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TestyTim.com

TestyTim.com

Entries Tagged 'Open Source'

Photocopier No More: The Reckoning with AI Creativity Has Arrived

By Timothy R. Butler | Mar 10, 2026 at 4:16 AM

Two esoteric programming events bubbled up this past week. If you’re not into computer science, they may appear irrelevant to you. They’re not. The arcane managed to bring to life our pressing questions about whether AI can create or is a regurgitation machine.

Can Grokipedia Tesla-fy Wikipedia?

By Timothy R. Butler | Oct 29, 2025 at 12:30 PM
We all love to hate Wikipedia: it is imperfect, but unavoidably useful; biased, but somewhat correctable. Could Grokipedia take what is good about it and round off the rough edges? Maybe.

Tech Shouldn’t Die Young, But Increasingly Does

By Timothy R. Butler | Feb 19, 2025 at 11:29 PM

The Humane Pin has died and HP has killed it. The burial of last year’s tech darling, DOA as its concept was from the get-go, isn’t that important in itself, but continues the troubling trend of things we buy dying unnatural deaths.

Getting Debianized

By Dennis E. Powell | Sep 04, 2024 at 9:28 PM

The time has come. The inevitable can be postponed no more. I’m switching my desktop computer to Debian Linux. I should have embraced Debian from the beginning. Please allow me to offer my excuse for not having done so 26 years ago.

Can We Rewind the Clock to a Better Social Media?

By Timothy R. Butler | Feb 08, 2023 at 10:47 PM

I’ve been on Facebook since 2006 and Twitter since 2009. I decidedly don’t quit social networks because I decide this or that moderation policy isn’t leaning in my political direction. But, as of a week ago, I joined the push for a relatively new alternative social network, Mastodon, and I hope you will too.

A Quarter Century of Linux

By Dennis E. Powell | Jan 25, 2023 at 4:13 PM

The Linux operating system for Intel-architecture personal computers wasn’t exactly new when I switched to it. There were already a number of publishers — I choose the word carefully; you’ll see why — who were offering their own versions, which were similar in some ways yet mostly incompatible with each other.

Making It "Better"

By Dennis E. Powell | Sep 28, 2022 at 4:43 PM
My friends tend to be people with whom a lively conversation might begin with this question: “How many perfectly useful things have you destroyed in an attempt to make them into something else?”