• 5 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • Typically with Debian distros, I set security updates to be automatic and I just go in every now and then and update the rest. But I pretty much only use it on servers and Raspberry Pi side projects.

    To be clear to people who find this, none of these distros we’re talking about are for massive scale. We’re talking personal stuff, side projects, small businesses, etc. Don’t put Kali Linux on your laptop. It’s made for a specific purpose.




  • I always go back to Fedora. Different strokes for different folks and I’m definitely not trying to have a “Which distro?!?” conversation. Maybe you have philosophical reasons to hate it. (I do sometimes too.) But that’s my home base.

    It’s partly because I learned on WhiteHat/CentOS/RHEL for work. But even today, it’s my stable, baseline distro. They don’t change Gnome or push updates without at least some testing. (I know.) Drivers almost always work. There’s (usually) documentation written by paid professionals. It’s just a good, solid OS that I can make mine without uninstalling shit or worrying it’s unstable.

    Debian is perfect for that too, obviously and I’m eternally grateful for Arch’s wiki and community. But for my needs, Fedora strikes a near-perfect balance.




  • I’d like to think so. When we read 1984 in high school, a friend and I were studying together. I remember saying (in my naïveté), “I loved the book and I get the history but why would you want to be in charge of a place that sucks?” She was like, “You’re just going to have to get used to the fact that a lot of people care about power more than beaches.”

    Well, I still think those people are foolish. I’d rather be in charge of my own tiny slice of paradise than rule over some wack ass dictatorship where everyone else is miserable. Not wanting to be in charge is probably the basic pre-requisite for being a benevolent dictator. I like to cook for people and stuff. I’d use my power and wealth to do that.

    That being said, I’m a dirtbag. I’d have a cool house somewhere with mountain and ocean views. Probably 3 or 4 beauty queens who also have Ms. Congeniality pageant sashes who are in charge of laughing at my jokes and charming me. No more than one or two rhythmic gymnastics teams that delight us all by throwing ribbons to each other with their feet. (Other apparatuses are cool too. Hula hoop. Clubs. Ball. Variety is the spice of life.)



  • I’ve seen a lot of bands doing that at their merch table. I think for most bands, it’s just a keepsake like buying a T-shirt or sticker or whatever after a show. I’m sure there’s plenty of people who prefer cassettes (or at least the Walkman aesthetic) but for the most part, it’s just a souvenir.

    I’ve never been into tapes but I collect vinyl. Part of the fun is all the extras tossed in. It’s like buying a boxed set or special edition DVD/Blu-Ray. Tapes don’t really have the same space for fun stuff but Taylor Swift probably has the budget to do something “extra” and make it a whole thing people put on Instagram.








  • I don’t know if it even helps with productivity that much. A lot of bosses think developers’ entire job is just churning out code when it’s actually like 50% coding and 50% listening to stakeholders, planning, collaborating with designers, etc. I mean, it’s fine for a quick Python script or whatever but that might save an experienced developer 20 minutes max.

    And if you “write” me an email using Chat GPT and I just read a summary, what is the fucking point? All the nuance is lost. Specialized A.I. is great! I’m all for it combing through giant astronomy data sets or protein folding and stuff like that. But I don’t know that I’ve seen generative A.I. without a specific focus increase productivity very much.


  • You can give your info to the registrar and then make it anonymous to whois domain.tld searches so it’s not public. Cloudflare is the registrar I use these days because it’s a one-stop shop and used the company address but, at least in the U.S., they need your info for both credit/debit card processing. (Processing fees are cheaper the more info they provide but usually any address with the same zip code is enough.)

    If you have nefarious plans, I don’t have a good recommendation. But if it’s just about privacy, I don’t know if it’s really possible to be completely anonymous anyway. I guess you could use a gift card or something but at least in the U.S., if you own or buy a house, your address is public info already anyway. Shit, city hall will probably give you blueprints of any house.


  • I don’t want age verification for social media — I’d rather parents, who in 2025 probably grew up with connected devices, be responsible for it — but if they do force this, it should be part of the operating system. Sort of like Apple Pay and Google Pay where sites and apps can essentially put some boilerplate code in that’s easy to implement and all the sites/apps get back is a yes/no answer. Users only have to go through the process once. It protects privacy way more than giving your info to every “social media” site that comes along.

    It’s not ideal but it’d be way more workable than having to provide ID to every site that has social media functions. I mean, you could classify any random forum or site with a comment section as “social media” if the definition is too broad. Things like Fediverse instances wouldn’t have to each write their own implementation. (Eventually, there would be trusted, mature libraries, obviously, but that could take awhile and presumably would need to be part of every browser/app language but also at least some code for every back-end language to store the data.)