That makes no sense to me though. I always prefer physical books to any ereader, but I still stopped accumulating (new) books in my flat - they just accumulate space. I'll always love hardcopy books, but not needing them as a physical hardcopy is just better for me.

Why can’t someone else have a different opinion than you, even if it doesn’t make sense to you?

You seem to be optimizing for storage space, while others are optimizing for their preferred reading experience.

>they just accumulate space..

Can't you dontate them to a library. Or take it from one in the first place..

I just get rid of most books after reading, knowing that I won’t reread the great majority of them or need them as a reference. For the few that I might unexpectedly end up wanting to reread, it’s okay if I’ll have to reprocure them. That case hasn’t occurred so far.

I had the same problem which inevitable made me buy a bigger apartment. It's hand down the best investment I have ever done since tangible book assets give you so many different an non curated insights which you can only get from reading. You should not see books as something that take up space but rather something that free up space

That advice makes no sense.

In fact - many old huge books are epic. I remember in the early 1990s we had a huge book about history. It detailed each year with the most important events. I loved reading in it. Even today I like it.

Unfortunately I am also now part of the digital-only guys, so I have not bought a hardcopy paper books in quite a while (excluding one exception for Raymond Feist, but by and large I only read .pdf files nowadays). So I store things in .pdf files mostly. I also hate .epub files and refuse to use them.

I still have many old books here, but new books rarely come up and I only keep books I find interesting or important or I may re-read. For instance I have one small hardcopy of 1984; I think it is an important book. And a few more like that. But I barely have any new paper books.

I don't presently have any really huge book. Not sure what I will do should I inherit huge books. On the one hand, having them is kind of cool, but I don't want to keep them in a library or shelf either, so ... I will probably not use it. But I would not chop up any book, not even on a first april. It just seems totally pointless and also defeats the point of having huge books. Huge books are kind of cool. Not practical but cool.

> One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11

I see this more as an excuse used by a small corrupt elite wanting to enslave the people. The problem is that you do not have a real democracy in the USA. The current orange clown brigade shows this best (corrupt to the core), but it is not really much better with other roleplaying administrations.

Sooner or later people will realise this too, even the not too terribly bright.

I don't know why Trump's existence is evidence the US does not have a "real" democracy. As a group, we voted for him, and he went to the Oval Office. That's democracy.

There are certainly governments outlawing political opponents in the first world, but that's not the US.

When the same guy wins when he gets the popular vote, and wins when he doesn't, that may technically be "democracy" in the sense that a vote occurred and votes were counted, but it clearly isn't fair (and it isn't, it isn't designed to be. If it were fair, the people might do something crazy like vote in a populist demagogue...)

And yes, I would say that regarding the other side too.

That's just the way the US system is set up. You can't win the presidency by doing really well in the five largest states.

Yes, it was set up that way to keep slave-owning states in the union, which one assumes should no longer be an issue.

I don't think you should be able to win the presidency by doing really well in the five largest states necessarily, but I definitely don't think you should be able to win the presidency by only doing well in a couple of swing states.

> Text just doesn’t carry enough meta information for any kind of assessments to be even close to accurate.

Well, that is true, but I have seen how one japanese developer, who has had low english language skills, suddenly writes epic text. So it is clear that he is using AI when interacting with other people. This is a problem because a lot of it is just AI slop fake interacting. I don't want to interact through any AI filter; it means the other human being is not interested in communicating with me, so why would I want to communicate with an AI slop controlled human? It makes no sense.

As for software: IMO documentation is very important. Many projects lack good documentation. This is valid for both AI slop created projects and real humans created projects. There are too many software developers who hate writing documentation. I don't want to use such software anymore.

Unfortunately AI slop documentation often sucks too. They just spam you down with words that mean nothing. And are very verbose. This is also totally useless.

It seems as if software designers indeed fail hard in the last years. Quality standards used to be higher in, say, 2005 to 2010, compared to now and the last five years.

> Their mere existence makes educating yourself and going on fun side projects much less rewarding.

It's not just AI though. Look at Google search. Use it. It is totally useless now. Google crippled it deliberately some years ago. Now you'd think alternatives are better, but they also suck. DuckDuckGo? Qwant? They, oddly enough, manage to be even worse crap than Google search, which is amazing. Crapification has become the default now.

It is possible to do it over a few days really, even with not too much knowledge.

Requiring four months seems as if it was a side project, which is of course totally fine, but for any main task it really should not take more than a few days, even on a semi-slow computer (well, depends on how slow).

Well as mentioned it was in the 2000s. Compiling KDE alone took several days. Also there was no automation/script, so you really had to go to ftp.gnu.org and look in which folder the coreutils package is ;) I realize there's now a list of packages with checksums

If you're going to run the OS, you have to make sure it compiles and runs the bootloader and its installer. The toolchain could be different enough for that to fail. And you do boot into a reasonably small OS and continue from there. That's what BLFS is all about.

TBH, though, the only lesson you learn from BLFS is that value of package managers.

If you like the idea of everything being purpose built for your computer, then after you do LFS you should switch to gentoo.

"Requires"/"needed".

LFS is about the muscle memory; the documentation; the cohesiveness.

I always recommend it to people and consider it foundational to my understanding of How Stuff Works.

Whether that amounts to a hill of beans in the AI world remains to be seen.

It is more how stuff is compiled than how stuff works.

Fundamental things like how processes are scheduled are not explained by LFS.

"works" is a loaded term. LFS is how the rubber meets the road, you want how the rubber is made, for that you need something like https://www.baeldung.com/linux/processes-guide or https://linux-kernel-labs.github.io/refs/heads/master/lectur...

And if you want to get to at least the bottom most visible turtle you go with something like NAND to Tetris https://www.nand2tetris.org/

>LFS is how the rubber meets the road

Again I disagree. Way too much time is spent building software than actual practical OS development.

LFS is not OS development. You build a distribution by assembling all the components. If you want to develop an OS from scratch, perhaps you're looking for osdev.org.

One supports the other, they aren't laid in opposition, but they are different, well-defined disciplines

OK: "How *nix tools functioned together in command-line days".

To some extent I agree with you. I'd like to decouple some parts, e. g. the tutorial part is great but it should ideally be distinct from "just go at it" 1:1. I also fail to compile various things right now, which is frustrating; two or three years ago all went well. The whole LFS build up is too brittle. In part this is due to external complexity, but LFS needs to re-think what it does. It's also sad that they are now systemd-only, which further adds intrinsic uselessness. I don't need anything systemd offers; all my boot up logic is stored in yaml files and autogenerated to target formats via ruby as-is.

LFS is great. Unfortunately nowadays I often fail to compile it; most recently with GCC complaining and failing at options.cc. But I also get more issues here.

I kind of need a LFS variant that is more flexible. For instance, the part up to having a working standalone compiler, should ideally become more robust and/or decoupled from the actual LFS build process. Once I have a sane toolchain, the rest is trivial, ruby scripts solve that part for me. But the build up towards that is not so reliable. Things also fluctuate so much in the build process; I still need perl for instance, and python wants to add more and more complexity into the build system as well, even though meson/ninja is a nice combo. For some reason, the build situation on Linux is not very elegant to word this nicely. Then we also "now you need LLVM and glslang and spirv" and so forth, and so on. The complexity always increases. To some extent I can understand why slackware crumbled. How can a single person, even with scripts, keep that all working?

Or MS could have used AI to find all these issues months ago already. But obviously they did not, which is strange. These big corporations promote AI but then don't use it to improve their own software code base systematically.