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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I was always disappointed that celebrity and character voice packs weren’t a thing for the voice-assistant platforms. I’d pay literal ones of dollars for a voice assistant with a Sebastian Michaelis intonation and theming.

    Cortana for Windows Phone came closest, I think they did use the same voice actress as the game character.






  • Discussion: you can have an “extinction event” in any ecosystem-- not just biological ones.

    For example, the abandonment of steam locomotives in the mid-20th-century, or the Home Computer crash of the 1980s.

    Similar to a biological mass extinction, you have:

    • A discernable ecosystem change, either a sudden event (the introduction of reliable, mass-produced diesel locomotives), or a measurable decline of “habitability factors” (as hundreds of firms brought cheap 8-bit computers to market, retail space and overall consumer interest saturated)
    • a rapid diversification of new and exotic types to fill the vacated niches (the cabless “B-unit” and flexible “road-switcher” locomotive types didn’t exist in the steam era. The post-crash computer market brought in new entrants like cheap IBM clones, the C128 and Atari 130XE, all chasing a sub-$1000 market that was now free of Sinclair, Coleco, and Texas Instruments)
    • followed by a shake out and consolidation of the survivors/winners as they select for fitness in the new world (ALCO was a strong #2 in the diesel locomotive market in 1950, but didn’t make it to 1970. The C128 never became the world-beater its predecessor did.)
    • a few niches largely untouched (China was still building steam locomotives into the 1990s. The Apple II series lasted about as long.)

  • Legit multipolarization?

    NATO, in particular, is highly coupled to the American/anti-Russian agenda. How much chance did Europe get to discuss the pros and cons of bankrolling a long-term conflict in Ukraine vs getting railroaded into it with the insinuations of being the next Chamberlain?

    Even Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin don’t wake up every morning asking “how can I be evil today?” They may have a different agenda than the West, but it still comes from a place of caring for their country, legacy, and position. These are not wholesale foreign concepts. They can be understood and worked with. But I suspect the sort of organizations that would get the best out of them would require certain countries to acknowledge their place among equals and be willing to comptomise their sphere of influence.




  • I guess the assumption is more that for me, a fresh install is often about decluttering as much as anything-- the five Wayland compositors, three music players, and six pseudo-IDEs I tried and didn’t like don’t need to follow me to the next build.

    In a conventional install, that just means “don’t check the checkbox in the installer next time”. In a Nix-style system, this is a conscious process of actively deciding to remove things from the stored configuration, no?

    I suppose the closest I’ve gotten was recently migrating my setup from a desktop to a new laptop. Mostly copying over some config from my home directory, but even then, I wanted enough different stuff-- removing tools I don’t use on the laptop, adding things like battery monitoring and Wi-Fi control-- that it involved some reconfiguration.


  • I suspect the tooling isn’t quite there yet for desktop use cases.

    If I were to try to replicate my current desktop in an immutable model, it would involve a lot of manual labour in scripting or checkpointing every time I installed or configured something, to save a few hours of labour in 2 years time when I get a new drive or do a full install.

    The case is easier for defined workload servers and dev environments that are regularly spun up fresh.