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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • It’s just the normal “Pager” widget, configured to show application icons.

    I find “minimap” more descriptive for what I’m doing, because I don’t minimize, nor stack windows, so if a window exists, it has a location.
    Which is also ultimately how I use this thing. Imagine a large desk where you need to jump between topics every so often. You’d put related sheets of paper next to each other and leave a bit of space between the groups. Sheets of paper are just application windows in my case (I will open one or more windows per task, I don’t mix tasks together based on application like people usually do). Well, and my desk also happens to be very long, so I can comfortably fit a minimap for it in my panel.

    And because I really like multitasking, I’ve actually got multiple desks, in different colors:

    For these, I use Plasma’s Activities. The different colors are done by having a transparent panel and then setting the wallpaper to different colors + telling Plasma to use the wallpaper for determining the accent color.

    In this screenshot, you can also beautifully see a workspace with 5 Kate windows, which is genuinely where I shoved a bunch of notes, for me to sort through them later. 🙃





  • I get to use Linux at $DAYJOB and I have a rather customized KDE setup (basically window tiling, 20-80 workspaces, a workspace minimap in the panel).
    Usually, I’m surrounded by other nerds, who’ll ask about it occasionally, but you know, they’ve heard of or used Linux before, they know that some crazy things can be done.

    Now, yesterday, I was in a call with the legal department. I started sharing my screen and explaining my relatively simple problem. And the guy took longer than I expected to respond, which made me quite self-conscious, whether he needs time to process my explanation …or rather what in the fresh hell I did to my computer to make it look like that. 🙃






  • I mean, it really isn’t hard to write an application, which won’t work on Windows or macOS. For example, I have a little utility, which adds a text file into a folder underneath ~/.local/ and opens it in my default text editor via xdg-open, so that I can easily jot something down. Both of things are currently implemented Linux-only.

    In this case, I could’ve pulled in two libraries to do those things with Windows/macOS support. But it’s also an incredibly simple application. If you build something more complex, there’s a good chance that no library exists and that you still need to make assumptions about the OS.

    Of course, a complex applications is likely to be useful enough, that someone wants to use them on Windows/macOS and then contributes support (and pinky-promises to the maintainer to regularly test on those platforms). That’s the other vehicle how lots of open-source applications do support a multitude of platforms.

    But yeah, it’s just not quite as much of a given as your comment makes it sound…






  • You can make external tools available to the LLM and then provide it with instructions for when/how to use them.
    So, for example, you’d describe to it that if someone asks it about math or chess, then it should generate JSON text according to a given schema and generate the command text to parametrize a script with it. The script can then e.g. make an API call to Wolfram Alpha or call into Stockfish or whatever.

    This isn’t going to be 100% reliable. For example, there’s a decent chance of the LLM fucking up when generating the relatively big JSON you need for describing the entire state of the chessboard, especially with general-purpose LLMs which are configured to introduce some amount of randomness in their output.

    But well, in particular, ChatGPT just won’t have the instructions built-in for calling a chess API/program, so for this particular case, it is likely as dumb as auto-complete. It will likely have a math API hooked up, though, so it should be able to calculate a logarithm through such an external tool. Of course, it might still not understand when to use a logarithm, for example.


  • The problem is that corporations are not holistic organizations. In theory¹, a company could not have any juniors and always just hire seniors from the outside. And if your boss has reason to believe that this is more cost-effective, then they have to strive for that, even if they’re well aware that it cannot work when all companies strive for that.

    ¹) In practice, I’ve actually found that juniors are important, too. If you staff a project team with only seniors, you quickly end up in a situation, where they don’t talk enough to each other. They know how to solve things technologically, so they don’t need to tell each other about their challenges and what solution they chose.
    Similarly, you likely end up in a situation, where only big problems are being tackled, because everyone can tackle big problems and they’re just very visible, highly prioritized problems. But when you add up enough small problems, they become just as problematic.