Ya wayland v x11. I ended up having to sideload xcfe+x11 just to do 1) video streaming work 2) kicad
one was a permissions/capability issue, but the other was straight up performance. As someone said above, an AI agent drilled down on both workstreams immediately, so the pivot wasnt too rough
Yeah I hate the term "sideload", but I'm guessing they meant it in the sense that they installed a separate DE within a distro designed around its original DE. Ideally, the DE that ships with a distro should be able to solve problems like video streaming and KiCAD with relative ease in the year 2026. Although I'd be curious as to why exactly that person decided they needed to change their setup in that way, I also can't say I'm entirely surprised that they would end up needing to do something like that.
The idea of a distro being "designed" around a particular DE has always annoyed me too. I'd hear people saying they wanted to try KDE so they wiped Ubuntu and installed Kubuntu instead and it's like, buddy you could have just... installed KDE. I know some specialized distros are really all about shipping a nicely-configured setup for their specific DE, but your old standbys like Debian, Redhat, Arch, Slackware, these are all infinitely flexible.
The idea, I think, is to provide a sense of GUI unity that Windows and Mac mostly provide. While it's nice in principle, the reality is you're going to install other software, and it's often going to use GUI libraries that don't perfectly match or match at all with your Linux DE. Personally, I've never found the need for a system to be designed so heavily around a DE. Like you said, it's entirely feasible and relatively straight forward to download Debian or whatever distribution and install a DE and chances are it will work ask expected. Well, until you perform an update/upgrade and boot to a black screen, but that's a different story. Once you've got your kernel and init system of choice, you can pretty much do anything you want. A premade DE is hardly even needed if you have a modest familiarity with how Linux works. The only downside is the added work from setting it up and debugging it, but people who use Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, XFCE, MATE, LXDE, and so forth, end up doing that anyway eventually.
It’s not hard to rectify at all. Once you accept that we (humans) are not logical or consistent, and you couple that with the gobs of money these companies pay, blamo.
It’s not even hack though. I have my model and agent self modify its running parameters, thus self service, on commodity hardware. I have it run other models and other software. there is agent model autonomy here, and it’s not even complicated. A harness is kilobytes, a model is gigabytes, and networks are abundant. Moving the pieces is easy and cheap.
With these properties alone the virus like replication of intelligent actors isn’t hard to imagine at all.
Maybe in the future, but right now, in my understanding, we have two things:
- frontier models, which might be smart enough to self-replicate, but are also far larger than a few GB and need enormous amounts of VRAM to operate at any reasonable speed.
- local models which can run on your mac or high-end gaming PC, but which are simply too dumb to self-replicate (without being explicitly instructed to do so).
I don't think we have something that is both small enough and smart enough to operate like a virus yet.
(Edit: well, there is a third option: A frontier model could replicate itself on a CPU machine, ditch the VRAM and just accept that the replicants will be r e a l l y r e a l l y s l o w. That would be sort of hilarious, but maybe not completely harmless if the replication stays undetected and they could keep spreading. It would be a "smoldering ember" kind of situation - and a million machines each running at 0.001 tok/s is still 10.000 tok/s as a whole.)
- Multiplayer Mario Builder 64, via Coop DX. Pretty much done, with playtested macos builds.
- Adding bezier curve support, adding Western duplex support, to kle-ng for keyboard fab. Wanted to build a BIG keyboard, but get ergo support and the pcb gen working for non trivially large builds
Compile to js target and leverage v8 compiler cache? I dunno, just riffing. You’re probably BEAMing vs js runtime-ing for server workloads, but periodically i compile to node and do stuff
one was a permissions/capability issue, but the other was straight up performance. As someone said above, an AI agent drilled down on both workstreams immediately, so the pivot wasnt too rough
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