I used to think that I wanted to distro hop. Turns out that what I wanted was a bare bones OS that gave me the freedom to rice in strange and unnatural ways.

After 25(!) years of battling X11, dependency hells, and the early days of desktop compositing, I finally realized that what I wanted was Arch, and a few window managers to play with. SwayWM, and now Hyprland.

Unless you have some niche needs (real-time audio encoding) or want to play with more esoteric experiments (Nix, OSTree, etc), distro hopping is overkill.

But most distros have homogenized to the point to where all you need is knowledge about systemd to go from one to the other.

Just pick your favorite, non-snap distro and hack on it.

It'll only affect 32bit systems with ancient operating systems storing dates in epoch time.

Not a small number. But nowhere remotely near what Y2K could have been.

Hopefully by the time we need to account for a 64bit rollover, I'll be comfortably retired. But by that time, proton decay may be a more worrisome problem.

I imagine there are fan groups for Our Flag Means Death.

The term, "enshitification" is getting bandied about a lot. But the bots and corporations are an inevitable part of capitalism. Make money at all costs, never be satisfied with what you have, and treat everybody that isn't you like a stepping stone.

Scammers and sociopathic c-levels are missing something fundamentally human. A complete lack of empathy. But this has always been a part of our species. The difference now is that we have a system that dramatically rewards that sickness. And that's not even getting into how being able to be evil at scale is going to make the next few decades interesting.

Pop verification neck to continue.

Janeway would straight up murder them. She's done worse for less reason.

My argument is thus:

LLMs are decent at boilerplate. They're good at rephrasing things so that they're easier to understand. I had a student who struggled for months to wrap her head around how pointers work, two hours with GPT and the ability to ask clarifying questions and now she's rockin'.

I like being able to plop in a chunk of Python and say, "type annotate this for me and none of your sarcasm this time!"

But if you're using an LLM as a problem solver and not as an accelerator, you're going to lack some of the deep understanding of what happens when your code runs.

I live in a college town where you'd expect to find a lot of bike lanes.

And we do have them. For a few blocks at a stretch. Then they go away or merge with traffic only to pick up again a few blocks down the road.

Sometimes I need a car. I can't carry a week's worth of groceries on a bike. I can't ride to a D&D gathering when it's -35°F outside (Montana).

But situations like that notwithstanding, I could easily use a bike for 70+% of my travel needs. And yet I don't.

There is no infrastructure. And any voter initiatives to create the infrastructure will inevitably get killed by Conservatives upset that something will help a college student while not providing themselves with anything. Or purely out of spite.

I spent some time in Davis, CA and have never seen a more mature and robust system of bike paths and traffic control. Bicyclists are first class citizens and (where possible) have paths that are completely separate from motor vehicle traffic.

I would ride my bike everywhere if I could do it without the justifiable fear that I'll get run off the road for not going fast enough.

PHP: You're not a nerd. But you are at least trying.

It takes nearly as long to decrapify a new Firefox install as it does to compile Librewolf.

Install uBlock.

Tell Firefox that you don't want to sync at the moment.

Disable "sponsored" stories. AKA, listicles designed to draw in idiots who want to see which 8 child actors from the 90s turned out to be the tallest. Alarmingly close to the tacky crap that you might see on a fresh Windows install.

Tell Firefox that you don't want to sync at the moment.

Now disable Pocket. Remembering to go into about:config to really disable it

Disable telemetry.

Tell Firefox that you don't want to sync at the moment.

Remove Amazon, Bing, et al. from the search engine list.

Remove "suggested" and "sponsored" autocomplete.

Tell Firefox that you don't want to sync at the moment.

Remind yourself that, despite this crap, Firefox is still a better browser than any Chromium knockoff.

I think that it's absolutely fair to jump on Microsoft for this.

There is nothing wrong with this hardware. RAM and CPU clock speed plateaued a long time ago. The overwhelming majority of these systems being thrown away would run Linux flawlessly.

Microsoft has never given a damn about security before. These new security "features" do more to lock people in than they do to keep them safe.

Survivorship bias.

We didn't experience the numerous appliances and other detritus from the 70's that crapped out and died. The ones whose safety policy began and ended with the power of prayer.

I have no idea what 2024 will bring us. It feels like the entire world is shaking itself apart. But I can promise you with 100% certainty that in 2064 they'll be lamenting that their appliances aren't built as good as they used to.

Oh! So I can't go into a post-op ward in a white lab coat and tell the recovering patients that the power of prayer is better than surgery?!

What's next?! Taking away my Professional Engineer certification just because I'm not an engineer?

Or maybe you want to bankrupt my architecture firm simply because my certifications double as my Colgate Cavity Patrol diploma!

Never forget: If you can't commit outright fraud with your free speech, is it really free?

/s

I stopped caring several years ago.

It's like when Disney bought Star Wars. They homogenized it to make it more palatable and ended up making it dull and unappetizing. Neither franchise has a soul anymore. Just a formulaic plot with a set of waypoints in a dull 3 act format. Sprinkle in some in-humor, pedestrian jokes, and a special effects budget that would make the Pentagon blush and you have a recipe for dull tripe.

It's more than just centralized control.

They have the ability to arbitrarily push out Snap updates.

That's right! Your production server is getting patched without your knowledge or consent. Thankfully they magnanimously decided to let admins delay it by a few weeks.

Linux is about control. I decide what my machine does. When it updates. What it updates. The feedback from Canonical regarding Snaps was so tone dead and condescending it made Steve Balmer look sane. It boiled down to, don't worry your pretty little head off. We know what's best.

I genuinely want Gopher back.

I want to share information and to communicate. I don't want every bowel movement tracked and monetizes. I don't want 30 cross site requests when going to a news site. A single story should not require 10MB of JavaScript libraries.

I have no doubt that most of the authors of the original internet are aghast at what their high-minded creation has itself created.

Same here. I've been trying to immerse myself in Spanish. My grandparents were from there and they were always disappointed that none of their grandchildren became fluent.

Now I go back once per year as a sort of pilgrimage. Hopefully I'll be able to hold conversations soon.

It's difficult, but I never want to be that American who refuses to make even a token effort to learn the basics of the language when they're travelling abroad.

Spectat sicut Anglis. Possum legere sine ullo negotio.

My NeoVim (which can leverage VSCodes plugins) uses about 60MB for an entire project.

And doesn't have the stink of Microsoft and its associated user tracking.

I'll talk nothing over a terribly implemented Electron app that devours system resources and brings every other Electron app down when it inevitably OOMs.