Doing the Lord’s work in the Devil’s basement

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Cake day: May 8th, 2024

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  • I tried out a tool that helped you do that, but i can’t remember the name. Maybe it rings a bell to someone ?

    Basically it was a dotfile manager (which you use to save your config files and deploy them on a new install), which also recorded which packages were installed on your system. It would output a bunch of bash scripts which you could customize and save on a git repo. Running those bash scripts would install all the mentioned packages with the configs you have saved. It may have been Arch only, i can’t remember.

    There’s a bunch of dotfile managers listed on this page, such as chezmoi and yadm, but i’m not sure if one of them handles packages as well.

    Realistically the list of tools you really need to reinstall on a new system shouldn’t be very long. Personally i just reinstall a bare system and install tools if and when i need them. The advantage is that you don’t carry over bloat from one system to the other. Do you think it would be applicable to your use case ?





  • “Reliable access to food” as in “rowing bands of bandits won’t burn your crops, in exchange, you have to pay tax to the king”

    Not just that. Centralized settlements allowed for pooling resources, better grain storage, and easier production of high-calorie items such as bread.

    at first it was at eye level “we grow food, you fight”

    I don’t think that’s how it came about. At first it was “we build our houses together and pool our grain so we can better defend ourselves against aggressors”, then “oh those guys at the temple are pretty good at keeping count and dividing the food among us”, then “oh this organization helps us produce surplus food so now we can have dedicated guards who train instead of growing food”, then “oh the priesthood sure became powerful now that they control the guards”, etc…

    The monopoly on violence is an extremely modern concept which is easy to oversimplify, especially in historical contexts which can be very varied. The things you mention are really local to medieval Europe and don’t necessarily translate well to other settings.








  • I don’t know any AI artists (as in someone who prompts a model and then calls the result a work of art), although most traditional artists i know have come to incorporate AI one way or another in their process.

    You don’t really hear about it because it’s all intermediate material used during the production phase. For example, as a hobbyist writer, one thing i struggle with is writing action scenes cause i don’t have visual memory and i tend to forget a lot about continuity and “spatial realism” (“this guy starts in this corner of the room so there’s no way he could grab that object at that point”, shit like that). With AI I can generate some kind of “story board” of my scene, which helps me write it much better. It’s just laid out visually in front of me and i catch a lot more details.

    Sometimes when i’m toying with an idea i’ll also have a model generate a few variations on it, with different points of view, writing style, focus etc… Even if the writing is mediocre, it gives me a really good idea of how each version could pan out, and whether an angle works or not. I’ll then select the angle that works best and rewrite it entirely from scratch.

    There’s nothing innovative about it, people have been using assistants to avoid tedious work forever. It’s just that before AI you had to, you know, be rich and able to actually pay for the labor.




  • Black mirror is inspired by the great scifi anthologies such as the twilight zone, which themselves are an offshoot of scifi short story anthologies (as in books). The formula is pretty well established, you’ll get a cold open, some rich world building based on technology, and, most of the times, a bleak and existential ending.

    Sorry but that’s kind of baked in the entire genre…



  • In french, the most common name is probably “beu” which is a contraction of “beuher” which is verlan (a type of slang where you reverse the word) for “herbe”.

    This was distorted in a movie to “beuze” , which was then given the verlan treatment again (this happens often) to “zeb”, hence my personal favorite “zebuline”. Mind you, that’s not a common name that’s a personal one I use often.