Funnily enough the terminal which was the reason people said linux is too much of a hassle is the very thing that now makes it so you can easily fix your computer with natural language.
Sure the problem is it will still come with problems out of the box but that's mostly on laptop manufacturers. At least now you can easily fix them with an agent.
For me it's much more fun to tell my computer what I want and to get it than to scroll through a settings GUI but to each his own
That's what KDE (and gnome, to a lesser extent) have been trying to do for a long while.
The fundamental issue is that a GUI is a static abstraction over a CLI that allows for millions of potential combinations. You can only expose so many options in a menu before the interface becomes completely unusable.
To expand on your analogy, it’s like running a restaurant that only uses automated vending machines to serve food. It works perfectly fine if someone just wants toasted bread. But the moment a customer asks for more than toasted bread, you're toasted.
Imho, the best bet for the future is a bunch of pre loaded llm skills and clis an agent can work with: getting the chef to use pre-approved hardware, sorta, that can cook up anything that is needed.
> The fundamental issue is that a GUI is a static abstraction over a CLI that allows for millions of potential combinations. You can only expose so many options in a menu before the interface becomes completely unusable.
But is that an issue? Macs have had this solved for almost half a century: You expose things in the GUI that normal people need, not everything. For hackers, they can still go to the command line to hack.
> > The fundamental issue is that a GUI is a static abstraction over a CLI that allows for millions of potential combinations. You can only expose so many options in a menu before the interface becomes completely unusable.
>
> But is that an issue? Macs have had this solved for almost half a century: You expose things in the GUI that normal people need, not everything. For hackers, they can still go to the command line to hack.
Good point. I'd say, Linux has inherent complexity across multiple dimensions (less hardware integration, multiple stacks (is it running systemd-networkd ? Or maybe dns
macOS also exposes more advanced things through the GUI but not by default. Its largely undiscoverable, but holding option before clicking something generally offers more options (e.g., hold option and click wifi in the menu bar to get all the detailed connection information).
I like that method, keeps the default GUI clean but still offers GUI options for most things if you know where to look.
I agree but its becoming increasingly clear that "chatbot-as-the-CLI" is likely a "worse is better" situation. It's clearly crappier and slower than just hitting a button, but everyone knows what they want and they know how to put it into text. CLIs in the past never could cope because they relied on exacting, esoteric syntax, so mere mortals had to learn a lot about how to translate what they want "Send a copy of this photo to my friend Sally". So a button is abstracted that says "Send" and "Attach" and some file-based metaphor is built up to allow the work to map better to what people know and understand and can intuit.
My mom can't find the button in the GUI though, and odds are it would be buried in menus she'd get lost in. She can type "Send Sally this picture" into a box and hit go. Anyone literate can.
One thing that's been really useful for many years is the Help menu in MacOS. You click it and start typing the command you are looking for, and MacOS conveniently opens the menu and any submenus and shows you the command with a big blue arrow. Wouldn't this be easy to pair with a simple AI, so that people can more freely type what they want to do? Maybe even make it Spotlight accessible.
I like the visual and thus get along much better with drag-and-drop than any text based interface. So for me (and maybe your mom) the best solution would be that Sally was a window you could open and drag things to. Surprised that Apple and nobody else ever did this on desktop. At least on iOS, your friends are pictures that appear whenever you press share, but it's not perfect.
There are some corn/rice pastas that are pretty close to the real deal. Sure a seasoned pasta officianado could tell the difference, but we have gluten intolerant in the house so predominantly eat gluten free pastas. Never had a visitor or kids friends complaining (and kids will complain about anything). Happily chow down. There are also some pretty good grain free varieties made from tapioca and egg, we get lasagne sheets that are approved of by the only real Italian I known, they maintain the chewy/rubbery texture of lasagne well.
You don't need the wheat protein 'gluten' to make pasta at all.
You do need some kind of protein. Carbohydrate hydration is a reversible process whose other endpoint is a solution, while (most) protein coagulation is a non-reversible polymerization process that creates an insoluble matrix. The less protein is available, the easier it is to "overcook" pasta into goop and then a starchy beverage. You see it in cooking the two common varieties of 'normal pasta' already - egg durum wheat pasta has more protein than pure durum wheat pasta, and is much harder to overcook.
I recently found some pasta made with 100% red lentils, rice or peas, which is really good, I can gladly offer it to people.
They cost a premium but the state gives us around 100€ a month to spend, and I don't eat that much gluten free stuff.
Pizza on the other hand makes me sad ;(
Gluten-free cooking has come a long way since I was a five year old with celiac eating bread with the texture of cardboard! For pizza check out the America's Test Kitchen's recipe, which apparently gets pretty close (however it might be off, I've never had wheat pizza! haha):
Personally I do a 'lazy pizza' which is just a really basic primitive bread (like how people would have made bread before yeast):
The original recipe was:
- 8oz doves farm self raising flour (or any celiac self raising flour. but doves is the og and the best IMHO)
- 1 large or medium egg
- 1 tsp baking powder
- cold water to mix (alternatively: a cup and a bit of water with 1tsp chia seeds in it, you want them in the water for about 10 - 20 minutes with regular (regular!) stirring. stirring every time they kinda coalesce at the bottom. it should look like frogs spawn by the time you're through.)
Oil pan well, put soft dough in (you want it like. soft enough that it starts to spread just a little. but not so wet that it's spreading a lot. you do NOT want it as dry as a normal non-celiac bread because there is no gluten to hold on to the water). flatten with oily silicon brush, then top. cook at 180°C for 20 minutes or so. You might want to cook it a little before topping if your toppings are cooked already. And honestly, I just eyeball the cooking time based on how it behaves.
The chia seeds help make it a little chewy, which apparently is part of how pizza dough usually reacts, as well as pulling and stabilising any moisture so it doesn't get soggy.
I really like the Open Nature (Safeway/Von's store brand) cauliflower crust. No one believes me because it's a store brand but I've actually hooked some people on those that don't have any gluten restrictions. I haven't found a branded one that's better.
I've found the hardest thing is to get a really soft, fluffy bread or cake. You really need the bonding strength of gluten to hold up a structure like that. So a nice airy New York style pizza crust is out, but thin crispy crusts are doable.
The very article you're commenting on says "gluten free" pasta (or at least the one type of Barilla spaghetti they tested) becomes the "real deal" when boiled with salt, which you should be doing anyways.
I buy Jovial which is a just straight brown rice flour and as long as you cook it right (which in Albuquerque is a problem with wheat pasta too) it's great.
I remember flying in the 80s (and early nineties in parts of Europe) and always got 'air-sick' which made flying awful. Only after smoking was banned did I realise I wasn't motion sickness but it was instead poisoning from the smokers around me. My parents would book non-smoking seats and we'd be 1 row in front of the smokers...wild times
Apparently glm5.1 and qwen coder latest is as good as opus 4.6 on benchmarks. So I tried both seriously for a week (glm Pro using CC) and qwen using qwen companion. Thought I could save $80 a month. Unfortunately after 2 days I had switched back to Max. The speed (slower on both although qwen is much faster) and errors (stupid layout mistakes, inserting 2 footers then refusing to remove one, not seeing obvious problems in screenshots & major f-ups of functionality), not being able to view URLs properly, etc. I'll give deepseek a go but I suspect it will be similar. The model is only half the story. Also been testing gpt5.4 with codex and it is very almost as good as CC... better on long running tasks running in background. Not keen on ChatGPT codex 'personality' so will stick to CC for the most part.
It reads as a stream of thought. I quite enjoyed it. He can't get his kids off the computer, are they gaming? Or on Facebook (unlikely given their ages). Sounds like the alternative they've been given is cleaning the house. My kid is not at that age nor does she have a device, but I hope that as she grows older we can maintain some of the same interests to keep a connection doing fun stuff...including gaming but mostly outdoors, we can dream
Since this accepts all marine, freshwater and sky animals (birds) also this could take a very long time. For a bit more of a challenge in a shorter time list all animals starting with a particular letter. Time yourself a couple minutes to put some pressure on. Challenge your friends and family!
