AI? Look, I helped a friend fix a new install. It wasn’t Linux fault, it was a setting in the bios that needed to be changed. But the AI had them trying all sorts of things that were unrelated, and was never going to help. Use with a grain of salt.

I have the same experience but sometimes it was even worse; Sometimes the AI would confidently recommend doing things that might lead to breakage. Personally I recommend against using AI to learn Linux. It’s just not worth it and will only give new users a false impression of how things work on Linux. People are much better off reading documentation (actual documentation, not SEO slop on random websites) or asking for help in forums.

It has a green lock icon with the word “Private” next to it so it’s fine bro.

arch-meson is a small wrapper script for meson:

$ cat /usr/bin/arch-meson
#!/bin/bash -ex
# Highly opinionated wrapper for Arch Linux packaging

exec meson setup \
  --prefix        /usr \
  --libexecdir    lib \
  --sbindir       bin \
  --buildtype     plain \
  --auto-features enabled \
  --wrap-mode     nodownload \
  -D              b_pie=true \
  -D              python.bytecompile=1 \
  "$@"

You’ll have to upload the image for that to work.

Support for Loongson’s Chips was mainlined a little while ago in both GCC and the Linux Kernel so I’m hopeful. If the Kernel devs suddenly start refusing to merge stuff from Chinese Hardware makers that will only create a soft-fork of the Kernel and they’d just tell everybody to use their fork. In fact, Loongson did fork both the Linux Kernel and GCC to modify them in the first place until eventually their modifications got accepted. Even I myself am actually running a Kernel that I modified because there are certain things I disagree with. Also let’s not forget that Linux isn’t the only FOSS UNIX-like out there.

Viewing an image? Ask copilot to generate what it thinks the image looks like.

And then you try to open the image file on a non-Windows system and discover that it’s actually just a text file with a prompt. Your actual Image is now part of copilot’s training data and you’ve agreed to this by accepting the Windows EULA.

“Save storage space with copilot!”

I haven’t touched Windows in years and every time I take a peek at the current state of Windows I’m horrified and ask myself “How do people put up with this?”.

It’s his Pixelfed Account on the pixelfed.social Instance: https://pixelfed.social/Yogthos

deleted by creator

One time I asked DeepSeek for guidance on a more complex problem involving a linked list and I wanted to know how a simple implementation of that would look like in practice. The most high level I go is C and they claim it knows C, so I asked it to write in the C language. It literally started writing code like this:

void important_function() {
    // important_function code goes here
}

void black_magic() {
    // Code that performs black magic goes here.
}

I tried at least 2 more times after that and while it did actually write code this time, the code it wrote made no sense whatsoever. For example one time it started writing literal C# in the middle of a C function for some reason. Another time it wrongly assumed that I’m asking for C++ (despite me explicitly stating otherwise) and the C++ it produced was horrifying and didn’t even work. Yet another time it acted like the average redditor and hyper focused on a very specific part of my prompt and then only responded to that while ignoring my actual request.

I tried to “massage” it a lot in hopes of getting some useful information out of it but in the end I found that some random people’s Git repos and Stackexchange questions were way more helpful to my problem. All of my experiences with LLMs have been like this thus far and I’ve been messing with them for 1+ years now. People claim they’re very useful for writing repetitive or boiler plate code but I am never in a position where I’d want or need that. Maybe my use cases are just too niche lol.

A few days ago I was configuring some software where it’s difficult to find good documentation about so I decided to ask DeepSeek. I described what I’m trying to do and asked if it could give me an example setup so I can get a better understanding. All it did was confidently make shit up and told me things that I already knew. And that’s only the most recent example. I have yet to find LLMs be a useful tool.

That’s only been my experience with software that depends on many different libraries. And it’s extra painful when you find out that it needs hyper specific versions of libraries that are older than the ones you have already installed. Rust is only painless because it just downloads all the right dependencies.

Some old software does use 8-Bit ASCII for special/locale specific characters. Also there is this Unicode hack where the last bit is used to determine if the byte is part of a multi-byte sequence.