Aside from small scripts and stupid joke images, I used ChatGPT on a vacation for extra details about the area I was in. It was when it first came out and Wikipedia and Google were obviously better for facts or finding restaurants but being able to ask follow-up questions was sometimes useful. You can be more vague and slowly zero in on what you’re actually asking about.

So, I don’t rely on it for anything important but it’s handy for a number of edge cases (sometimes, if only to figure out what you need to do a regular search for).

Lots of western companies are. Not everything is subject to sanctions — the U.S. government still buys uranium from Russia and there’s cooperation on space launches — but even the companies that tried to divest for moral reasons found it challenging, to say the least. The ones who tried often had their assets essentially stolen or sold for pennies on the dollar to a Putin loyalist oligarch.

I’m not sure what Apple is doing there besides having the App Store. They did stop all exports so any new Apple products there are smuggled and probably way more expensive. On balance, I think it’s better keeping the App Store and software updates available to Russians. Some dissidents and journalists use Apple products too and you don’t want their devices left insecure.

chown changes the file owner. chmod changes permissions. So, if a file or directory is owned by root but a user should have access, you could make them the owner or you could keep root the owner and just allow read/write access.

They come up more on servers where you often have multiple users with different access levels. Some users might not have sudo permission but do have full control over their home directory and whatever else they need. And web servers, for instance, will usually have a user called www-data or similar and it’s shared by all the users in the “developer” group.

chmod is the command to change user permissions. The numbers mean user, group, and others and the value allows read, write, execute. So, 000 means no one has permissions to get rid of the mount point. 777 means everyone has all permissions. (4 is read, 2 is write, and 1 is execute and the numbers are added. So, 644 would mean you can read/write, the group and other users have read only access.)

You don’t have to use the numbers but eventually, almost every Linux admin does because it’s faster, a bit like a keyboard shortcut. But, for instance, you can add Execute permission with chmod +x /some/file/location.

Here’s more details on the how to chmod and the historic reasons for the 0-7 system (spoiler: it’s 8 bits): https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/linux-file-permissions-explained

My favorite drink is usually a crisp white wine like Pinot Grigio but I’ll order a Sazerac or Old Fashioned (or a specialty cocktail) at nice places. At a dive bar or music venue or whatever, I typically stick to gin and tonic or vodka soda, the main reasons being just that they’re simple for a busy bartender to make and also don’t make me as miserable the next day.

In 2003, The Onion had an “article” with no text that was just the headline “Taste Acquired” and a picture of empty beer cans.

I suspect the main upside will be that you can argue shitty regulations aren’t valid. Like if Trump decides to allow the dumping of poison in the waterhole, it’s very clear that the the EPA is allowed to act when somebody poisons the waterhole.

Or maybe it’s just a Calvinball ruling where they decided the Supreme Court is the only branch that doesn’t have checks and balances. It is a mystery.

At least it didn’t break in the middle of fighting a Lynel.

The future of humanity rests on everyone, regardless of nationality, being able to ask Midjourney to generate an image of an Ewok with big naturals.

Molto bene.

print “Fine. Fuck y’all.”

There’s an awesome Afrobeat collection called Nigeria: The Definitive Story of 1970’s Funky Lagos. I don’t know if it’s streaming but it’s a good next step.

This is a way more chill recommendation but I love Mayra Andrade from Cape Verde for music to relax to.

It would have to be game changing! Get it?!? “Game” changing?!? Ah, whatever.

Awful puns aside, it really would have to be a major step up in hardware. The Steam Deck is a platform developers (plus accessory makers and open source devs for emulators and stuff) seem to care about. Even modern AAA game devs will often try to make their games playable on it even if they have to compromise. (It may not be technically possible or economically feasible but devs seem to all want to support the Deck even if their bosses have other plans.)

At some point, it’ll be impossible for the Deck’s hardware to handle recent games and then we’ll all upgrade to something that sets a new baseline and strikes a better balance — whether Steam Deck 2 or a competitor. But my guess is that it’s going to be more about hardware generations than something Microsoft does. (Proton might be nearly perfect by the time Microsoft makes a decent controller interface and they seem to be focused on shoehorning AI into Notepad and Paint instead of doing useful things.)

I got it when it came out and had fun with it. It’s kind of short, at least for an adult, but that makes it accessible for kids. And they added some (free) content later. Controls were pretty good. A little hard to get used to at first but I played it on Steam Deck while traveling — so with a controller on a small screen — and I imagine there’d be no learning curve with a mouse and monitor.

Anyway, at the price it is there, it’s well worth it. You solve puzzles by building stuff but there’s usually plenty of extra pieces so you can make something fun/creative within the parameters of solving the puzzle.

The perfect plan. The only thing that could screw it up is if the climate somehow changed.

I would take a class if I were you. Not necessarily at a college but an art, cooking, or dancing class. Whatever you’re into. You mentioned running so maybe try to train for a marathon (or whatever your distance is).

The only other way I know of time traveling is brown liquor and you definitely don’t want to go that route if you’re depressed and lonely. A class will help you meet new people too.

I ran some trail and road marathons when I was younger and trail runners are always super interesting and a bit nuts in a good way. It’s a solo hobby at times but there is a community. Trail running isn’t about your time since every trail is different. No one really compares anything except distance and even then, finding a cool trail is more important. So, it tends to be about the process rather than the outcome.

Maybe they asked Quora if it was legal.

In all seriousness, though, I don’t get that site’s popularity. I only ever visit Quora by accident (because Google ranks it highly) and it’s basically always garbage answers. And speaking as a developer, the UI/UX causes my eyes to roll back in my head and say, “REDRUM” in a demonic voice. It’s hard to even tell where the answer is because there’s so much superfluous shit on the page.

Definitely not 9-5, M-F. Most billionaires inherited substantial wealth to begin with. But executives, in general, don’t have “hours” in the same way as rank and file workers. It’s more about knowledge and meetings — well, hopefully knowledge — so you might have an 11am meeting, a 2pm call, and then a 7pm dinner with a potential investor or whatever. You don’t really “work” in between those obligations unless it’s a small company (where you probably aren’t a billionaire anyway). At most, you need to make a board report or PowerPoint for a presentation or something like that.

Billionaires who just own things and aren’t in the C-suite don’t work much at all. Even if you’re on some boards, it’s not much in terms of actual obligations. There’s definitely tasks to do but it’s also definitely not a job. So, a bit like being a landlord.

Yet another example of leveraged buyouts being bad and dumb. The “risk” may be technically on the company you’re buying’s books but it’s really on the employees who actually face the real consequences of the bet failing.

I don’t have Linux on a tablet right now but my first thought was that you might want to check into what Steam Deck users are doing with “Desktop Mode.” It has a touchscreen and virtual keyboard so it’s essentially a tablet-like experience (though it has touchpads and a few buttons, obviously, and isn’t a tablet). It runs KDE by default, which I’m not as familiar with as Gnome, but it might have more users than any other GNU/Linux touchscreen product.

Last time I had a Linux tablet, there were also some Firefox/Chrome/Gnome extensions that made it more touch-friendly. Like instead of selecting text, one finger swipe scrolled, two-fingers zoomed in, etc. like a typical tablet. Not sure if that’s still an issue. But if you do run into an issue, it might already be solved by an extension.

Hopefully, someone has more up-to-date advice. The tablet I had (and probably still have in a drawer somewhere) was an experimental Ubuntu Touch device and there’s been huge strides since then.