS doing something conceptually similar with BTRFS snapshots and atomic transactional updates, though I haven't actually run it. Different mechanism but it sounds like the same instinct.

I have run the Kalpa Desktop, which is basically MicroOS + KDE, and yes that's almost exactly the same setup; updates/changes are done using transactional-update, which AIUI performs the change in a new root snapshot/filesystem and then you reboot to make it take effect. Honestly a very nice system, although I eventually abandoned it because I was ultimately unwilling to run on BTRFS (which I absolutely do not trust).

> For me, boot environments are the killer feature. I think it's the only mainstream OS to really support the concept. Void linux (which is great) and (probably?) the Illumos distributions are the other open source choices, but those are much more niche. Or you could bolt it on to another linux distro using ZBM, but then you're on your own.

I think (Open)SUSE does something similar using BTRFS snapshots. But yes, ZFS-backed BEs are the best IMHO:) OpenIndiana still does them, of course, but yeah that's sadly niche.

A Brief Word About Btrfs A fair-minded reader will point out that Linux has its own copy-on-write filesystem: Btrfs. And openSUSE's integration of Btrfs with Snapper deserves genuine credit. Snapper, developed by Arvin Schnell at SUSE and first shipped with openSUSE 12.1 in November 2011, creates automatic snapshots in pre/post pairs around every zypper transaction. GRUB is patched to offer a submenu for booting from snap‐ shots. The rollback workflow is coherent: reboot, select the snapshot, verify, run snapper rollback , reboot again. On openSUSE, this works out of the box. The caveats are worth mentioning. Btrfs's RAID5 and RAID6 implementations still carry an official data loss warning in the documentation, a caveat that has per‐ sisted for years. ZFS's equivalent (RAIDZ, RAIDZ2, RAIDZ3) has been production- ready since 2005. Btrfs has no equivalent to zfs send and zfs receive for efficient incremental replication between hosts. And while Btrfs reached general production readiness around 2015, ZFS had a decade's head start. None of this makes Btrfs a bad filesystem. It makes it a younger one. And the openSUSE team deserves genuine credit for building what they have built. But even in the best case, the Btrfs workflow on openSUSE is a distribution-level achievement. It is SUSE's integration work on top of a filesystem, a bootloader, and a snapshot manager that are all developed separately. The GRUB integration is openSUSE-specific; other distributions using Snapper do not get the boot-from- snapshot feature without additional patching. The whole edifice is one team's excel‐ lent work within the assembled model. On FreeBSD, it is one team, one repository, one design, one release.

ublue and alike accomplish similar on Linux, it looks a bit wonky on the first glance, but is pretty good day to day

openSUSE with snapper does this automatically. It's far more mainstream than FreeBSD.

If the games you want are on steam, check if they are on this list: https://areweanticheatyet.com/

If there is no anticheat (or the anticheat is supported), and the game is on steam, then I would wager that it would "just work". My feeling is that it's more like 99% now. Non steam games can be more problematic (I had issues with the blizzard/wow launcher for instance, it can be made to work but definitely doesn't "just work").

Happy gaming!

Thanks for the link, yeah I'm pretty much entirely on Steam. I'll play Diablo 4 one of these years, and that appears to be running fine. Sometimes I'll try out a game on my steam deck for fun and so far everything I run has worked. Maybe it is 99%+ for me. I looked through the "Denied" and "Broken" lists and saw a few games that I've played in the past (street fighter, guilty gear) on the Broken list. Guess I could always just play those on Playstation.

This sounds really interesting! How does one get started? Is it expensive?

I think lapidary and faceting often have guilds or clubs that let you use shared equipment. I think in terms of materials gem rough material is cheap for some gemstones and expensive for others. Obviously synthetic and quartz are cheaper than natural sapphire, but there's a whole range. In terms of equipment I think the faceting machines come in different kinds with different features and are maybe circa okayish laptop prices for a used one but get much more expensive for new ones or specialty ones. I know there are at least two kinds - traditional faceting and concave. I don't know that much about how designing new cuts works, but it's definitely its own niche thing and if you look into groups that do it they'll talk about facet designs and who designed them. I think there are some books and software that folks use, but I don't know a whole lot about it.