I use it as my main platform right now both for work/swe stuff, and person stuff. It works pretty well, they have the full suite of tools I want from general LLM chat, to notebookLM, to antigravity.

My main use-cases outside of SWE generally involve the ability to compare detailed product specs and come up with answers/comparisons/etc... Gemini does really well for that, probably because of the deeper google search index integration.

Also I got a year of pro for free with my phone....so thats a big part.

same, but honestly OSRS is so good at this point I'd probably wanna be there.

invest in manual mills now, profit later.

the scaling and UI framework issues are by far my biggest pain point. I will inevitably end up with an app with tiny and/or blurry UI elements every few weeks and have to spend a ton of time figuring out the correct incantation to make it better.

This is on a pretty clean/fresh install of current ubuntu desktop

agreed. I haven't done LFS, but ive done arch and plently of other distros for a good while and I definitely wouldn't say I have a rock solid understanding of the fundamentals.

its probably a charity, no money there.

man I haven't heard anything about Vala in ages. is it still actively developed/used? how is it?

Yes, it is actively being developed.

Quite easy to make apps with it and GNOME Builder makes it really easy to package it for distribution (creates a proper flatpak environment, no need to make all the boilerplate). It's quite nice to work with, and make stuff happen. Gtk docs and awful deprecation culture (deprecate functions without any real alternative) are still a PITA though.

There's a surprising number of GUI apps built using Vala, if you've used Linux long enough, there's a chance you may have used a Vala based GUI and not even known you were. It's just such a nice language, it's a shame it's not more prevalent since Gnome libraries can compile basically anywhere.

Vala is still being developed and used in the GNOME ecosystem. Boo, on the other hand, is pretty dead.

I thought Boo was a .net/mono clr thing? whats the relationship

Vala was inspired by Boo. And they were both “GNOME future languages” around the same timeframe.

I can't wait for the town hall meetings in areas where a datacenter is coming "you want us to live next to supersonic jets powering a datacenter?"

Already happening: https://www.memphisflyer.com/southaven-residents-raise-conce...

If there's a town hall meeting in the woods and there's no Republican representative there to hear it, did it make a sound?

just thinking about this makes me itch. A lot of heat wrap for exhaust pipes is made of this stuff. Works pretty well though, just not a ton of fun to work with.

I had wrap from my exhaust system start to unravel at one point during a long journey far from home. I had to unwrap it by hand on the roadside sans-gloves to prevent it from ending up under a wheel and tearing components apart. The end result was that I had to find a local retailer selling duct-tape; Not for the car, but so I could apply segments of it to my skin to pull those tiny irritating fragments free from my inner forearm. Yeah, that itch is evil!

I refuse to touch the stuff unless its been soaked in water, and I have gloves