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@mos_8502 oh and another more modern choice you could make too, depending on application: disregard package management entirely and treat the entire OS as an immutable image that's built as an atomic unit, with updates being done by having a pair of A/B partitions. You boot off the current active partition, and to update the OS you write out the entire new image to the inactive and reboot onto it.

The Fedora Atomic distros do this, as do the Universal Blue ecosystem (they're essentially running the "new" atomic stack that future Fedora will use). CoreOS was arguably the OG at this for widely known distros, although this is how a large swatch of embedded linux operates, using either buildroot to generate images or Yocto (whose build system is a horrific crime, but it's also very powerful, can generate whole disk images _and also_ a stream of delta updates for efficient upgrading, and is widely supported by embedded linux hardware and software vendors so a lot of stuff ends up using it, even though I find it horrible every time I try touching it)

@mos_8502 The biggest pains, if you're not reusing someone else's package manager: how do you express dependencies between packages? Can you have optional deps like debian's "recommended" ? Can you have virtual packages that can be provided by multiple concrete packages (I don't have an example on tap but debian, arch, gentoo all support this for stuff like swapping out libc implementations or pulseaudio vs. pipewire), how do you version packages where the upstream might have an unhelpful or missing versioning scheme of its own, how do you handle the million different build systems that upstream uses, how fancy is your dependency resolution algorithm (can be anything from "unhelpfully useless" to "NP-hard and sometimes takes hours to compute a solution" - most useful distros land somewhere in the middle).

None of this _has_ to be hard, at every step you can make some simplifying assumptions/decisions that cut off some flexibility from your distro in exchange for a simpler system to build/use/maintain. There not being any "correct" answer is why there's a million distros with more showing up all the time.

@mos_8502 Pretty much. And along the way make a million policy decisions for what you want your distro to be. What libc options does it use, what filesystem layout, what default kernel config, which packages with which options, does your package manager support easily recompiling with different flags, etc.

I'm told Gentoo is a good example at one end of the spectrum, a source-based distro (where technically every install involves building from source with the exact bespoke flags and configs you desire, although these days there's a binary cache for the "common" build options). At the other end of the spectrum is probably debian and fedora, very binary-oriented distros where building packages and installing them are two very different sets of operations.

Oh and you'll also need to make yourself an installer for your distro once you have a package set, although these days I'm told you can do that pretty easily by slightly customizing the Calamares installer.

@michaelgemar Yeah, the antimemetics stories are a really great little arc!

I can't think of another thematic hub that works as well for me, but plenty of standalone articles are a treat.

Oh, and the way to appeal an AI ban is pretty straightforward: show evidence that you did work, for example a draft with versions that show the writing appearing progressively over time, the way it does when a human is writing. As a bonus, if you use the sandbox wiki to draft your things, you get that for free!

I don't think I've ever seen an AI ban appeal succeed, because guess what the slop article appears fully formed in v1, or appears in large multi-paragraph chunks over a few revisions with no rewriting or tinkering (other than removing the more obvious LLM telltales that even sloperators seem to know about, and even that's pretty rare).

@aburka I'm kinda surprised that there hasn't yet been an SCP that's just a direct potshot at LLMs. There probably is and I missed it :)

And on that note, kudos to SCP, which has a straightforward rule for their creative writing community: any use of generative AI that results in words you didn't write appearing on the site gets you a permanent ban.

And yes, I take very special pleasure in reading new submissions and flagging those with LLM telltales, and seeing the "permanent ban implemented" update in the moderation log a few days later.

I hate how LLMs have contaminated creative writing communities. I start reading something that has an interesting premise, and then my heart slowly sinks as I start noticing the LLM telltales sprinkled throughout. It quickly becomes evident that the story is using a lot of words to say nothing, and the writing is terrible.

I don't even mind terrible writing if it's earnest! I've read more cringe fanfic than I care to admit. I'm willing to push through clumsy writing when it's a fellow mind trying their best to show me this neat thing they made.

But LLM terrible writing is completely bland and soulless, just a kilo of store brand words from the words warehouse. You can spot it a mile away, and it devalues anything it touches.

All creative writing communities should have a tool that lets me mark another user as a sloperator, and never see another word they extruded from the words machine. Get that fucking shit out of our idea exchanges.