That’s debatable.

That smells like a false dichotomy… but, I’m heading on to other things better to do with my time than to think up examples outside those two possibilities.

But don’t worry, everybody. The national/global digital ID single point of failure will protect us from such fails. :`3

I don’t know what they mean, but,

In my experience, it’s an accelerant towards burnout.

And it even entices you in deeper, with the continuing illusion of ease of productivity, deeper, into burnout.

Burnout is no fun. [Note: To be clear, that’s “no fun”, not merely “not fun”. As in, it saps, eliminates and prevents all fun from your life while in burnout. And it takes twice as long to recover as it seems, ~ so the moment you think you’ve recovered, you’re only half way there, and need to keep on having no fun for as long again, despite feeling like you can have fun, and every bit of energy expended on fun can still more readily send you back into burnout and extends the recovery time, tormenting you further. Seriously, burnout, is no fun. ~ Speaking as someone with (at last count) 65 ailments (some of which reduce some people to tears when they hear about), and I remain chipper, mocking the harrowing symptoms of it all, by calling it “fun” (e.g. “oh my flesh is rupturing again, what fun”), but burnout… that’s no fun.]

So, I suspect we may see an increase in burnout among our developers. And that’s speaking just from the enticing use on an individual level, before considering then also the added workload from everybody else churning through LLM accelerated workloads, having to deal with all the bug reports and pull requests (many of which will be hallucinated, or have insidious malicious injections, many of which will be vital critical issues), and then all the extra pressure to try harder to keep up your own skills against the accelerating spray, and those skills being moved to where your lower level skills atrophy, especially amidst the social pressure, perhaps even economic pressure and pressure from bosses and hierarchies and investors, to “keep up”, and quantity over quality lines being blurred in the self reassurance that it’s not being enshitified and our atrophying capacity to discern for ourselves… the demands increasing and capacity decreasing, drives the race to the bottom even harder. So I suspect we may see an increase in burnout among our developers.

Rather than relaxing back towards a 4 hour working week, or to lives of leisure, the driving inertia of society’s contemporary socio-economic model would instead have us see this promise of extra potential as something to maximally exploit, for the more that can be done. … Which in turn drives that ambition even more. And do-addiction is a hard chariot to dismount from, or to slow down. Unlike food-addiction [the other difficult addiction (~ because you have to eat)], the dopamine from a do-addiction is largely celebrated and not shamed nor generally offered help to break the addiction.

All this a verbose way to get around to depicting that… we may see many of those who embrace “AI” more, despite an initial apparent “getting ahead”, may be headed for a big long stall and crash, and instead it’s they who “fall behind”.

Depends how one uses it; How well one manages to titrate ones use. It could be a great pedagogical facilitator. But then, so could the internet… remember…? Remember when the internet was more like a library and science club, before it became more like TV and a bar fight? … With the perverse incentives of big actors with the most grasp of the steering wheel, we may see LLMs/AI head the same degenerative direction, despite the early hopium promise that it wont be skynet, and will be a paradise generator that helps us sublimate past such societal structural corruption issues. Remember when electromagnetism was going to power the world for free, wirelessly in cymatic cromulence, making us all free and healthy (~ no, I guess not… a bit before our time), and now look and the technology born of electromagnetic discoveries and depictions, the prisons it gets shaped into, by those lacking the wisdom to see beyond their petty parasitic short-loop “well I have more than them”, with all it’s attention hijacking, with trillions invested in ensnaring our minds [(~ glad I got outta that biz, where that used to be my “just doing my job”)]. Difficult to see, if pattern will hold, with all this hopium and urgent socio-economic pressure and terror gumming up our senses. It could save us, you have to or you’ll fall behind, it could enslave and kill us all. Hope, pressure, terror. But if we take a step back… maybe we can get a more sober assessment.

Anyways, long rambles aside, really just posing the counter-notion to the assumption in the statement being queried in the original post,

despite an initial apparent “getting ahead”, with the demand, the churn, the lure, they may be headed for burnout, and instead it’s they who “fall behind”. Depends tho.

Aaaaah! I was just getting past that one, starting to convince myself of my adaptability to work around anything I forget to bring. How easily that one is rekindled. That’s a biggie.

Every time I discover I didn’t, I add another check.

I don’t know if “Did you lock the door?” is beginner anxiety. Seems more a delicacy of hyper vigilance anxiety from PTSD; more higher tier stuff. Like starting on a sip of the strong stuff.

Ahhh. Fond memories. They were simpler times. “Duck and cover!” and under our desks we’d go.

That was some fun anxiety fodder… The adults taking care of us were telling us being under our desks would save us from a nuclear blast.

And it’s happening right now! Everywhere!

Didn’t have to read it.

I’m intentionally steering my eyes away from all the suggestions here, lol.

“Am I breathing right?”

tends to help get things going.

If it doesn’t work, and you actually calm your breathing instead, try prefacing it with an “Oh no!”, and if that doesn’t work still, try framing it in the negative, with more urgent alarm…

“Oh no! Is my breathing wrong?!”

Then you can really get underway with anxiety, moving on to things like “something bad is going to happen”.

With a little practice, you can build up to full blown panic attacks in no time.

Wouldn’t that more correctly be

untangle his tarsi

(tarsuses?)

And, how did you manage to determine his sex?

be owned by owners,

is not what freedom looks like.

perverse incentives.

When looking that up, I came across this tidbit of extra irony at the start of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate :

According to the World Prison Brief (WPB) the United States had the world’s highest incarceration rate from 2001 (when the US overtook Russia) through October 4, 2022 (US rate of 629 per 100,000 population at that time).

Rummaging around through other sources gives me the idea the numbers are being massaged and manipulated, and that the real numbers could be much higher, and not had [as many sources imply] a decline from around 2003-2023. I suspect it could very likely be higher than 1996, now in 2026, rather than around half of what it was in 1996 [as many sources imply].

I wonder how many on house arrest, in bureaucratic states of transition that do not get counted as incarceration (even for extended periors), kept for questioning for terrorism, crammed into slavery prisons with quotas to fulfil, in local jails, in ICE holding, in private prisons that do not call themselves part of the US prison system, in unrecorded illegal incarceration, immigration processing, etc etc etc that are not being counted.

Not to mention the sanctuary districts! [Like Star Trek Deep Space Nine warned us about, on our television sets around the world in 1996, 57th & 58th episodes (11th & 12th episodes of season 3).]

And the broader “open prison” aspects of society… even just like the prison slop in place of food.

Depending on how one cuts the pie… could arguably go right up to around 300 million.

Or, perhaps more contrived an over-reach of interpretation… around 8 billion.

Paranoid?

Tummo breathing (like from the Wim Hof Method), and CBD isolate, and perhaps most of all, Caryophyllene.

Not paranoid any more. What remains are legit concerns.

And Hoshi looks on, quizzically.

If he turns up the gamma and saturation when watching DS9, like I do, he might say gold skin.

LOL. That’s a good laugh. Good stuff.

… But still, I’ve never met anyone who’s #FFF nor #000 … The more ambiguous “pink”, is perhaps more accurate in its vagueness, or even as a hard #F0F. But there are elements of earth culture that care not for such literal pedantry. Interpretation’s a bitch that can turn someone from #0FF to #00F (…or #F0F to #F00), attempting such.

We trekkies share the dream, a universe where we’re judged not on our hex code, but the content of our character.

And when Jennifer Sisko came from the mirror universe, they used the same actor for both those different people… Jenifer Sisko from this universe and Jennifer Sisko from the mirror universe.

Good question.

Hrmm. First janky thought… “dd the running system to the USB”. LOL. Dear oh dear, do not do that, LOL.

Actually, first thought, before reading the post, just from the title, was “install gentoo”, … and that still works, … if it’s gentoo you want.

I wonder if you could do it from a virtual system… with whatever passthrough(?) or whatever needed to let it install to USB. So [in virtualbox or qemu or whatever] boot from whatever distro’s live/installer [~ even, ventoy(?)], and install to USB, much like you would if running the live/installer on bare metal, except you’re in virtual, and have access to your current daily driver OS and all your comforts there.

I noticed recently some distros do not like being installed to USB (~ is that a recent thing? Maybe I’d not been installing distros to USB from as diverse a pool of distros as I thought, and it’d always been like this.)

I feel like I’m forgetting some other obvious avenue. There may be just distro-specific methods. Like gentoo’s stage3 handbook install method’s already sufficiently flexible way [(or exherbo or decibellinux (oh noes, decibellinux.org is still down) or other distro that does a similar manual install)]. [edit: oh!]

• dd (lol, no!)
• gentoo (or exherbo etc ~ / distro-specific ways)
• virtual (pick me!)
• the other ways I’m overlooking [edit: debootstrap]

… Then, depending upon what you need/want it for, and need/want avoid a reboot for, other options may offer solutions not considered further back in the decision tree… distrobox, bedrocklinux, distro-agnostic package management, manual (compile&)installs, or perhaps even just using something like virtualbox gets you far enough? … But no, none of that’s what you asked for. What you asked for is better. :)

[edit: oh!: I did make a start on a distro-agnostic distro-installer script, a decade or two ago, before life interrupted. I must have thought it possible. It would have allowed you to accomplish this. … Pity “life” happened, or I’d surely have that made already. Is doable.]