I live in San Diego but the S is silent. The D is loud though.

Grandpa showing love in his own way.

I still have like eight of those. I bought some smart devices a while ago that all had them for the reset hole, so I’m stocked up for life.

Metamucil is the most grown up drink. Keeps you regular.

If I were a nonbinary parent, I’d definitely go with “elder”.

Literal fucking alchemists. That’s why they built the $20 billion machine.

Yep. When I was a cashier in a grocery store, I had every code memorized except some of the less popular bulk nuts. A human cashier is way faster than a self checkout.

I can’t answer that for you. I’ll tell you, I don’t think a computer science degree is a waste.

I live in California, so any place that sells alcohol needs at least one real cashier. A lot of places took that “at least one” to be an upper limit, not a lower one. For a while there, going into Albertsons was a nightmare. Twenty minutes shopping, another twenty waiting to check out because everybody had alcohol.

Any place that is replacing junior devs with AI is probably going to really regret it when they have no senior devs in a few years. Being a junior dev in a team is kind of like an apprenticeship. You learn the trade, but you also learn the shop. Then when the senior dev moves on, you have all that knowledge and can step into the role of senior dev. If a team decides to not have junior devs anymore, then they’ll have no one to take over when a senior dev leaves.

So the answer is yes, it is already replacing junior devs, but that’s only because management hasn’t learned how bad of an idea that is yet. Ultimately, it will cost them more through losing foundational team knowledge.

You also have to hold an AI’s hand the entire way through coding something, whereas you can kind of just let a junior dev go do their own thing, and eventually they’ll probably get it right. An AI “agent” tries to hold its own hand, but that doesn’t seem to work out usually when I’ve tried it. It starts making changes that are really bad, then just seems to always double down and eventually make a huge mess.

Yeah, that’s probably true. Remember how all the execs decided to replace cashiers with robots, then the stores started losing money because a. it made stealing a lot easier and b. people would avoid stores that only had self-checkout robots and never had anyone to help you because a robot doesn’t know where the flour is. Now the self checkouts are being decommissioned and we’re going back to regular human cashiers. It turns out cashiers do more than just scan barcodes. But, upper management didn’t get to where they are by being smart.

I’ve been a professional software developer for over two decades. There is zero chance my job will get taken by an AI any time soon. Anyone who thinks my job is to write code doesn’t understand my job. That’s like saying a bus driver’s job is to turn a steering wheel.

My job is to turn vague ideas and nondescript feelings into APIs and (sometimes) UIs, then turn those into specs, then split those into tasks, then sometimes I’ll write the code for them and sometimes someone else does. About 90% of my time is turning ideas into plans, and about 10% of my time is turning those plans into code.

When I was young and was a junior engineer, my job was more to receive the specs from the senior engineers and turn that into code, but even then, I was still designing my own stuff. Maybe more like 40/60 time instead of 90/10.

Now that I’m a grizzled old man forged in the fires of task management software, I’m doing almost all of the design work myself. I manage a project that has about 250,000 lines of code. An AI isn’t going to be able to build new features into that, let alone decide which features to build in the first place.

And sometimes it’s a hot air balloon.

I’ve seen this meme format before, but never knew what it was from. I just looked it up and read the manga. That was great.

You’re just moving all the transcoding from the GPU to the CPU. If you can get Quick Sync working, and you use h264, that’s fine. If not, you’re eating into your CPU.

Current world record holder for Any % Twitch Ban.

I once woke up from the couch and noticed this weird streak across the ceiling right above me. It was thousands of baby spiders.

I live in an area with tons of black widows. I’ll gladly kill them, cause they’d just as soon kill me back.

If you’re going to dual boot, the latest version of Fedora makes that really easy to set up. Linux Mint is also a really good choice. For the love of god, avoid Ubuntu like the plague. It is not user friendly anymore. If you ever have to look up a guide on how to set up Flatpak, you’re in the wrong distro. Flatpaks should be front and center in the software center.

Btw, you don’t download installers from the internet like you do with Windows. You install software from the software app. On Gnome, it’s called Software, and on KDE, it’s called Discover. Fedora offers both Gnome and KDE. Since you’re new to Linux, I’d recommend KDE. It’s similar to the Windows layout.

Then Mint uses Cinnamon. It’s similar to a Windows layout. I don’t know what the software app is called. Cinnamon is really user friendly and familiar. You’d like it.

Then there’s Bazzite. Bazzite is great if you only want to game. Like, if you’re setting up a console-like PC for your living room. But, it does have some issues. The biggest one is that it’s immutable. That’s great (and actually beneficial) if you don’t need to change anything about the system, which you probably don’t anyway, but it gets annoying if you ever need to do anything more advanced. It also can only install containerized apps, so like Flatpak. (It can technically install packages, but they get wiped on the next update.) If you’re really 100% sure that you’re only ever going to game and do very basic things like browsing, basic photo editing, media, etc, then Bazzite would work for you. Remember to run the updater from Desktop Mode once in a while.

Since Linux is free and easy to installed, you can try out all and see which one you like. If you’re dual booting, that might be a bad idea, so instead, try them out using VirtualBox in Windows. In a VirtualBox, your games won’t run, btw, because they don’t have access to your graphics card.

If your games aren’t running well, you may need to install the Nvidia drivers from the software app. Just search for Nvidia driver, and you’ll find it. After an install and a reboot, your games should run fine.

Backup everything on your PC before you continue, in case anything goes wrong. As another user recommended, installing Linux to a separate drive is a lot easier and less problematic than trying to resize your Windows partition and use the same drive.

Final notes, some things to know about Linux:

• Windows games run through Proton. Proton is based on Wine. It’s a translation layer that takes system and API calls from the game and translates them from Windows calls to Linux calls. It has very little performance impact, if any at all.
• No drive letters: you have a root file system mounted at /, and other drives get mounted to paths inside that. This is how normal computers have worked since the 60s. Windows has drive letters because it is based on DOS, which was weird. Also, it uses a slash to separate paths instead of a backslash. Again, backslash is a weird DOS thing.
• The terminal really isn’t scary. It’s just a way to run apps that generally don’t have a GUI, but instead take text as input and give text as output.
• You probably won’t need to use the terminal.
• If anyone ever tells you to run a command that starts with “dd” or “rm”, be super wary. Those commands can destroy your system. Same with “sudo”. That command runs things as “root”, which is the administrator account.
• ”Linux” generally refers to a bunch of different operating systems with varying experiences and difficulty levels, but technically, “Linux” is just a kernel. Some people get all pedantic about it. Ignore them.
• Linux offers different file systems. Btrfs is awesome, ext4 is rock solid, zfs is also awesome but more complicated. Linux can read and write to NTFS (Windows) partitions as long as Bitlocker is disabled.
• Full disk encryption is super easy on everything except Bazzite.
• A dot (“.”) in front of a file name in Linux makes the file hidden. So “myfile” is not hidden, and “.myfile” is hidden.
• If you change systems, everything installed as a Flatpak stores its stuff in the “.var” folder in your home directory. If you copy that folder over to your new system, all your Flatpak apps will have everything set up already for you. For that reason, you can uninstall the browser that comes with your OS and install a browser through Flatpak if you want it to be super easy to migrate.
• Linux updates are super easy compared to Windows. Just use the software app, it will update everything on your system (except games).
• Linux is fun.
• Linux is life.
• Linux is love.

So one of the biggest problems Flatpaks solve is that you can have different versions of dependencies installed at the same time (in this particular case, it’s a problem, because the Nvidia drivers are huge). Imagine you have two packages, P1 and P2. Both depend on library L1, but P1 depends on the newest version, L1 2.0, while P2 depends on the last version, L1 1.0. If the package P2 is open source, you can just rename L1 1.0 to L1-1 and patch it, but if it’s not open source, you can’t patch it, and P1 and P2 can’t be installed at the same time.

It also saves developer time, because the OS devs don’t have to maintain a package for every single app that comes out for Linux. Instead, the app developers make one package with all the dependencies they need and the right version of each and push it up to Flathub, where it can be installed on every OS.