I wish I was the right kind of creative, greedy, and dull to come up with this kind of crap. I could scam so many bald billionaires.

When you fly on Air Canada there’s a unmutable ad for the Alberta oil sands right after the safety announcement before takeoff. It’s surreal enough, but it’ll be so much worse when they start doing this kind of shit too.

I don’t need artificial intelligence in my terminal. Do you know how many times some troll has posted about “rm -fr /” on Reddit and other shitty forums, which then gets gobbled up and laundered by LLMs? Not letting that anywhere near my prod servers with valuable data.

I wouldn’t put a lot of trust in Telegram. Not only is their cryptography off by default, it’s a bespoke hand-rolled non-standard algorithm that might not work as well as they say. Oh, and it’s been potentially backdoored by the FSB (Russia’s CIA) for six years.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/telegram-reportedly-ordered-to-share-encryption-keys-with-fsb/

It’s crazy how the US gov basically handed him a monopoly on EV charging infrastructure, something Rockefeller could have only dreamed of, and the guy throws it away less than two weeks later in some ketamine fuelled stupor. Then has to backtrack at the cost of reputation, confidence, and sentiment. Truly another great stable genius.

I did it back in 2020 when we all had nothing better to do. Got as far as installing X11 and Openbox, and halfway through setting up the toolchain for Firefox.

It was fun - the kind of fun digging a big hole is. It’s not for everybody, but I sort of enjoyed it.

The bastards can never take away your shell script full of arcane and unreadable curl commands parsed by incomprehensible awk scripts!

In my opinion it points to a more dangerous thing, “continuous delivery” software mindset seeping into safety critical systems.

It’s fine, good even, that web developers can push updates to “prod” in minutes. But imagine if some dork could push largely untested control system updates to your car’s ECU… it’s one thing for a website site to get a couple errors, but it’s a very bad thing if it makes your steering wheel stop working.

Unfinished products make more money, and it’s high time a consumer protection law clamped down on this.

Not an arch user, but it’s possible they moved dbus to a user scoped unit now. Might be possible to start it like this (or something similar)

systemctl —user start dbus.service

Most desktop environments you just hit alt+f2 to activate the launcher which lets you run any command you want

I use plain old bash with the plain old .bashrc that ships with Debian. I’ll bolt on a git-branch-aware function into the prompt here and there, but that’s about it.

Why? I ssh into a few dozen machines most days and my shitty little lizard brain can’t deal with everything being different on each box. So as much as I appreciate zsh, powerline plug-ins, all that glitzy stuff, I’ll be a late adopter when it comes to plain old Debian stable…

I’ll never participate in one of the “master race” communities because of the chronically icky association with fash shit. I get it, it’s an old reddit-ey joke from like 2011, but it’s undeniable that the name has a very strong undertone of white supremacy.

Moving away from the incumbent social networks is our chance to create a new culture without that baggage.

Honestly, you’re not going to have a lot of luck with recent games. The sandybridge i5’s were great back in the day but their time has come. I had a 2600 for a looong time but it’s been out to pasture for a couple years now.

Check out the “patientgamers” communities, they like to play older games that would run a lot smoother on your hardware.

If it was installed with tasksel that would be a good way to remove any dependancies like lightdm as well.

Fwiw, I’ve had great results with upgrading Debian derivatives. A machine in my closet has been upgraded from version 8 -> 12 without any major issue. Usually, upgrade problems come from custom or third party software in my experience.

That would never happen, no maintainer would open themselves up to that kind of liability.

Might be worth it if you want network printing. Usb only is fine, but it’s worth paying a little extra to get Ethernet if that’s what you want. Mdns/avahi/bonjour make things easy for sure. Wifi printers always suck, I’d avoid that. I’ve had nothing but good results with my brother b&w on wired Ethernet.

You could probably get a used x280 or x390 for that price. Both are great machines even 4 years later. Check local refurbishers for off-lease machines on the cheap.

Write install and maintenance guides, save them somewhere public. Automation is good, but documentation and practicing technical writing is better.

Why not Debian? It’s a fantastic distro on its own, without the need to bolt on vendor’s stuff if you already know what you’re doing.