Linux in general and Arch in particular are kinda laissez-faire in that they’ll allow you to shoot yourself in the foot. Some distros may put barriers in your way, others practically hand you the gun, but at the end of the day, the gun is freely available and it’s your own foot that you’re shooting.

That… that’s what they were saying, no? Companies should worry about their shit.

Butterfly gang

The latter has been taken over by ElMu and his shenanigans, the former was originally a Twitter-internal project for a decentralised social media interfacing protocol, got forked out from Twitter in 2021 (the year before Musk took over Twitter), has a lot of Ex-Twitter people on it and promises to do a lot of things a lot better than either Twitter (now X) and offer a little more resilience against things like moderator abuse.

Curiously, that last bit is the first time I’ve seen a reasonable use case for Blockchain: Your content can be stored on arbitrary servers and migrated to others. Your identity is tied to keys that can be used to verify your content is actually yours. The info where the public half of the key and all your content are stored is recorded in a public, distributed, append-only ledger, where each entry verifies the integrity of the previous one. Thus, once you’re registered on that, no single moderator can arbitrarily ban you anymore. (Pretty sure there’s a hole in that logic, but I’m not versed enough to confidently assert as much.)

Of course, there’s a caveat: To discover content, you need an index (“relay”) of all the content feeds. That takes some of the content aggregation load off your individual content servers and makes hosting them easier. However, it shifts the content moderation / federation power from the individual instances to the shared index: If a given index blocks your content, people using it won’t see your content.

In theory anyone can host their own relay and everyone can choose which relay they want their content feed to use. In practice, hosting a relay is resource-intensive, bsky have a solid headstart and probably more resources, and their app also obviously uses their own index by default, so if you do want to create a “competitor”/alternative index, you’ll have a lot of catching up to do. They even state that expectation: “In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers” ^src

Which is basically a small-scale version of Google and Bing (and the AT Protocol Overview explicitly uses that comparison): Sure, you can make your own search engine, but if Google is the default everywhere, has a lot of storage and computing power to serve more requests and has way more indexed content, why would people use yours instead? Thus, if you want your content to be seen by many people, you have to play by the big relays’ rules.

Much decentral. Very open.

(I’m being snarky here, but I will give them the benefit of the doubt: They probably do mean to make self-hosting your personal data and content easier, and it’s easier for custom feeds to use single, big relays to draw from rather than doing the indexing and collation themselves. However, it provides them with a lot of leverage and just because they call themselves a “public benefit corporation” doesn’t mean I trust them not to start enshittifying for profit at some point.)

Honestly, yeah. I spent decades developing and maintaining it, hopefully will spend a few more decades with it, but after that? I have no use for it anymore, but if it’s still in decent condition, it would be a shame to waste it.

I’d rather have it be of some use to someone, and “drink mead out of it” is very high up the list, right after “use it for science or education” and right before “use it for semi-realistic (but doubly awesome) historical weapon tests or demos”. Other contenders are “deco piece”, “movie/theatre prop” and “ritual implement”.

Actually, that probably applies to most of my body. Reuse or repurpose as much as you can, turn the rest into fertiliser.

Failing that (if my spouse or family can’t stand the thought of cremating my remains, I don’t want to force them), at least bury me with some weapons. Not because I believe in Valhalla, I just want to troll some future archaeologist. Bonus points for mixing eras and qualities, e.g. a wallhanger 1700s cavalry sabre, weapons-grade Xiphos and a non-functional gun reproduction, dressed in a 900s Samurai armour.

Wait, you’ve had a skull grow on you? You’re boned

That’s the distinction between “should” and “will”

Then it seems like it’s too out there

Safe-ish, until some other driver on the crossing road approaches way faster than estimated, sees the light go yellow and floors it. Sure, they might see it in time, but there’s a risk they don’t. My dad once didn’t see a crossing car at a yield intersection despite looking that way and got T-boned. He didn’t think he was doing anything unsafe either.

Still safer than just blazing through though, so I guess partial credit for being carefully impatient?

Ah yeah, that seems to have Anticheat issues.

Still, I like to term it “System inertia” - moving systems is work, and unless something applies force, getting yourself to switch is hard.

Laziness most definitely is a thing. I didn’t switch until I had to.

What’s TOF? I’m only finding answers about flight instruments and cardiac issues

Bribe them with snacks. Source: Am IT. Have been bribed with snacks. You can bet that user got priority treatment from that day on.

Playing games in general or specific games? Because just about every game I like to play runs just fine on Linux now. The only one I ever missed was Destiny2, but then I moved on.

I’ve twice now gotten a position without prior knowledge of the tools in question. I think a lot is just taking a gamble on your ability to learn as you go - which clearly worked out in your case.

I had my start with Python, albeit as a kid and I didn’t actually understand too much about the principles at the time. Still, I think that was a good place to start learning about the concepts of instructions and variables.

I learned more about the ideas underpinning it all later, and most of my understanding came when actually working in software development on a live and in-development codebase. I think that’s a good progression: start small, then learn some theory just so you’ve heard the terms once, then try to make sense of actual code using that.

Edit: definitely work on some goal though. Don’t code in a vacuum, think of something small you want to achieve and learn to do that.

You can recommend all you want, the decision is far removed from me

Ooh that’s a good one

Idk how that person’s IT works, but in mine, that would probably warrant a lot of paperwork. The techs would have to pitch the change to client management, client management would have to pitch it to change management and provide test results to show it has no side effects, then deal with the techs complaining about the uptick in tickets about slow boot times or people justifying never shutting down or restarting with it taking so long to boot.

Not that they’re actually slow, our users are just super entitled. I got to observe the rollout of automatic screen lock for security reasons, and the ensuing pushback. The audacity of having to reenter your password if you’ve spent more than ten minutes doing nothing!

Security even managed to push for reducing it to five minutes after some unfortunate incident… but it got reverted for reasons you can probably guess. Hint: shit always flows downward.

I work in our service department myself (not as support tech though), but obviously, all tickets are supposed to go through 1st level. I don’t wanna be the dick skipping queue, so I did then one time I had an issue.

There’s a unique feeling of satisfaction to submitting a ticket with basically all the 1st level troubleshooting in the notes, allowing the tech to immediately escalate it to a 2nd level team. One quick call, one check I didn’t know about, already prepared the escalation notes while it ran. Never have I heard our support sound so cheerful.