Archives for February, 2026
Arguing with Grok 4.20 (Beta) about Fedora
Since Grok seems to be very generous with me on its free layer these days, I thought of chatting with it about some aspects I never quite understood or accepted…
SJVN and the fragile bazaar
In a recent opinion column in The Reg, SJVN describes a severe problem that open-source software is facing today, namely the burnout of the (unpaid) software developers: Feeling the burn:…
One year later, DWW is run by the same shitheads
I know I'm banned from commenting on DistroWatch Weekly. It's been years since I was not allowed to leave even the most innocent comment there, regardless of the name used,…
I needed to vent about Calibre
On the one hand, Kovid Goyal is a hero: Calibre is the preferred e-book editor and converter on planet Earth. On the other hand, he is one of the most…
Să-l sărbătorim pe Grok 4.20, care se descurcă și la limbi!
În ultima vreme am testat Grok 4.20 (Beta), pe care l-am găsit destul de bun. Se pare că pornește 4 agenți, din care 3 desfășoară investigații paralele, iar al patrulea…
SPECIAL: It’s distro-hopping time! (Is this a happy ending?)
In my various rants about Linux, I leaned towards Debian, as described for instance here. After I purchased another cheap but very decent laptop, I declared that it will be…
The law says you’re responsible for the snow on sidewalks. Why?
There is a thing that bothers me in “civilized countries”: if someone breaks their neck while on a public sidewalk that you don’t own, you’re the one at fault if…
Am discutat scurt cu Gemini despre ninsoarea din București
Începută cu o nedumerire legată de volumul ninsorii, discuția cu Gemini s-a încheiat cu o scurtă interacțiune (o întrebare, un răspuns) care s-a referit la principii, nu doar la insuficiența…
Chatbots are mostly clueless regarding the game of GO
I was visiting Reddit for a Linux-related topic, when a thread from r/baduk was suggested to me: How is this a real eye? This is an elementary eye viability recognition…
AI and more on the Japanese note.com
I just discovered note, a popular Japanese blogging and content-sharing platform that allows users to create and publish articles, entire blogs, illustrations, photos, and videos. While in some regards it…
Two Debian developers’ ignominious fight with AI
There are a lot of things generative AI can be blamed for, but some people seem to take this issue personally. It also seems to me that people are not…
Nicolas Kovacs, aka Kiki Novak, finds refuge in Debian!
Nicolas Kovacs, a veteran open-source IT expert and Linux instructor, and long-time advocate of CentOS (as well as Slackware), has authored four books, beginning with CentOS 5.3 and ending with…
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS should be renamed Idiocracy Linux
I said it before: the adoption of GNOME 3 as “the” desktop was a severe betrayal of Ubuntu’s user base. But now Canonical goes even further in insulting the intelligence…
SSDs are not magic—but YT shorts are somewhat dumb, too
Me: This YT short claims that a SSD might lose information over time if unplugged. It's not like it's RAM, but still electrons move around. However, even if plugged in,…
Reassessing the usefulness of major LLMs
I keep being disappointed by major chatbots. You see, it's not enough if such an LLM knows about those newfangled frameworks or programming languages; it has to know, or to…
Bolojan și oferta lui de nerefuzat
După ce am citit materialul avocatului Alexandru Mușătoiu „Asociații unui SRL răspund cu bunurile personale în fața ANAF”, m-am bășicat rău pe tovarășul Ilie Bolojan și m-am gândit să întreb…
A Big Beautiful Bullshit List
There are still Luddites on Earth, which is good news! Unfortunately, they have no power, and the overcomplexification of everything is going to continue. But yesterday I was stunned to…
I did say I’ll be back, didn’t I?
After the last iteration through my tables from The futile quest for the last cheap laptop with enough RAM, I concocted another table, meant to help me really take a…
A paper about the Boltzmann brain paradox, vulgarized by AI
In a very small nutshell, and quoting from Wikipedia, “The Boltzmann brain thought experiment suggests that it is probably more likely for a brain to spontaneously form, complete with a…
The futile quest for the last cheap laptop with enough RAM
In a previous post, in the chapter “On RAM prices because of the AI madness,” I explored the possibility of purchasing a cheap laptop with 24 GB or 32 GB…