Corporate LAN party

Yeah, I’m not about to rush in but I suspect over the next year or so I’ll be letting an llm loose on my old crates to see what happens and MacGyver some sort of Dread Pirate Robot that can run locally and is a frankenstein of beets, plugins and other projects that will eat music and shit albums.

A mishmash of beets and the old ways got me to where I am, navidrome with a bit of mpv & kodi.

I’m currently trying to ignore it and plan to return with a new workflow over the next year or so. Beets will be part of this but also need some python, shell glue and other tools working together, and things are changing at little faster than they once were.

I spent a little time a few months back grabbing NPR and KEXP audio at scale with yt-dlp and having them land with decent tags as navidrome compliant albums and now feel a little more confident incorporating oddities into sacred realm of jazz flacs.

But the one folder to rule them all is still in the planning stages.

sorry, I should have used the predictive text spellcheck system on my google device to post

It is about that.

I have AntiX laptop & desktop, Gentoo & Debian boxen with Alpine kvm’s running x11 nicely. This is fine but I am keeping an eye on the ecosystem as the lines of code outside my x11 window are going faster than cmatrix at the moment.

An ‘insane person’ summoning up novel display servers that make them smile and ditching 4 million lines of x11 code is of interest to me. As is Rene Rebe talking about vibe coding his own kernel whilst vibe coding the linux kernel, peeps are playing supertuxkart on the hurd and Fabrice Bellard is working on LLM’s like an Elven smith.

Old hardware and software is coming back to life at a time when new hardware, that isn’t shit, is hard to come by. Man pages and neofetches are being read again and novel solutions are appearing as people demand all sorts of weird content from novel models not caring if people think them a witch.

At a time when the government here are trying to lock spyware into operating systems the possibility of being able to roll your own components alongside models that can understand and modify them, even if they are a bit shit and can’t run steam, is worth considering. If an insane pleb can do it on a current consumer model, the future is bright.

The big question is: Could cutting edge LMM’s make Netflix content less shit?

I like x11. It works well, does a lot and has been battle hardened stable for a long time even if made of ancient arcane magic that’s never seen an llm.
I could try and change the alpine qemu-kvm’s running lqtx on my headless gentoo server so I can connect remotely via a more modern stack, but I can’t be arsed unless it goes on fire.

The future is uncertain and I’m keeping an eye. This kinda thing is interesting:

https://isene.org/2026/07/Frame.html

If x11 is on life support until beyond 2030, that’s a lot of cpu cycles between now and EOL for x11.

I know you’re being dramatic, but even if X was just yanked out of existence, for the purposes of digital signage or other such extremely basic computing tasks it really shouldn’t be such an issue to switch to something else.

We’re still using COBOL for stuff like Visa and Mastercard for almost every contactless payment, saying ‘just port it’ is not how it works.

BTW’ers more the world of x86_64 only cutting edge gamestation/workstation that could snap at any moment and is heavily populated by people using linux as a daily driver workstation that want to ‘rice’, need high steam fps and are often rather evangelical about the idea of ‘choice’ on a distro that offers almost none of it. Not the ‘How to install Steam on Kali’ peeps, but not far off.

I’m not saying X11 is god, just been happy with it since 2012 or so and think I can at least chill for another good few years.

I should add Alan McCrae and other Arch devs are wonderful peeps that can use pacman/abs as us mere mortals would apt or portage, but many Arch consumers are not this way ime.

I don’t hate computer games or young people, I’ve had both for ages.

I’m not a big fan of Valve, or the billionaire running the app store from his mega yachts.

BTW’ing seems relevant. It’s an ecosystem that’s been largely focused on turning a gnu/linux workstation into an x86_64 Steam player for over a decade and now Valve are using BTW as $UPSTREAM. It’s what this kinda thing evolved into as actually compiling stuff was harder than copy and pasting ''yaourt eyebleach-kitchen-sink-bin steam" https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Gentoo-is-Rice.html

Ask a question on X11 in the world of BSD, Debian, RHEL, Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi OS, Gentoo, Alpine, Rocky, MX or in the nerd mines of Phoronix, Linux Questions or Stack Exchange and people will help that have knowledge, ask in BTW lands and there will be witch hunt by people who have no idea what they are talking about.

If X11 goes down it would be like Mad Max: International banking and airports screens would just go black, Moscow, Pyongyang and Beijing too…even more important stuff like adverts could stop working at scale.

Yeah, it’s the younglings trying raise money to get Gabe a better yacht afaiu.

BTW’ing I think they call it.