I’d forgotten all about Google+ until you made this observation

About how far does this leave us from a usable quantum processor? How far from all current cryptographic algorithms being junk?

That may well be the thing I’m looking for, thanks for the pointer!

You don’t understand because I didn’t state why 😅 I have enough time and energy to set up and manage containerised applications. 20 years ago I might have had the drive to set up a local dev version, manage the dependencies and set up local init scripts, but not anymore.

KDE Connect is a great idea, thanks!

Take your pick from the Linux family tree

I don’t know where you live, but if you have a Hado arena nearby, then a taster session might be a good gift. It’s an augmented reality sport which can be played casually or professionally. There are arenas all over the world.

Unfortunately their world site is a little out of date. I know quite a few kids in my area of the UK, at around that age, who are getting into it.

Hado UK
Hado World Site

This was also my first Linux distro after having used Sun’s Solaris while at uni. I think I tried out Slack and Suse at around the same time, but stuck with RedHat and related distros for about 6 years.

Interesting. I was brought up in the '80s and '90s thinking I belonged to the middle class. Tory-voting, Daily Express-reading, shares-owning parents, father a professional with his own business, living in a safe, blue seat.

It took me many years to realise that I am in fact working-class. The social mobility my parents thought we had has been quickly disassembled for mine and following generations, and despite having a ‘good job’ with a reliable employer, I live hand to mouth and can never dream of even saving money, never mind investing in shares.

From your post, I can now understand why my parents thought they were middle-class Tories, despite one of them growing up in a hugely deprived town with a very basic education and the other being an immigrant.

I had no idea this was being worked on, and the news has made my day

If you’re not using GNU/Hurd are you even trying?

One of the critical differences between FOSS and commercial software is that FOSS projects don’t need to drive sales and consequently also don’t need to immediately jump onto technology trends in order to not look like they’re lagging behind the competition.

What I’ve consistently seen from FOSS over the 30 years I’ve been using it, is that if a technology choice is a good fit for the problem, then it will be adopted into projects where relevant.

I believe that there are use cases where LLM processing is absolutely a good fit, and the projects that need that functionality will use it. What you’re less likely to see is ‘AI’ added to everything, because it isn’t generally a good solution to most problems in it’s current form.

As an aside, you may be less likely to get good faith interaction with your question while using the term ‘luddite’ as it is quite pejorative.