Well that’s pretty much how I already live my life, so it should be an easy transition to indoctrinating my kid into nerdy shit.

Obviously she’ll rebel and get super into sports or cars or something, but what can you do? 😄

That’s awesome to know. I suppose they’re really just a game of “let’s pretend” but with a bit of structure.

For me they’re aspirational. I haven’t played a pen and paper RPG in over 20 years, but like to imagine I’ll find the time. With a baby on the way, in about 8 to 12 years I’ll have a captive audience to play with, between her and my wife.

It’s the same with our giant shelf of board games that are better with 3 players. We’re playing the long game here.

Even more dramatic is that if a repair service provider discovers a third-party spare part that was installed in a Galaxy device as part of a previous repair, they must immediately disassemble the smartphone, tablet or notebook into its individual parts and inform Samsung of the details of the respective incident.

Well this feels illegal (or certainly should be). Imagine taking your car in for a repair only to find out the shop functionally scrapped it and told on you to Ford, all because they noticed you had changed a tire.

If I remember correctly ZFS keeps the whole array running whenever one is active (which is basically always). If I remember, I’ll check my UPS when I get home to see the actual power draw. The storage itself is probably cheaper to run than the main server in the rack - a gen8 HP 360p, which is a bit on the old side and I’d guess not terribly efficient being a 1U piece with many small high-powered fans running constantly.

Electricity here isn’t too expensive though, being public hydro power.

That’s a slight exaggeration. I think it was about 2 years to get close to filling that up. Keep in mind that a chunk of that is unusable due to drive parity.

It really depends on what you’re doing. In my case the soft costs like domains are pretty negligible compared to how much I seem to spend on more hard disks every six months. You might tell yourself, “96 TB of raw storage will last forever,” but it turns out forever is about a year.

I love that they specify that they’re not accepting pull requests.

Very cool! Thank you for this.

Yeeeeees. If you’re orienting your company as the privacy-alternative it’d be great to emphasize support for the main privacy-oriented OS. I get that developers don’t grow on trees, but this seems like a pretty crucial feature that should be prioritized.

I mean, I recently switched to Proton knowing what I was getting into, but I’d really like to see this happen soon.

They mean a variant you use in a stable, like to run an automatic feeder for horses. According to Ars Technica, however, you are not to use it in your production stable.

There are some things that not even a god has the power to do.

This is what I look like:

Well I don’t see any cops.

stable release of Arch Linux is also affected. That distribution, however, isn’t used in production systems.

Don’t tell me how to live my life, Ars Technica.

This looks legit pretty promising! I’ve been gradually working on moving off of Notion for the last year, and somehow this one slipped past my notice.

I don’t have any experience with CoreOS so can’t help you on that front. That said, it sounds like the server in question isn’t mission-critical in the first place and you seem to have come up with a good argument for trying it out. Why not give it a go and see how it works out?

This is indeed the way. In my personal life I’m like 50-75% there: I run Linux on my primary computer, use Firefox and LibreWolf, self-host as much as possible, etc. But you’re right about the duopoly (triopoly, if that’s a word? If you consider MS, Google, and Apple as being the main gatekeepers to the average person’s technical experiences). As much as open-source and privacy-respecting alternatives have gotten vastly more accessible over the last decade or so, it still almost always requires effort and at least some technical knowledge on the part of the user. Sometimes at the end of the day I just want to chill out, so I pick my battles and approach this as a long-term, gradual process.

To your last point I’ll even admit that I’m part of the problem. In addition to some other roles I run IT for the small business I’ve worked for over the last decade+. About a year and a half ago the owners decided to retire and my family pooled our money to buy the business (a bunch of us had worked there a long time). Newly promoted to treasurer, I had the keys to the castle and could have used this as an opportunity to push for a paradigm switch in our IT to Linux. I didn’t though, because with all the other moving parts and major financial risks we were taking, it would have just been one more source of friction in an already -stressful time.

So, instead, I doubled down on the MS tax and moved us to MS365. The thing is, though, outside of two Windows-only apps (only one of which is mission-critical) 90% of what my users do is all browser-based and they probably wouldn’t even notice a difference in their OS. But, a) I didn’t want to waste the political capital when I had other priorities I wanted to push for with the new owners, and b) again - sticking with the status quo is just easier in the short term. The thought of teaching a new OS to a dozen non-technical admins and salespeople was just too much at a time when I was scrambling to make sure we could pay our bills. As the old adage goes, “no one gets fired for buying IBM.”

What makes this even more ridiculous is that, in part due to my lack of super-in-depth Windows admin knowledge, I ended up setting up a co-management agreement with an IT provider so I had a fallback option when my other duties kept me from responding to IT issues myself. The really crazy part, looking back, is that I regularly run into way more weird bugs on my Windows 11 work laptop than I do on my goddamn Arch desktop. Perhaps if I’d have just pushed for this back then, I’d have saved the company thousands of dollars in subscription fees - money which could have instead been spent on my main priority of raising wages. But, alas, the tech establishment is really good at marketing themselves as a turnkey solution (which really isn’t true).

Anyway, thank you all for coming to my Ted Talk.

Shifts nervously

For real though, I’ve been meaning to switch to a de-Googled variant but just haven’t found the energy. Baby steps.

I honestly just assumed this would more or less be happening all along, even pre-AI. Google and Microsoft are established Peeping Toms. If you care at all about privacy they should be avoided. (I type from my Android phone…)