From the administration's perspective, why was this a good idea? I'm scouring the web but I'm struggling to find a steel-man. My best guess is that this is to control where the research dollars go which I'll summarize below, but wondering if anyone has better ideas.
From what I've read it seems the administration is very anti-social sciences, and very pro nuclear, AI, quantum. Thought from what I can tell most of the funding already goes to the hard sciences [1]. There were cuts proposed over the last few months but they were shut down by congress [2]. I suppose by cutting off the head of the org it's an easier fight to cut funding FY2027?
> when all hope is lost in conversation, retreat into your self
This speaks to me quite a bit, particularly around unfalsifiable topics I'll have with friends/family, such as theology. If we define hope as the idea they'll change their mind and agree with me, seems not much one can do but retreat into themself, right? I suppose I can sympathize with their sentiment before I retreat into myself, but taking this bullet point at face value I'm unsure how to make this a pro-social experience :/
It’s possible to be social with people who hold opinions you disagree with. Being social and recognizing or even celebrating our shared humanity does not require having the same opinions and ideas as the other person.
yes, but that means that hope is not lost yet. for me, all hope is lost when people stop listening if i said something they disagree with, even if i follow up with something they do agree with (which is usually my tactic in this case, find common ground, and then expand from there). to be social with people who disagree requires both sides to want to continue the conversation. both sides need to believe that having the same opinions is not required. if they don't want to continue then i can try as i might, but at that point hope is lost.
You can also simply chose not to talk about controversial topics where you suspect such deep disagreements might lie.
In my experience the only way to really connect across those divides is to first have a long history, months or years, of productive and positive social interaction. But you don’t get control how others think and feel, even if by some theoretical measure, your position is “right”. So even under the best of circumstances you just have to accept and resist that others think differently.
You need to question whether you really need to have the conversation in those terms. A conversation about religion/theology is not like a conversation about physics or math. If you insist on applying scientific rigor to matters of faith, you are and will remain fully confused.
I bet if you observe your own mind for long enough, you'll find some part of your life which requires you to have faith too. Use that to understand your friends and family better. The next time you find yourself in a conversation with them about religion, ask them about their faith (not their religion). You will gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how they navigate the world.
If you can have that conversation, go ahead and ask them about their religious beliefs, withholding judgement unless/until they say something morally objectionable. You can think of their religion like any other mythology, and you get to play sociologist for a while. There's a fascinating variety of responses people give to even fundamental questions - e.g. "what is god?".
This open approach is not only much easier for everyone, it's also more useful in the long term. My neighbor has an interesting mashup of beliefs that includes a decent chunk of Christianity. She sometimes has bad anxiety, and unfortunately she can't afford treatment for it. I've helped her out of panic attacks using two methods: 1 - I've given her a clonazepam tablet and 2 - I've quoted scripture to her (e.g. "behold the lilies of the field"). Both methods work, and the latter tends to work faster.
It's different if the person is using their religion as a cover for engaging in or supporting something morally evil. That's a trickier conversation and often one not really worth having, depending on your relationship and how comfortable/willing you are to attempt to correct them.
(If you're an atheist) You shouldn't debate theology with religious people. The whole idea of religion is that they 'believe' despite their experiences, facts, reasoning and logic. There's literally nothing to gain from using logic and reasoning to debate religious people.
edit: also the article is sarcastic. You shouldn't retreat into yourself just because you cannot agree on something. Talk about something else.
I'm not personally sure that's a supernatural event, but if I'd had my eyes deteriorating for years, undergone multiple failed surgeries to stave off blindness, become fully blind, had doctors tell me I was irrepairably blind, and lived without eyesight for years, then had it come back within two days of praying to a Catholic saint for healing...
To me that doesn't follow logically. What if instead of praying to some saint, they found their lucky underwear that they lost when they were a child, and wore that for the first time again? Would that proof that the lucky underwear was somehow instrumental in fixing their eyes?
Apparently the body was able to heal her own eyes, and it would have happened if she prayed to the saint or not.
> Would that proof that the lucky underwear was somehow instrumental in fixing their eyes?
No, obviously not, as there's no reason to believe the underwear are sentient.
Rapidly getting what you ask for, when experts have generally agreed it's impossible, would be very striking.
> Apparently the body was able to heal her own eyes
There's no more evidence for that claim than there is for the claim that a saint did it.
Indeed, the fact that medical personnel say "This does not happen" is arguably evidence against the "it was a natural coincidence" interpretation.
I don't mean to suggest that anyone experiencing such a healing should or would necessarily become religious.
I'm just saying that personally, given my other life experiences this far, I probably would ratchet my probability of there being some unnatural power capable of intervening in the universe from ~55% to 90%, if I experienced sudden, dramatic healing of incurable blindness promptly after praying for it.
And, returning to my original point, there are people out there who asked for something vanishingly rare to the point that some experts label it impossible, then get it quite rapidly after praying for it.
That's a fairly reasonable reason to believe in a personal God of some sort, even if it's not the only plausible explanation.
How can there be nothing to gain, when discussions around the subject helped convince me about atheism? I was born catholic and my family is catholic. If no one talked about it, I'd probably still be going to mass every sunday.
Theology is quite predictable rigid scientific field, something like law. You just have to define which set of rules you are using (catholic orthodox, shia islam...) There are thousands of books with notes, precedents... going back thousands years. Thousands branches...
Calling theology "unfalsiable" is ignorant. Like saying math is unfalsiable, because there are multiple geometries and nobody understands it anyway.
Reading and blogging. I'm early career and trying to transition into a performance engineering-esque role. So, I'm spending a lot more time writing to learn, particularly about OS under-the-hood stuff and observability best practices.
> Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages
Throughout college I would see a pretty stark divide, where most people would use vscode on mac or on Windows + WSL. But there was a small minority who would spend alot of time 'tinkering' (e.g, experiment with OS like nix/gentoo, or tweaking their dev environment). Maybe i'm misunderstanding what a 'craft lover' means here but it seemed to me, at the time, that the latter camp had more technical depth just based on conversation. Can't speak to the result in terms of test scores. Though it would be interesting to see any data on that if it exists.
Maybe jumbo-frames for your LAN, but I wouldn't expect too much from that.
Since you're already running Arch, try including CachyOs's highly optimized repositories, kernel, interesting scheduling options, and endless other goodies?
It's not for gamers only. One doesn't even need to use most of their utilities for noobs, though some are convenient, like switching through schedulers and their settings with a few clicks.
Trying Openj9 is a great idea, I'm curious how it will stack up against Hotspot for this use case.
I haven't personally tried CatchyOs (if you're actively using it I'd love to hear what you think about it). Though I figure I'll eventually have to try fiddling with the scheduler, so i'll look into it. Thank you for your response!
I'm actively using it since about 2 years, and it has never failed me so far. BUT that depends on your chosen path during installation, and the quality of your BIOS/UEFI, other firmware, and used GPUs, if any. Like with any other distro...
My path was Btrfs for the whole single SSD, so no RAID, no encryption, no trouble.
Systemd-boot as boot-manager as default at the time, by now you can also have GRUB or Limine with bootable Btrfs-snapshots. I didn't see the need to change, though.
Desktop Environment is KDE/Plasma, which may be best supported. I don't know about the others, because since later Plasma 5 it has been more than good enough for me, so I didn't try.
(Just FVWM2 for 'the lulz' by myself, but it makes no sense anymore, because you don't save that much RAM, when your'e using applications pulling in all sorts of deps anyway.)
On my obsolete all Intel hardware it ran fantastically fast and rock solid from day one without any hickups, glitches, or crashes. I had some programs from the AUR crash on me, but that wasn't really the AURs, or Cachys fault, just bitrotten apps, like Hexchat, which got fixed meanwhile. But there is KVirc, in QT, so why care? Shrug?
What else to expect? There seems to be some animosity from parts of the Arch-community towards Cachy, because of percieved bugginess, and being flooded with support questions from Cachy-users, pestering them, without telling they are using Cachy.
So don't do that? ;-)
Maybe that is because Cachy has no IRC, only Discord and a webforum. I've looked into both and they are mostly noise with bad SNR to me. Most people have either bad(ly supported) HW, or are 'holding it wrong'. Again, that happens with all distros.
If you state your problem clearly, you'll get help, on both sides.
It just so happens that I never needed any, since I'm doing this cybershit since about 1985 :-)
That leads me to share another observation: During and after install I never really needed to intervene. But I did check, and still do check everything that changes. However, besides the rarely needed changes/edits for something in /etc, I never needed that. No difference to Arch at all. It just works.
At least on my hardware, and my chosen path like Btrfs, bootloader, login-manager, DE, it wasn't necessary. I could have just blindly clicked "Yes, Yes, come on, gimme the hot stuff!' all along.
I'm not using their graphical pacman-frontends, just pacman in Konsole(how lame, I know...), and meanwhile 'yay' too, because someone here pointed me to it.
Check it out, see if it works good with your needed drivers, for your hardware, in the ways they compile and link the stuff, optimizing the shit out of it.
Revert to plain Arch if not. Nothing lost but a little bit of time.
Maybe much won, because of WOW!1!! ;->
Edit: I forgot, they have something like an installation manual/wiki mix, not as comprehensive as Archs, but usable as an overview of all the optimizations they do.
I'd suggest reading that first before doing anything with it:
Wow, this is a lot of great info/sources. I can't thank you enough! I think I'm sold, honestly. I've been looking for an excuse to ditch my laptop's quasi-vestigial Windows partition. I dualboot for once a blue moon gaming, since I'm also on Wayland and neither games nor electron apps play nice.
I think for part 2 the move will be to overwrite the Windows partition on the laptop with Catchy and go from there. I'm excited to see the outcome.
From what I've read it seems the administration is very anti-social sciences, and very pro nuclear, AI, quantum. Thought from what I can tell most of the funding already goes to the hard sciences [1]. There were cuts proposed over the last few months but they were shut down by congress [2]. I suppose by cutting off the head of the org it's an easier fight to cut funding FY2027?
[1]: https://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/all
[2]: https://www.aps.org/apsnews/2026/04/nsf-lags-trump-proposes-...