The sound of 3D printers is mesmerising. Not so keen on the sound of kitchen blenders/grinders.

Fuckin hell. I'm Autistic, but I'm not like that. Can't claim Autism for being a gobshite.

He's bang on. LLMs have no understanding of anything: they are literally just statistical models.

I'm in Autistic burnout... the slightest stress - just about any official letter, appointment with benefit agency or sometimes just something nasty on the news - can lead me straight into dissociation or shutdown. Occasionally, just having to concentrate hard can also wipe me out in a similar way. It usually takes at least a few days for me to recover.

I'm nearly 60, and this is new to me - I mean, I've had bouts before, but never as debilitating as this. I used to be able to cope with these things, even if they darkened my day.

The court has decided not to tell the jury that the trial for the accusation of burglary will result in terrorism sentences if they are found guilty; the defendants have been told they are not allowed to state their motivation of preventing the production of weapons that were to be used in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the press was gagged from reporting on it.

In other words, it was going to look to the jury like it was purely a burglary, but the defendants were going to be sentenced for a different, much more serious crime, and no-one was allowed to talk about it. This is because in the previous trials, most of the defendants were acquitted by the jury, because the defendants used the crime of conscience defence.

I'd suggest you start with a simple static web server if you're looking for a good beginner project. Use something like Nginx, and just set it up on your local network at first, then work out how to harden it, and open it up to the real internet. There's a lot less to learn for this usage case, and it's less likely to get you into trouble.

I say that, because, after reading through the thread, it seems you are hoping to find an (educational) use for an old computer. I did Linux and Unix admin professionally for 15 years, for some famous brands. I would NOT recommend setting up a mail server as a first project - it's complex in ways you will never expect, and will require learning skills and knowledge that are very specific and you literally can't "start small and build up" because a lot of the things you don't know yet will get you into big trouble. Essentially, it's not too hard to set up the server software, and your hardware is certainly capable of running this task, but making it safe and secure IS hard these days - especially with all the encryption and anti-spam setups you have to learn how to do.

Looks like there's gonna be a lot of devs who quit to be goatherds or whatever low-tech, tranquil, agrarian gig they can pull off.

Sounds like you're lucky enough to not have any sensory problems - you probably don't get overwhelmed by textures, flavours or smells. Not everyone is like that. You also don't seem to have any particular cultural or ethical concerns about your food choices. My family is vegan and very neurodivergent; none of us would ever consider steak or shrimp, for ethical reasons, and most of us have texture and flavour sensitivities that mean that certain foods are off limits for some of us. We generally buy within those parameters, but some of us really like things others really hate, so cooking can be a nightmare. In many cases, it's the texture of food that causes this - often borderline textures going from firm to soft, too granular, "wrong" like soft when should be crunchy etc.

But I bet you have some things you wouldn't try, based on cultural or texture preferences, which some people love. What about...

• Soft biscuits (cookies) - baked crunchy, but have gone damp and soft?
• Dry, stale bread - baked soft, but just dried out and stale?
• Witchetty grubs - moth larvae from Australia?
• Dog meat, eaten in some Asian countries?
• Fermented shark meat, stinky and rank, eaten in some Nordic states?
• Reindeer poo - traditional Finnish cuisine sometimes uses it?
• Natto - stringy, slimy soya beans fermented by a bacteria, very strong flavour, popular in Asia, especially Japan?
• Tempeh - soya beans colonised by a particular edible mould fungus, eaten widely in Asia?
• Tofu - bean curd in various textures, but very little flavour, eaten widely by vegans and in Asia?
• Furry tofu - tofu colonised by another edible mould fungus, eaten widely in Asia?

Being allowed to do things my way, even if it makes no sense to others. I do lots of things differently to everyone else, because they work for me, and the people I live with are respectful of that. I've had to make lots of changes recently due to being in Autistic burnout, and that has resulted in me doing even more things "my way". Sometimes, when I'm struggling with speaking, it means saying things very briefly - one or two words, like "tea?" instead of "do you want a cup of tea?" or "out" when I need to leave a shop because it's overwhelming me. Other times, it's just being allowed to do my grounding routines, like getting my breakfast in peace, because I get muddled or distracted if someone is hovering round me in the kitchen while I do it.

Because substack is a nazi bar.

In 2011, I worked in West Bromwich, greater Birmingham, UK, on Birmingham Road, where it joined High Street. The news had been reporting on riots starting in Tottenham, London, and it was said that they were spreading. One lunch time during this time, I went out to get lunch from a great Indian sweet shop called Dhillons that did an amazing Samosa Chaat, which was about 5 minutes walk down the road from our office. As I got closer, I could see a crowd and police further down the road, not far from the sweet shop, and coming towards me. Then I saw smoke, and turned around, and went back to the office, without my samosa chaat. Loads of busies with full blues and two's on (police cars with sirens and lights on) started whizzing past, towards the trouble, and this continued all afternoon. When I left, the air was cloyed with smoke, and the street towards the sweet shop was cordoned off. The next day we learnt that the sweet shop got smashed up, and their van was torched, one of many that got hit. Nearly got caught up in a riot!

Seems quite good - I've tried a LOT of MarkDown editors over the years, but until quite recently, I'd stuck with Zettlr for a long time. I've recently reinstalled my laptop, which made me look for alternatives to some software, and I've been playing round with MarkText for the last few days, which seems nice.

HelixNotes is definitely good - if I had to drop MarkText, I think I could get on well with it. I like that they have a debian repository, so I can keep it updated with the usual system update software. I downloaded the AppImage as a quick test, but it didn't work because it was compiled against an old version of glibc.

The only thing I don't like so far is the format toolbar is at the bottom of the editor screen, and I haven't found a way to move it.

This diagram is wrong on so many levels. Ozone is "charged Oxygen" (O1 rather than the usual O2) so it's saying you get Ozone out of the Hydrogen side. The bubbles are forming in a place where they can't get to the output vents, so the accumulating gases would slowly force the water level in the inner chamber down, and thus up through the vents. It's pretty shit. Is it AI slop?

Science fiction dystopias being fictional and set in the "far future".

I can assure you it's far from easy to get PIP, as I'm going through the process at the moment. It's degrading and stressful (which is the thing I've been told to avoid) and seems entirely arbitrary. The application process is opaque and assessment is not performed by medical professionals. If someone IS getting PIP, they have jumped through MASSIVE hoops to do so. If you think they're "cheating" then I challenge you to try to get it yourself. You really seem to have no idea.

I hate your reductive "if they'd just" rhetoric, whether directed at drug use or other "simple to solve" difficulties that are, in practice, far from simple to solve. You see an outward symptom as the root cause, and you also fallaciously assume that even if that IS the root cause, that it's easy to solve. And before you assume that I'm one of those people "doing drugs all the time", I'm not.

I started working in 1985, and I've worked right up to July last year, when I got ill. Prior to that, I seldom had time off sick - I had less than two weeks off in the past decade.

Just wait until LLMs are used to design most of them - they will be distinctively average.

Favorite: Debian Stable (For my uses, it was the least trouble)

First: Slackware (1995, installed from floppy disks, also a short stretch in 2009)

Current: Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) (Using because I need to support users on stock Mint)

Distro you liked the least: Novell SuSE (Used in a corporate setting)

Distro you want to use in the future: Unknown

Distro you used for the longest time: Debian Stable (15 years)

Distro everyone likes but I don’t: Ubuntu

Honorable mention: DietPi (RaspberryPi and SBC focused OS)

Over time, I've used quite a lot of different distros: Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise, Scientific, CENTOS, Fedora, Mandrake, Damn Small, Puppy, CrashBang, Raspbian, Bazzite, to name just the ones I can remember off the top of my head now.

Can relate, it's heart-rending. Had to do the same with my 18 year old mackerel tabby, Macro, about a month ago. It hurts so much, but it's the kindest thing to do when they aren't going to recover. Solidarity.

Nah man. "kill" doesn't shut the system down quickly. This is the "instant death" way - the kernel reset gun - no shutdown scripts, no disk sync, just reset to BIOS boot sequence, instantly:

As root:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq

echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger

If you change out the "b" in the second command for "o" it will just halt the kernel instead of rebooting. Still switched on, but the system is doing absolutely nothing.

I used to use this trick all the time to test high availability server clusters.

Not only can you take loans against your shares, but you can pay the interest on those loans with dividends from the shares, and because they're a loans, the cash-in-hand is not taxable, so you pay NO TAX on it. You have no "income" on paper, but you can pay people and companies with shares instead of money, shares that you can literally conjure into existence by typing numbers into a spreadsheet. Those money and shares are really useful for greasing the palms of politicians, government officials, and hangers-on so that you can get your way. You can even use this money and influence to cause riots and stoke division in society.