It isn’t fun.

Yeah, all the stereotypes of the wacky ADHD guy squirrel lol, but it’s not like that on the inside.

We are lost in the goddamn fog, chasing phantoms and mirages that disappear when you look at them too long. We are constantly running to catch up and flailing for context. What looks capricious and funny is mostly just desperation. We aren’t bursting with unlimited energy, it’s as exhausting as it looks. Taking five attempts to actually get a task done because you just forget halfway through. Forgetting where you put the thing, every time. Feeling your working memory slip away like waking from a dream. Fucking up all the time, then having to work twice as hard to fix it, and feeling like shit because you can’t get anything right.

It gets old, man.

Knowledge is justified true belief.

You can’t know whether you have it or not.

When my kid started out using the internet, it was over-the-shoulder supervision to start out, then slowly dropping to in-the-room supervision (the PC in the living room), and progressively less over time, with the clearly stated proviso that I would occasionally be glancing over history just to make sure he wasn’t getting caught up in anything horrible, but that I wouldn’t be going into any kind of detail. At 13, he got his own PC in his room, and I left him to it.

I’m a very firm believer that you don’t attempt technical solutions to administrative problems. Privacy is important and monitoring is shit. You equip your kid with the tools and the supervised-experience to make good decisions, and once they can balance by themselves you let go of the bike.

Teach them to do dangerous things safely, that’s parenting in a nutshell.

(actually to clear up a misconception: to teach a kid to ride a bike, you hold the shoulders, not the bicycle. With the extra feedback they can actually compensate and learn to balance; if you hold the bike itself it just weirdly fights them and their cerebellum never gets it)

Anyone who pushes jira is a waste of fucking carbon, and I hope they never find happiness.

If you want twenty minutes of rage-filled ranting, ask me about vscode-server sometime.

Nonsense. Where do you think lawyers come from?

Why do you only frame the issue in terms of the voters’ responsibilities, and never in terms of the candidate’s responsibilities?

Why aren’t the politicians the ones who need to make hard choices? Why can’t they get wedged on the issues for once?

That’s not the question.

The question should be what choice does Harris have, except to stop Israel?

If (as I strongly agree) trump is the worst human on the planet who will cause irreparable damage to :gestures wildly: fucking everything, then why doesn’t his opponent have the responsibility to do whatever the hell it takes, within the law to keep him out of power?

Especially as in this instance his opponent is currently sworn to be responsible for the ongoing welfare of the nation.

Imagine being so fucking intent on enabling genocide half a planet away that you’d rather let your own country fall into the hands of Camacho Harkonnen rather than attract progressive voters.

Why is it always ‘voters need to lower their standards’, and never ‘candidates need to be decent human beings’?

Have they tried fucking off?

bash

What do you get when you cross Kim Jong Un and Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg?

My brother in christ, you need some Hatchie.

Hatchie - Rooftops

Hatchie - Giving the World Away

Hell yeah, though I prefer untoasted multigrain - also some cracked black pepper, maybe a little parsley or chives.

Resources and influence will always drunkard’s-walk into the hands of the unscrupulous and manipulative, pretty much by definition.

They’re going to be drawn to it, they’ll fight dirtier for it, and they’ll use the power it gives them to prevent anyone else from taking it away.

Big Tech is a huge source of both, so it would be amazing if the people on top of the heap weren’t massive piles of shit.

World’s on fire, grab some marshmallows and a stick.

World wants to make you miserable, be happy out of sheer spite.

Listen to more ska: yeah we’re going to hell, but I have a trumpet.

Most useful thing was actually a $2 key wallet. Stupid, but it was actually really hard to find the most basic keyring-with-wrap that wasn’t trying to be a card wallet or have fancy dangly bits or whatever. Just an oblong of fake leather, two studs and a split ring, so my keys don’t chew holes in my pocket.

You left out the part where he called him sir.

I do know about window managers, thanks.

And that’s part of the problem: they all have their own slightly different infrastructure that relies on slightly intricate and not-quite-standard plumbing.

Dialogs not opening, or those weird invisible 30-second timeouts opening an application becasue dbus isn’t happy because one of the xorg init scripts messed some XDG path or set the wrong GTK_* option, or XAUTHORITY is pointing somewhere weird.

Whichever user is logged in locally should be allowed to talk to the device they plugged in via usb? Well that’s just an unreasonable thing to expect to happen by default, let me spend 20 minutes cooking up a udev script to chown it on creation.

Users managing to set their default terminal to some random script they were working on (seriously, how?). Or they initialised their xfce4 profile with the blank-toolbar option and now can’t work out how to launch anything.

Notification popups? Sure, the toolbar will let you add one, but nothing communicates with it by default lol.

also jesus christ kde.

And I’m talking about the built-in functionality of the desktop environment wrt package management, not separate applications.

Sure, it’s nice to be able to apt-get upgrade and just get everything all at once - when everything is happy with everything else.

But when you get conflicting dependencies and you have to take time out to track down what libpyzongo0-util is used for or what is going to break later on if you just purge it because people use cutesy package names that are worse than Ruby libraries in terms of communicating what they’re actually for, and do we need this thing for the core platform or it it form some random crap that was installed ad-hoc and used precisely once, it gets old.

Like I say you need this amount of flexibility and complexity for development and deployment and network services and all the rest. Anyone using Windows for much more than file-print-office-browser-gaming has more masochism in them than I can comprehend.

But for that same very minimal set of core use-cases, you don’t need (or, I’d argue, want) flexibility or complexity, you want it to be simple and robust with JOWTDI. And for everything else, you ssh into your linux box and do it there. I was amazed to discover that Windows Terminal is actually really nice; combine that with an X server and maybe a VNC client, and you’ve got the best of both worlds.

And yes, Windows has all kinds of annoying shit of its own - but that mostly pops up when you want to do interesting things on it, not when you just want to look at cat videos on the internet.

I’m a sysadmin. We’re a Linux shop, I spend my life deep in the guts of Linux boxes, both server and desktop.

And for my daily-driver both at work and at home, I use windows.

The UI and overall UX are just better. The annoying bullshit I make a living knowing my way around, I don’t have to think about.

For actual development or backend services, of course you want a Linux box. Proper logging, proper tools, build shit, pipe it together, automate stuff and get down and technical when it breaks. Doing that on windows is absolutely hell.

But on windows, the volume control just works, I never have to delete lockfiles to get my browser to open, my desktop login doesn’t terminate if something in .profile returned nonzero, I can play every video game out there without having to fuck around, I can use native versions of real apps, I don’t have package-management dependency hell, all the pieces were designed to work with each other, and the baseline cognitive load needed to just use my computer is zero, which frees up my brain to focus on my actual work, or for playing games and fucking around on the internets.