To be blunt, we’d probably find the robots a lot more endearing if they placed themselves on an appropriate side of the Uncanny Valley.

Years ago, there was an IRC channel with a couple of simple Markov-chain bots and they were legitimately charming with their randomness, which ranged from “demented Pokemon repeating their name over and over” to “flash of insight”. But you’d hardly be quoting them in a serious conversation to a co-worker or boss, and nobody was promising superintelligence any day now from then to justify tripling my electric bill.

They used to say something along the lines of “you don’t buy a drill, you buy a hole.”

Any tool, whether a widget, software, AI, or labour, is a means to an end. This might be something coherent, like “we bought sheet metal to make tortilla presses, which we can sell for more than they cost to make” or a a rejected Bond-villian vision like “if we acquire all the potassium in the world, they’ll be forced to declare our boss the next king of eSwatini.”

Specifically, right now, the “end” seems to be “if we vapourize enough cash, investors will buy our stock becsuse we’re the most True Believers in the current trend.” I’m not sure, but the potassium plan might make more sense.

I use it as a desktop. I like that it’s free of the nasty surprises of modern Linux (flatpak/snaps, systemd, X11 is still pretty first-class) while not feeling quite as isolated as Slackware and its sort of pre-broadband approach to packaging.

My biggest issue was poor support for an old Epson scanner that rewuired a binary package that wouldn’t install cleanly as it was designed for Debian; solved by buying a $10 used Canon scsnner which worked out of the box.

I like it better than Devuan for a non-systemd distribuition because, as its own thing, you don’t end up with as many “do I need to follow the Standard Debian guides or do something special” questions.