SeaGL Conference This Weekend

Welcome back to the Linux Prepper podcast.

This weekend is the seagull, Ganyu Linux, Seattle Ganyu Linux Conference.

At the University of Washington Hub, I'll leave the links so you can check it out.

Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend.

They did cancel my performance about a week or two ago.

It's no one's fault.

It's just life.

Life got in the way, unfortunately.

I'm not able to be there to either table or perform my new show.

AI scanned my brain rot that I've been working on for over a year now, but you should still

definitely attend seagull.

It kicks off first thing in the morning at 9 a.m.

And there's a lot of focus on local infrastructure, local tooling, a lot of talk about AI, an

open source, of course, and decentralization, which is pretty classic for the Seattle Ganyu

Linux Conference.

So there will be a lot of community focus, more so than any other conference you'll

ever attend.

It's just really amazing.

So for example, there's like refining the Linux elevator pitch when you're talking to

a new person, right, who may be interested and curious, or you might have something like,

what is a flight computer, which is used for say, modern rockets, and accomplished as

nine possible tasks, taking off from Earth, getting very accurate into orbit.

And this person will go through a simulation and explain it to you.

And it's just like all kinds of cool talks and some of them get extremely technical.

One of my favorite talks that I ever heard at the seagull conference was all about mirroring

for all of the repositories, all the major repositories.

And people got to ask questions about Debian or Fedora, and how all these different projects

set up mirrors around the globe to mirror their package repository availability.

And I thought that was one of the coolest talks I've ever heard because it was regular

people who basically put a lot of this together.

So I think it's, it's definitely exciting and it's a great, um, it's a great experience.

And the good news is if you can't be there in person, they do a lot of streaming onto

YouTube as well.

So I'll leave links for the conference.

And then I'll also leave links for their YouTube, which is where they stream to.

So that should be streaming tomorrow for the majority of the talks.

And you can check that out.

The next episode that's going to be coming out in this series on local tooling is all

about assembling a ghost lab, running services within your home where other people don't

have to know about it and don't have to be impacted by it.

So that episode is coming up.

And I think it's worth addressing something, which is like, basically, where have I been?

Where has this show been?

Where is it gone?

And I think it's interesting to acknowledge that.

So in the last episode, I talked about battle stations, right?

And repurposing old hardware.

And maybe you noticed, maybe you didn't notice that was the most technically involved complex

episode that I have ever done.

There was no musical lead in.

There was, it was just nonstop, you know, going, going, going, and took many attempts

to get through that.

And in relation to the right now of like specifically in regards to AI, I want to make

a note because like, because I'm not able to perform, scan my brain rot at the conference

this weekend, a lot of the material that I have in there is, is it's not just entertainment.

It's like actual real information.

And one of the things that I realized in engaging with AI this last year, which I'd never done

before, I did it specifically for the show, right?

For making this scan my brain rot performance, I realized I should engage with AI.

And something that really just, I was like totally shocked to experience and learn about

what was the idea that large language models, number one, are just here to stay.

And I, I loathe to talk about it because I think people don't want to hear about this

stuff necessarily or they have strong feelings.

And I think that's fair.

And I have a story related to that.

So if we go back in time, 10 years, and I'm hanging out at my local hackerspace and a

guy came up to me at that time I was teaching a Linux sys admin class, and he said, James,

he was like, uh, yeah, like, how's the class going?

I'm like, that's going great.

He's like, yeah, dude, it's been cool.

You should really take my database class.

And I was like your database class, the MySQL one, and he was like, absolutely.

You got to get on on this dude.

He's like, you got to get on this machine learning.

You got to get on the machine learning and learn about these language models, which you

can use with my MySQL database, you can get started.

He was like, do you want to be in my database?

And I was like, oh, no, thanks.

And he was like, Oh, okay.

If I'd been smarter, I would have realized 10 years later, the only difference in that

interaction is he wouldn't have asked.

Think about it.

You just put the person in the database, you stop asking, and, and this is where I think

this relates to why people have such strong frustration and other feelings in regards

to this technology, which I heard described interestingly just today by a friend, because

I was talking about working on recording this.

And they mentioned that an AI is like a chainsaw.

That's a tool and I thought, Oh, interesting way of putting it.

And they go, yeah, you can take a chainsaw and you can gravely injure yourself and cut

up the floor and ruin your house.

But at the same time, the chainsaws still a chainsaw.

And I thought, hmm, interesting way of putting it, the perspective of like it being a tool.

And obviously it's more complex than that.

But it's an interesting way of looking at it, of framing it.

And in a world where we're already in this situation, we're basically, we're in the database,

right?

Everyone's sort of in the database.

And we're dealing with the repercussions of this, like new reality.

I think it's something to, it's good to be able to try to like, laugh about it and also

to be more understanding and acknowledging of like, what's happening around us.

So I think that's where like, I'm sure there will be a ton of great talks about this at

Siegel in regards to like concerns and also like new things and, you know, but what it

made me realize personally is that the only things I can really trust are things that I

understand.

And this threads back directly into the previous parts of the season of local tooling, local

workflows.

And I think Siegel is also on this same kick, which is I only trust tools that I understand.

And to me, the things that I actually understand is like plain text, plain text workflows that

I set up that I understand at the local level.

And if I don't understand something at the local level, then I feel like I don't understand

it at all anymore.

It's just too, you know, there's too many unknown variables in this frontier in this

world we live in now.

So that's right now.

There is, if you might know, some people already on it, but there is a newsletter.

So now Linux Pepper podcast has the Linux Pepper dispatch.

It is an email newsletter.

Why?

Well, previous to Siegel at Linux Fest Northwest when I was there, I had actually gotten injured

from work.

And I realized that I'm like, oh man, I could be sidelined as a performer.

And at the same time, I realized that with the centralization of technology, it would

be very easy for my show to be sidelined.

I was asked actually if I was worried about, you know, the centralization of podcasting

through major companies and gatekeeping and age restriction.

And I said, yes, if you know what I'm talking about, this is still a thing coming into this

new year, holding content creators responsible for any potential harms to like underage audiences,

things like this.

And this show obviously is trying to be family friendly, but I mean, it's technical.

And it's just an unknown of like, will people be able to do what I'm doing now in the future?

And I don't actually know.

And I realized that I want to take things into a more text basis.

So the newsletter is part of that.

It's removing the gatekeeping of needing anything besides an email to get the newsletter.

So that's one step.

And then migrating all of my content into a text-first experience.

And that's been something that's been going on.

Not just for the last five months, but for the last full calendar year.

And at this point, those who are on the wiki are having a really good experience at this

point.

Like 250 pieces of curated software I think I have listed on there.

So there's a lot and a lot of topics and it's still very much under construction because

it's just a huge project, but it's all files and folders, plain text, doku wiki.

And I'll link to it in the show notes, but yeah, the best way if you want to know about

what I'm working on with the show is to join from dot living cartoon dot org.

And there is a newsletter, both one for Linux prepper dispatch and one for living cartoon

and performance stuff for the future.

And I hope that if you're interested, you go check out seagull the 23rd and 24th this

weekend.

If you're going to attend, otherwise you can check out the YouTube streaming links for

most of the talks happening over this weekend.

It should be a really cool event.

I'm really sorry that I can't attend and we'll get back into the swing of things.

I just wanted to give you some background of what I've been doing and what's up with the

show.

So a lot of hard work being put in.

I know that you're like, well, I don't know, but I'm telling you we're getting back on

track and yeah, you can check out from dot living cartoon dot org, join the Linux prepper

dispatch and that'll just come out like once a month no matter what telling you about the

projects and tools that I'm playing with, whether or not they get talked about on the

show because there's a lot of stuff going on the background.

And then we'll get back to our regular programming of local tooling.

But yeah, I just want to keep in mind in the world of AI, I think it's more important than

ever that we take a moment to actually learn how our tools work and not just blindly trust.

Anytime you have blind trust, come at it from a level of understanding, focus on the things

that you can understand and you can get better at.

And I feel like if I don't do that, who am I to talk about for the sake of being a cool

guy, I want to throw out some pics that you should check out, one of them is it's actually

somewhere between a piece of software and a game.

It's called tiny logic and tiny logic is a game where you build a risk five 32 bit computer

for real in a simulation.

And it's available on it's also available through GitHub repos.

And this thing is awesome.

This is like the coolest game I've ever seen.

You start at the transistor level and through a series of challenges, you build your own

computer and then you program the logic into the computer so that it will run doom.

It will run like Minecraft.

It'll run Java and it is a real computer that is past the risk five benchmarking.

It's amazing.

It's tiny logic.

And I was also turned on to an older project, which is taught through MIT and all the course

materials online, which is called NAND to Tetris.

And NAND to Tetris is a similar idea where you start from a NAND circuit and you end

up building a computer that runs Tetris, the game.

And I'll link to both of those and you can check it out.

Thank you so much for listening to Linux Prepper podcast.

I hope you have a great time at seagull.

Check out some of the talks online or check them out in person and take care y'all.