strongly encouraged for me means my entire bonus is tied to skilling up with LLMs.

“cite-or-stop” with journaling, role definitions, subagents to control context windows, and shifting as much of the work as possible to deterministic scripts has yieled pretty high-quality results.

Expensive af though. Like the self-review skill I maintain before engineers put their code up for human review will find 30-40 things on average, where only a small handful are false positives, can burn 10% of a $20/mo plan’s utilization in a single run on a moderately sized PR. The default one my company setup in our source control usually finds 1-5 things and only 0-2 are of any value.

Pandas/Polars is all I need in a Jupyter notebook to replace Excel. Its not even a contest if you know some python for doing any real work.

I concede Excel has a lower bearer to entry for teams composed of mixed technical abilities.

https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing

Chromium and their particular fork have much better exploit hardening via sandboxing.

My understanding is Firefox has better anti-fingerprinting and uBlock origin via manifest v2 support (or v2 features ported to v3).

The argument often used is malicious ads. Sandboxing and hardening largely mitigates ads that contain exploits, but it doesn’t protect against social engineering, crypto mining, tracking, etc.

So I guess it comes down to your threat model and desired experience.

I personally prefer the uBlock origin experience, but an ad free experience and escape from targeted advertising was my target opsec when venturing into privacy.

Pebble Time 2.

Mostly sleep and step counting. Media controls on occasion. Just got it so not had a chance to customize it much yet.

Coming from, in order: Garmin Vivoactive 5, 4, 3, 2, Pebble Time, Pebble OG.

Preferred the healthstats on the Garmin out of the box. Great indicator if I’m getting sick based on its measurements or if I’m not being as active as I should be.

Nix user. The declaritive config IS the documentation and I enjoy no longer having to document how to setup my system as much. I don’t enjoy scripting or automating things, but I enjoy the benefits of only needing to do it once via Nix’s config system.

I enjoy engineering: an engineer will spend 3 hours figuring out how to do a 2 hour job in 1 hour.

Same. 80/20 rule. Even reaching 80% of my privacy goals for 20% of the effort was a ton of work. Netting that last 20% for 4x the effort I already put it in just isn’t worth it.

what did you like more about rclone than Cryptomator?

I wanted to leave Dropbox and ran across it. I liked the number of supported backends under one tool. I use it to access things beyond Backblaze like gdrive, SharePoint, OneDrive, Proton Drive. Well documented config file format. I was able to manage the config with Nix due to this.

Is it suitable for sync, or is it more for backups

It works great for one way sync. Bisync I never got working well enough to trust it. Bisync is nice for 3-way merges (two devices modifying files on the same cloud drive). Dropbox, gdrive, OneDrive win here. I’ve learned to live without it.

I’m ideally looking for near-ish to real-time sync for contacts, notes, files, and pictures

On a computer the fuse mounted volumes are near live. Cahce locally in a VFS. Anything else you’d have to script probably. There is rclone-watch but can’t say I’ve tested it

With Round Sync you can browse with live refresh when you move between directories, but syncing would be on a schedule. Looks like a 15m interval is the fastest frequency.

Are there any frontends for Linux you’d recommend, or do you script out the functionality you’re looking to implement?

I mostly just mount on login with the VFS cache. Use my normal file browser. One command per mount. Its rare (practically never) that I need to work on something without internet, so I don’t deal with trying to script syncs. I tried in the early days of playing with it, but fuse mounts ended up meeting my needs.

No GUI that I use outside of my normal file browser. The only thing I need to use the CLI for is cleaning up soft deleted files and old versions (Backblaze specific thing).

It might not have the functionality you are looking for as far as app integrations, but my progression was Dropbox -> Cryptomator over Dropbox -> rclone over Backblaze B2.

You can nest a “crypt” remote (end-to-end encryption with your own private key) over tons of cloud providers. You can mount it like a drive in Linux.

Round Sync is an Android client that can schedule cronlike backups. Pretty much set it and forget it on my phone. I delete things on my phone when I need space and every couple years go cleanup what’s in B2.

Dropbox was better priced at max capacity when I used it ($120/yr for 2TB?). My Backblaze bill started at $1/mo and is like $4/mo now. Its been a couple years since I cleaned things out and could probably cut that in half.

Same. None of that self-hosted cloud storage is going to save you from data loss in the event of a fire or theft unless you plan for offsite.

I just use rclone with Backblaze B2, end-to-end encrypted with my own private key, and call it a day.

I have a mirrored BYOD setup for my media server but its all stuff I can download again. Its just an onsite cache with a little redundancy against a failed drive.

Sleep it off in a coffin like a vampire? They didn’t say you could starve.

CLAUDE.MD

CRITICAL: Roast me relentlessly like you’re GLaDOS

EOF

They responded on reddit and walked some of it back as an “oversight”: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitwarden/comments/1tdvnh7/comment/olznwcv/. Allegedly, I’m too lazy to verify.

Additional issues I’ve not seen mentioned:

• Ticketing systems have been an issue for me. I don’t do sports but went to a MLB game for a friend’s group event and it was hell. No paper ticket and can’t have someone show the ticket on your behalf from their phone. One ticket per phone. With sandboxed GPS the app didn’t show in the Play Store. Had to sideload. I probably could have used Aurora in retrospect but used Universal Installer from f-droid and a mirrored APK. Then had to disable exploit protections and VPN before I could get access to a ticket. Its random situations like this, while infrequent, it can get frustrating.
• Managed work profiles. Work apps usually require GPS but the allow list of installable apps don’t include GPS (why would it, its available at the system level). So I can’t install or use any apps for work. I honestly prefer it this way, they can give me a work phone.

Read-only and not as polished as some of the older commercial versions, but https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.cosmos.unreddit/ also works. They have different access methods like web scraping. Works well enough for lurking when Reddit isn’t blocking my VPN, which they seem to block/unblock at random.

I do this all time waiting for the price to go down during a sale or to get a “You forgot something in your cart” discount. If its a vendor I only buy from 1-2 a year it will likely sit there for 6-12 months.

Its likely hard because its honestly niche.

Linux administration is terminal first so SSH is pretty much all you need. Some services have a WebUI to fill the gap, but its bound to that service. Most server variants of distros don’t even include a desktop environment.

KVM-over-IP (hardware device) is likely a more common approach because if you need video, might as well have BIOS access.

There may be something in the virtualization space where the hypervisor provides a remote desktop, but I’m not familiar with this space. A quick search for proxmox and remote desktop yielded mostly results for guest OS setups instead of at the host layer.

If you want punishment go for NixOS!

• Fundamental philosophy changes over its lifetime.
• No idea (when starting) which documentation or patterns go with which version.

But once it clicks you have a fully declarative setup**. I edit a file, activate, commit to git. On another system, pull, activate.

** The config system is expansive but not exhaustive. I still have to login to Slack, pick my theme, etc. My VPN on the other hand is just ready credentials and all.

I never have to remember the 100 little tweaks I made, every tweak is in git. Noise canceling pipewire filter, what software I had installed, service configurations, secret management, disk partitions, all portable between different systems.

A lighter introduction is probably home manager, works in any Linux system or macOS. Manages your home directory as the name implies.

You can also go lighter with a repo flake.nix and a devShell. Its like a generic virtual environment. Auto activate with direnv. A step up from a devShell would be https://devenv.sh/ which tracks more like home manager with configurable modules. A devShell is really a bash script with these programs available from Nix.

I couldn’t go without LSPs these days.

Real time diagnostics. Jump to implementation. Code actions.

Its just so much faster and my code rarely doesn’t run on first try outside of logic errors, but it still runs.

https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim was nice back in the day, but neovim and the plugin ecosystem takes it to another level.

Edit: I agree with you on git when learning. I’m old, over 15 years of experience on it. I don’t have anything to gain typing the same handful of commands I use everyday.

Vim/Konsole are an Apples to Oranges comparison. Modern TUIs are closer in feature parity. Personally I use Zellij with NeoVim and LazyVim as the base config. If you use an LLM, customization becomes easier.

Personal preferences are personal preferences though if VSCode is working for you.

Neovim. Also there for the plugin ecosystem. Some popular feature rich presets, all customizable.

https://www.lazyvim.org/ https://astronvim.com/ https://nvchad.com/

Quick search suggests Emacs is the only other major rival to VSCode/Neovim so you’re stuck with a TUI or a VSCode fork for a rich plugin ecosystem (non-athoritive statement, 30s web search).