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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • It should be noted that linux corporate is a bit different than other corporate. Ubuntu is still open source and doesn’t track you, and Canonical (their owner) knows if they piss off users too much, they’ll just switch distros.

    But they do sometimes make top-level decisions that annoy the community (a lot of people hate their proprietary snap packages,) and have a different feel from community-based distros.



  • Choosing a distro is sort of like driving a car. If you’re not a car person, you probably don’t particularly care what your vehicle’s 0-60 is, or how much torque your engine gets, or something else. You probably just want something that’s comfortable and looks nice.

    As you learn about linux, you may become very interested in it, to the degree that you care about things like init systems and package management. In that case, there will be distros that suit your tastes. But if you don’t care, it’s perfectly ok to just something that feels comfortable and looks nice.

    The people who are passionate about linux will have the loudest voices, and will make their favorite distro sound really good, because they are passionate. You don’t have to be that passionate, though. And if at some point you do become that passionate, you will likely be motivated to learn all the fine details on your own so you can make an informed decision that suits your own tastes, so you really won’t have to worry about matching someone else’s.

    It’s good that people get excited about linux, but under the hood the distros are more alike than they are different. Don’t feel you need to have some specific distro experience to be part of the discussion: just use what you like, and if at some point you become dissatisfied, then consider changing.







  • We know cause and effect exist in the universe. We can use this to gain control of a lot of things in our world: for instance, when I push the letter “A” on my touchscreen, the letter “A” appears on my screen due to these cause/effect systems we have set up.

    However, we know that the universe is not entirely describable via cause and effect. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle precludes us from fully observing all aspects of a quantum system, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem shows that our knowledge of the universe will always be incomplete, and Schrödinger’s Cat shows us the absurdity of trying to make concrete claims about observed phenomena using probabilistic models.

    If the universe was purely deterministic and we were theoretically able to gain all knowledge of it, there would not be free will. But this is not the universe we live in. The universe we live in is one where:

    • Probability exists, so we cannot fully predict the future state of events even with perfect knowledge (i.e. Schrödinger can never gain enough knowledge to predict whether the cat is alive or dead before opening the box, because the event is fully probabilistic.)
    • There are aspects of the universe we cannot fully observe, because by focusing on some aspects we must filter out others, so observation will never be fully reliable.
    • Regardless of how much we learn, there will always be knowledge we cannot fully categorize.

    If events in the universe were fully deterministic, then free will would be an illusion, because everything could be traced to an earlier set of causes, and decisions would not actually exist. If events in the universe were random, free will would have no meaning, because decisions would be arbitrary.

    But we live in a universe where things are not immutable, but things are not equally likely. I can roll a fair set of dice for randomness, or I can weight them to create an uneven probability, or I can select a number to eliminate probability altogether. And we all make decisions with limited observations using incomplete knowledge that will only have a partial effect to affect the probabilities of future events. And that means we shape events without controlling them, so all of our decisions have meaning. We can also tell objectively based on observations that some decisions are better than others, while at the same time conceding that no decision is 100% objectively right or wrong.

    And that, my friend, is free will.