Linux distros and BSD ports did that since the 90's. When Linux distros had barely a PM or just tarballs, Infomagic sold 4 CD full of libre software. When I had no internet at home, back in the day I bought 3 DVD's of Debian Sarge for 20 euros, about $20. A bargain, it was the price of a hard-cover best seller book.
GB's of libre software, graphical install, 2.6 kernel, KDE3 desktop, very light on my Athlon 2000 with 256MB of RAM. It was incredible compared to what you got with Windows XP and 120 Euro per seat. Nonfree software and almost empty.
And, well, if for instance I could get read only, ~16TB durable USB drive with tons of Guix packages offline (in a two yearly basis with stable releases) for $200 I would buy them in the spot.
You would say that $200 for a distro it's expensive, but for what it provides, if you are only interested in libre gaming and tools, they amount you save can be huge. I've seen people spend $400 in Steam games because of the Holyday sales...
CPAN too, just try Hailo under Perl to test an old-fashioned chatbot based on Markov chains where very small LLM's and Hailo converge if used with the advanced training options for it. Yes, it will pull tons of dependencies, (less with cpanminus if run with 'cpanm -n Hailo'), but contrary to NPM, Pip and the like CPAN's repos are highly curated and before PHP and ubiquitoous Python Perl was used everywhere, from a sysadmin language (better than Bash/Sh for sure) to CGI, IRC bots and whatnot. How many issues did we have? Zero or near zero.
Package managers are older than some users here. From CPAN/CTAN to ports under BSD's.
Some pm's are badly maintained (Pip/NPM), while others are curated enough.
Again, if you have GNU/Linux installed, install Guix, read the Info manual on 'guix import' and just create a shell/container with 'guix shell --container' (and a manifest package created from guix import) and use any crap you need for NPM in a reproducible and isolated way. You $HOME will be safe, for sure.
Guix saves you from this. You can import NPM packages in a container (not even touching $HOME) and giving you a shell on the spot with just the dependencies and nothing more.
Learn about 'guix import'.
Oh, and you can install Guix on any GNU/Linux distro.
Free software apply for software made for humans, by definitions any LLM code can only have the license inherited from the previous work as it's a transformation work. In the end LLM's are just a source of legal troubles and propietary software companies will end suing each other while every pre AI libre software will be 100% legal to use.
Read about Lisp, the Computational Beauty of Nature, 64k Lisp from https://t3x.org and how all numbers can be composed of counting nested lists all down.
List of a single item:
(cons '1 nil)
Nil it's an empty atom, thus, this reads as:
[ 1 | nil ]
List of three items:
(cons '1 (cons 2 (cons 3 nil)))
Which is the same as
(list '1 '2 '3)
Internally, it's composed as is,
imagine these are domino pieces chained.
The right part of the first one points
to the second one and so on.
[ 1 | --> [ 2 | -> [ 3 | nil ]
A function is a list, it applies the operation
over the rest of the items:
(plus '1 '2 3')
Returns '6
Which is like saying:
(eval '(+ '1 '2 '3))
'(+ '1 '2 '3) it's just a list, not a function,
with 4 items.
Eval will just apply the '+' operation
to the rest of the list, recursively.
Whis is the the default for every list
written in parentheses without the
leading ' .
(+ 1 (+ 2 3))
Will evaluate to 6, while
(+ '1 '(+ '2 '3))
will give you an error
as you are adding a number and a list
and they are distinct items
themselves.
Computers games can have no video at all why the 'display' it's being sent over a serial output to either a display or a printed paper.
Nethack/Slashem, text adventures, Sokoban, Trek... can be printed one sheet at a time and be totally playable. With Slashem it might be a big waste of paper, but with text adventures you can just reuse the output (obviously) and reduce tons of further typing because you already have the whole scrollback printed back in your hands.
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