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Cake day: August 31st, 2025

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  • I think distro maintainers need to do a better job highlighting the actually important differences between distros rather than what fancy wallpaper is enablednby default.

    The most impactful difference between the major distros:

    • Debian prioritize stability at the cost of shipping outdated packages
    • Fedora prioritizes modernity at the cost of some stability
    • ArchLinux says “fuck it” and tries to ship the latest software as soon as it releases, at the cost of stability
    • other distros like Ubuntu, Mint, Bazzite, Manjaro, SteamOS, etc are usually derived from one of those three (Ubuntu is derived from Debian)

    So there’s kind of a sliding scale of linux fear/comfort for users, and your distro choice should reflect where you fall on that scale. Fedora generally provides a good middle ground and doesn’t break often, but will eventually break things (esp if you install updates frequently), so you should be prepared to fix them.

    Nowadays, atomic distros change this up because they support rollbacks, meaning a broken update can be fixed without any tinkering or Linux knowledge required from the end-user. Also, they’re theoretically less likely to break and easier to test due to their immutability.


  • I’m not saying it’s okay for Bazzite to have shipped a broken update. That’s sloppy.

    But you really are being a dumbass here. The solution for your problem is a rollback. That’s the whole point of atomic distros: rollback when something breaks using a single command (or just reboot and pick the grub option). Why bother with atomic if you’re not going to use one of the killer features?

    And in case you didn’t know, Flatpaks aren’t part of your OS, so you can still do flatpak update even if you don’t update Bazzite. There is literally zero cost to doing a rollback, and that’s by design.


  • I wonder how many Nix cheerleaders are aware of OSTree based systems like Silverblue, Kinoite, Bazzite, etc? They provide the same immutability guarantees, but none of the pain and standards-defiance of NixOS.

    I think Nix (the package manager) is a much stronger sell than NixOS. You can use Nix to install your apps on top of another immutable OS, whereas otherwise you might go with Flatpaks, containers, AppImages, etc. It’s certainly better than adding Homebrew or some other manager like Pacman.

    For devs, Nix is nice for people who can’t or don’t want to use containers for any reason (or want to use both!). I just don’t see anyone benefiting from using NixOS except for Nix addicts.


  • Well, fuck. I just learned about this drama, and it doesn’t seem very positive for Bazzite’s future. What is it about Discord servers that turns adults into spoiled brats? Idk whether Antheas’ version of events are 100% truthful, but he’s at least one point about some of the questionable changes recently, and I’ve seen some power tripping from the Bazzite devs wrt Ptyxis and Bazaar.

    Luckily, since it’s ostree based I can switch back to eg Fedora Kinoite with a single command if things get too bad. It would be a real shame if Bazzite died though, as it’s one of the best out of the box experiences for gaming PCs/handhelds. For now, I’m sticking with it.



  • The study is about the impact AI use has on learning. Their experiment seems to test just that, unlike what you’re describing.

    The title is literally “How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills”. Memorizing APIs isn’t what most people would consiser a “coding skill”.

    Debugging, systems design, optimization, research and evaluation, etc are what actually make someone a useful engineer, and are the skills a person develops as they go from junior to senior. Even domain knowledge (like knowing a lot about farming if you’re working on farming software) is more useful than memorizing the API of any framework. The only thing memorization does is it saves you a few minutes from having to read some docs, but that’s minimal impact, and it’s something you pick up normally throughout the course of working on a project anyways. When you finish that project, you might never use that API again, or if you do it might have changed completely when a new version is released.

    remembering what you did an hour ago seems like a real world problem to me.

    Sure, humans have shitty memory, but that has nothing to do with AI code assistance. There are plenty of non-AI coding assistants that help people with this (like Intellisense/LSP auto complete, which has been around for decades)





  • In a randomized controlled trial, we examined 1) how quickly software developers picked up a new skill (in this case, a Python library) with and without AI assistance; and 2) whether using AI made them less likely to understand the code they’d just written.

    We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand, or the equivalent of nearly two letter grades. Using AI sped up the task slightly, but this didn’t reach the threshold of statistical significance.

    Who designed this study? I assume it wasn’t a software engineer, because this doesn’t reflect real world “coding skills”. This is just a programming-flavored memory test. Obviously, the people who coded by hand remembered more about the library in the same way students who take notes by hand as opposed to typing tend to remember more.

    A proper study would need to evaluate critical thinking and problem solving skills using real world software engineering tasks. Maybe find some already-solved, but obscure bug in an open source project and have them try to solve it in a controlled environment (so they don’t just find the existing solution already).





  • I wasn’t really trying to give my opinion, but since you asked…

    I think copyright laws are a good thing for everyone. They’re definitely not perfect, but they do much more good than harm. The problem (which is not unique to copyright) is that the legal system treats large corporations differently than individuals and small businesses. The recent AI hype wave has supercharged this problem, but it’s not new.

    there is actually something inherently wrong with reusing code?

    Depends on what you mean. Open source software usually comes with a license attached, which is effectively a permission slip from its creator telling you what you can or can’t do with it. Without that pernission, you’d be violating their rights under copyright laws unless you limit yourself to what counts as “fair use”. That’s perfectly fine, and I don’t see why anyone reasonable would take issue with that.

    I know there are some fringe people out there who think copyright law shouldn’t exist at all, and that no individual deserves the right to exclusively profit off of their creative works. I don’t agree with that, and I don’t see how open source would work in that scenario as nobody would want to release anything. It’d make exploitation of the poor by the wealthy even more extreme, as those with the means to mass produce derivative products (eg you own a factory that can produce paintings or whatever) would be the only ones making a living off intellectual properties.

    But this is getting way off topic. I just wanted to call that guy stupid.


  • This is a dumb take. You didn’t understand the assignment.

    “From scratch” in software engineering usually means it was written without a starting point, being based off an existing implementation. It doesn’t mean it was written by someone who indepdently discovered computer science and software engineering on their own.

    You’re trying to regurgitate a pro-AI argument you read somewhere that defends OpenAI and others’ use of open source software to train their commercial models without paying, following open source licensing requirements, or even providing acknowledgement of their source (typically called “copyright infringement” or “plagiarism” when-non-billionaires do it). The argument you are plagiarising here tries to conflate human learning with AI training, which is as stupid as me saying that downloading movies for free is legal because I’m “training” my brain on that content.

    If you like AI slop, that’s cool. Idgaf. But if you’re going to wade into the controversies and politics though, maybe think a little harder before making a fool of yourself? The people you’re trying to argue with likely haven’t had their brain and critical thinking skills turned to mush by using LLMs as much as you have.