Corey Doctorow is a writer who does SciFi and tech/privacy activism. He works with/for the EFF, and he’s anti AI, but in a fairly nuanced way. You’d have to read his stuff to get a sense of it. Very opinionated, very prolific. Fun to read.

I count it! I really like his book Enshittification. Bought a copy for my boss. Possible career limiting move. Shrug

I spotted a Doctorow reader in the wild!

I snapshot my machine, set it to go overnight, went to bed. Woke up, 24% done “Do you want to use the package maintainer’s version?”. Grr. Went smooth though.

Imagine if ads were related to the content of the page? Like, if I look up a webpage about video games, and get ads for… Video Games? I made the mistake of looking up a particular eGPU a while ago, and now when I’m looking up kayaks online, I get ads for eGPUs.

The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem. Haven’t read it since I was a kid, but remember it was awesome.

I landed on Fedora Gnome as my default choice unless I have a reason to go other. My wife finally stuck with Linux after trying Mint, Ubuntu, Pop, and Ubuntu Mate, then landing on Fedora KDE. (When I say trying, I mean me trying to get her to use it and then her abandoning the machine for Windows.) Fedora KDE stuck.

My immediate supervisor at work knows how bad I get earworms, and does Baby Shark whenever I annoy him. It’s in there now, thanks to this.

Yeah, I know enough too, but I worry about the sneaky details I don’t know.

So, word of caution. Be careful. I tried using Copilot to open a connection for a single port between two LANs on my network in pfsense, as I didn’t know pfsense. It happily recommended opening 0.0.0.0/0 on the first LAN’s gateway address. It worked!.. By opening everything on the whole network up to anything at all. The problem with AI: you can only use it if you already know enough to catch its horrible screw ups.

I sync my podcasts hourly with Nextcloud and poddersync, so when my servers go down, my phone beeps at me.

Wife of ten years, I stuck her on Ubuntu 16.04 back in the day. She ignored it and used a laptop. A few years later? Mint with Mate. She started on it long enough to set the background to the Windows 10 background, then went back to a Windows boot, since I dual booted. Last year, new computer, Fedora KDE, again dual booted. Haven’t seen her in Windows yet. Me? I hop all over the place, but our HTPC and her laptop are now Fedora KDE.

I have it running right now on Fedora using lutris. Standard install, no weird steps or anything. Lutris is flatpak.

I tried to run Genshin Impact on Alpine once. Did not succeed.

I put it on a machine as a joke and, well… Three months and it hasn’t gone bye-bye.

I want this.

What irritates the ever loving crap out of me is that all the search engines have gotten so bad that you have to use AI to get the answers now… And…! AI scrapers are so hard on bandwidth and servers housing that all the old how-to tech blogs by actual smart people have packed their bags and left. I used to find loads of great self hosting guides by doing a Google search for “Proxmox npm setup guide” and clicking one of the top three results. Now: sponsored, slop, slop, shilling paid product, old Reddit post, etc.

Nextcloud! It was it’s own box, then a VM.

An ungodly mess of cables, planks, threaded rod, and old, used servers! My very own Proxmox Cluster! I have spent years tweaking and changing it, but I’ve had some services up (not, like, continuously) for 13 years now. The original server was an i7-950, and now I’m on dual Xeon Silver on my newest box.

I had it forever, but it doesn’t work on later Android versions. I bought the paid version too.