I switched from Windows (11) to Linux (Xubuntu) back in November, mostly because of all the AI stuff I didn't trust. While Linux is working ok for me, I can see why people complain about its not being user-friendly, particularly if you're not a Real Programmer. I've had to go to forums too many times to figure out why this or that doesn't work. The latest is the fact that 'apt update' has stopped working today for Vivaldi--it worked ok yesterday, but I have not been able to get it working after spending an hour or more. (If you're interested, there's a thread here: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/115133/public-key-is-not-ava....)
Also the fact that some apps update via 'apt', some by 'snap', and if you don't watch out some might update by 'flatpack'. While I think snap is updating automatically, it's hard to tell; some mornings I wake my PC up and only hours later do I discover that there's an update pop-up hidden behind other windows.
Oh, and every day I get a 'system problem' popup that asks if I want to submit a report, but won't tell me what the alleged problem was. I thought only Microsoft did that sort of thing?
I'm also not happy about the malware protection. Apparently the only anti-virus still available is ClamAV (and Kapersky, but for reasons I won't go into I don't trust that). But the gui for ClamAV has not been supported for several years, and running it from the command line is not so straightforward, never mind keeping it updated. (And don't tell me that Linux doesn't need antivirus protection. That's just whistling past the graveyard, particularly if you sometimes log in on public WiFi networks.)
I guess there are distros that are better about some of these things, but life is too short to try all of them, and hope that some bug (like the Vivaldi update thing) doesn't show up months later.
So yes, I'm using Linux, and I'm not planning to go back to Windows. But Linux sure could work better.
Can't help you with AV but otherwise your issues and confusions are all Ubuntu and Canonical and nothing on there is representative of other Linux dists.
Ubuntu is highly opinionated. Great for some/many people but not the best fit for everyone or even an obvious recommendation for newcomers (anymore). For your consideraion: Mint is basically a project that repackages Ubuntu to adress those issues to make it accessible for people not onboard with the Ubuntu idiosyncracies and more casual users who just want their desktop. Should be an easy migration for you.
Your Vivaldi problem comes from that you trusted gpg key for their stable. release repo, and fail verifying package from their archive. repo. Change repo to stable (that's prob what you want) or get the key for archive.
Your Ubuntu experience as told is not representative of desktop Linux experienced outside of Ubuntu. "But Linux sure could work better" is a misleading conclusion to share when that's all you know.
You're right that I mixed up the Vivaldi repo (maybe you are the one who pointed that out on the thread I linked). But even after fixing that, it's still not working---slightly different warning message, but still about gpg.
I've installed the Xfce Mint (you wren't the only one suggesting that). I don't have the same problems I had with Xubuntu, but I have different ones, like tearing on one of my two monitors. I initially had that with Xubuntu, but was able to find settings to fix it there-- IIRC by changing the refresh rate on that monitor. No luck so far on Xfce Mint. I've tried all seven of the Window Managers it offers, and both the configurations and most of the tweaks.
Also can't find the red mouse cursor theme that I had on Ubuntu. (If I could remember the name, I might be able to find it, but the "after market" mouse cursor themes I've found are so much eye candy--I just want an ordinary set of cursors, but red. Yes, I could probably generate my own, but I shouldn't have to.)
And when I reboot, the windows don't come up in the same place they were when I closed them. Some apps couldn't do that under Ubuntu either, but most could. I think it has to do with Wayland, but I'm not sure if it's even possible to go back to a purely X-windows system in Mint.
I recommend Mint over Ubuntu, the snap issue does not exist there.
> And don't tell me that Linux doesn't need antivirus... you sometimes log in on public WiFi networks.
This is a misunderstanding of the threat model of Wifi. Stick to software from the signed repos and SSL. Avoid attachments, keep updated. I've never used antivirus with Linux, despite working on symantec antivirus back in the day.
> particularly if you sometimes log in on public WiFi networks
If you're on Linux and have a firewall, so there are no listening ports, there is no threat from using public wifi. TLS encrypts your connection on ~all websites these days.
I'll just point out that while Ubuntu ships with a firewall, it's not enabled by default, and at least in Windows the firewall is enabled by default. I have since enabled it in Ubuntu.
I've spent a long career getting good at Linux. Real good. But I'm only human. Over the decades, the number of how-tos, wiki pages, Linux distros, Linux kernel source, other programs documentation and source; all of that which I've ingested and used in practice and gotten good at, doesn't hold a candle to AI having been trained on every single last one of them. The solution to your apt/Vivaldi problem is easy: install Claude code, and paste in the error. Hit ctrl-o to gain insight on how it fixes it.
You used to be able to charge a decent hourly consulting rate to do some Linux, but because Claude code is so good at it, there's no market for that anymore.
(for one, your URI is wrong, resulting in apt looking for
.../deb/dists/stable/dists/stable/Release )
I lived in Quito Ecuador back in the late 70s/ early 80s. There was a hamburger place called "Burger Queen"--the name was in English, presumably to attract people who knew about Burger King. They had a sign that read "Casa del Whooper" (not Whopper).
> xdg-session-management for being able to save and restore window positions
> is still not merged, so there is no standard way to implement this in Wayland
For me, this is a real reason not to want to be forced to use Wayland. I'm sure the implementation of Wayland in xfce is a long time off, and the dropping of Xwindows even further off, so hopefully this problem will have been solved by then.
Sorry, I'm not following. What do spaces have to do with this? Grammar is dependent on concepts like lexemes (sort of like words), but there aren't any spaces between lexemes in spoken language.
Probably slight confusion over the description, which I was thinking at first with the first "in the middle of" example - that English has compounds nouns so the existence of spaces doesn't necessarily work as a delimiter.
What it seems to be getting at instead is that language works more like madlibs than previously thought, just on a smaller scale than madlibs. Which to me isn't that surprising - it seems extremely close to "set phrases", and is explicitly how we learn language in a structured way when not immersed in it.
I also suspect most people don't even know about tree-style sentence mapping. I've mentioned it a handful of times at work when languages come up and even after describing it no one knew what I was talking about. I only remember it being covered in one class in middle school.
I had to look up 'madlibs', but I see now what you mean. We do indeed have lots of canned phrases, some of which are idioms. They may indeed come with blanks at the end (your example) or even in the middle ("pull __'s leg"). The issue I have with the original paper is that these canned phrases need to fit in with the language's overall grammar, e.g. "What did the fire alarm come in the middle of __?"
"Tree-style sentence mapping": I assume you mean the old sentence diagramming where the main part (more or less) of the sentence was on a line, and adjuncts (like prepositional phrases) were shown as branching off the bottom of the line on a diagonal. But there are also tree diagrams of the sort made popular by Chomsky and the generativists who followed. In fact I was once employed doing more or less that, just before the AI bubble in the late 80s. Fun!
Not sure why you bring up Schank's conceptual dependency theory. That was back in the late 60s, and I don't think anybody has worked in that theory for many decades.
In languages where word order matters a lot less, the grammar is still there---it just relies more on things like case markers and agreement markers (i.e. morphology).
The paper is basically saying “we have evidence that supports language comprehension inconsistent independently of structural hierarchy” [1] (or at least that’s my read of it).
However I imagine linguists have a more precise definition than most of us, but instead of speculating, I’ve decide read the paper.
Something they explain early on is a concept called multi-words (an example incomplete this is an idiom) tend communicate meaning without any meaning grammatical structure, and they say this
> “… multiword chunks challenge the traditional separation between lexicon and grammar associated with generativist accounts … However, some types of multiword chunks may likewise challenge the constructionist account.”
I’m an amateur language nerd with a piecemeal understanding of linguistics, but I’m no linguist so I don’t know what half this means, but it really sounds like they have a very specific definition here, that neither of us are talking about, and possibly hasn’t been well communicated in the article.
That said I’m out of my depth here, and I have a feeling most ppl replying to this article are probably too if they are going off the title and article that linked to the paper. But I would be interested to hear the opinion of a linguist or someone more familiar with this field, and their experimentation methods.
—-—-—-—-—-
[1] With the hypothesis testing typically done in science you can’t really accept a alternative hypothesis only reject a null one given you’re evidence, so you get titles like “may” or “might” or “evidence supporting x, y, z”, so you get these noncommittal titles like the one. In social sciences or nonnatural sciences I feel this is even more the case given the difficulty of forming definitive experiments without crossing some ethical boundary. In nature science you can put to elements together control variables see what happens in social sciences it’s really hard.
>multiword chunks challenge the traditional separation between lexicon and grammar associated with generativist accounts
This is just silly (the paper, not your comment). Do these folks really think they're the first people to think of associating meanings with multi-word units? Every conceivable idea about what the primes of linguistic meaning might be has been explored in the existing literature. You might be able to find new evidence supporting one of these ideas over another, but you are not going to come up with a fundamentally new idea in that domain.
As another commentor has pointed out, many of the sequences of words they identify correspond rather obviously to chunks of structure with gaps in certain argument positions. No-one would be surprised to find that 'trees with gaps to be filled in' are the sort of thing that might be involved in online processing of language.
On top of that, the authors seem to think that any evidence for the importance of linear sequencing is somehow evidence against the existence of hierarchical structure. But rather obviously, sentences have both a linear sequence of words and a hierarchical structure. No-one has ever suggested that only the latter is relevant to how a sentence is processed. Any linguist could give you examples of grammatical processes governed primarily by linear sequence rather than structure (e.g. various forms of contraction and cliticization).
I think their point was the meaning of multi-words isn't the result of structure or word order, such as many idioms for example aren't interpreted literally or their grammar isn't too important.
But this is also academia they want to have evidence behind claims even if they feel intuitive. Like in the social sciences you'll have models and theories that are largely true in a lot of cases, but fail to explain variance from the models. The constructivist and whatever stuff sounds like one of those larger models and they are pointing out where it falls short, not to entirely invalidate it but to show the model has limitations.
I have a feeling the authors are well aware they aren't the first people to consider this, but they did leg work to provide some empirical evidence about the claim. Which is something you want to have in challenging the orthodoxy of a field. Entirely possible they're working on a larger piece of work but they're being asked to demonstrate this fact which this larger piece of work rests on. But I'm largely speculating there.
> On top of that, the authors seem to think that any evidence for the importance of linear sequencing is somehow evidence against the existence of hierarchical structure
The way I see it if you can demonstrate comprehension in the absence of this structure, I think you can make the case that it is optional and therefore may not rely on it. Which is a different claim from it benefits in no way whatsoever, which I don't think their evidence necessarily challenges (based on my read)
My view is when a language depends a lot on complex grammar what's happening is its trying resolve ambiguity, but languages can address this problem a number of ways. In languages like Russian they handle more of this ambiguity in inflection (and many non-English indo-european languages), in tonal languages to some extent tone creates a greater possible combination of sounds which could provide other ways of resolving ambiguity. That's my guess at least, I also accept I have no idea what I'm talking about here.
> if you can demonstrate comprehension in the absence of this structure,
> I think you can make the case that it is optional and therefore may not
> rely on it.
One kind of example demonstrating the importance of structure is wh-movement (the appearance of a word like 'who' or 'what' at the beginning of a sentence, when the argument it is asking about would be somewhere deeper inside the structure). For instance "Who did John say that Mary had a fight with __?" (I've represented the position of the argument with the __.) It's been known since the 60s that there are lots of constraints on wh-movement, e.g. *"Who did John say he knew the person who had a fight with __?" (vs. the non-wh-movement sentence "John said he knew the person who had a fight with Bill.")
>the meaning of multi-words isn't the result of structure or word order
Surely the 'word order' part must be a mistake here? Clearly word order influences the interpretation of sequences of English words. As for structure, the paper presents no evidence whatever that structure is not involved in the interpretation.
>many idioms for example aren't interpreted literally
This is just the definition of what an idiom is, not any kind of insight.
I am an American, so my view of the situation over there is not...well informed. But I have wondered whether the EU couldn't set itself up as the New NATO. All European (unless Canada decides to join you), and omitting some of the old NATO provisions that are causing problems, like the ability of one member country to veto everyone else (I'm looking at you, Hungary). Would it work? Or is the EU infrastructure to weak to do that?
The issue is that this kind of authoritarian military organization needs a clear leader, and without that, cannot function properly. That leader used to be the US. Even under Trump 1 (and even though i disagree with the decision), forcing NATO member to think about the 3% rule was ultimately something someone have to do (my preference would have been to lower the threshold), and that someone was the US. I also think it would need a pre-2008 France, who refused to be under the integrated command, to build a sort of trust and respect between members.
Ultimately though, the Irak invasion shattered the trust and status quo, and i agree 100% with people saying NATO must die. Alliance that are more than a reactive defensive pact and force member into attacking unrelated countries should disappear. Just get nukes, and pray you won't have to use them.
Also the fact that some apps update via 'apt', some by 'snap', and if you don't watch out some might update by 'flatpack'. While I think snap is updating automatically, it's hard to tell; some mornings I wake my PC up and only hours later do I discover that there's an update pop-up hidden behind other windows.
Oh, and every day I get a 'system problem' popup that asks if I want to submit a report, but won't tell me what the alleged problem was. I thought only Microsoft did that sort of thing?
I'm also not happy about the malware protection. Apparently the only anti-virus still available is ClamAV (and Kapersky, but for reasons I won't go into I don't trust that). But the gui for ClamAV has not been supported for several years, and running it from the command line is not so straightforward, never mind keeping it updated. (And don't tell me that Linux doesn't need antivirus protection. That's just whistling past the graveyard, particularly if you sometimes log in on public WiFi networks.)
I guess there are distros that are better about some of these things, but life is too short to try all of them, and hope that some bug (like the Vivaldi update thing) doesn't show up months later.
So yes, I'm using Linux, and I'm not planning to go back to Windows. But Linux sure could work better.
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