This reminded me of the novel Boomsday by Christopher Buckley (same author that wrote the book Thank You for Smoking if you’re familiar) where Boomers are offered tax break incentives if they agree to kill themselves at age 75.

Except now Millennials are in the hot seat …

https://media4.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExcWdkbDBhd2EzNW0yaWVjcG1laDRhYWw2dWt5eXppdTFjZGR1bm5ibiZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/hC2H9IdtXDlfotmF0B/giphy.gif

The Chinese Room thought experiment is extremely relevant to what’s going on in the world today, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

I first read about it in Blindsight, a fantastic sci-fi novel by Peter Watts. (Unrelated, I also highly recommend Starfish by him as well).

So now imagine someone asks, “Do you like dogs?” and out pops the answer, “No, I hate them.” The worker inside the thought experiment room has no idea the question that was asked nor the answer that was given and it could very well run counter to their own opinions. The answer may come from bias in the initial data, or just the person who wrote the book of rules and decided to put their thumb on the scales. PLEASE stop trusting AI for literally anything, it is less than worthless, it is actively harmful.

In addition to this, or rather before, you can run pacman -D --asdeps package_name to mark a package as a dep. If it is no longer required by something else it will be removed with the above. This can be useful for things that are deps that you installed manually at some point for some reason.

Oh, that’s some amazing info, thanks!

I had noticed this might be a problem when I was setting something up and tried to install a dependency that was already on the system. It informed me it was being set to explicit and I wondered if it might lead to a situation like that.

https://www.knorr.com/us/en/p/spanish-rice-side.html/00041000022685

Depending on your level of struggle, these rice packets cost about ~$1.25 USD and cook in 7 minutes, you just gotta stir 'em a bit.

To that I’ll add some protein, either some sausages I cooked on the George Foreman grill and sliced up or a packet of flavored tuna. This is mostly no effort or unattended.

For veggies, I’ll steam up something fresh or microwave some frozen mixed veggies. Either way this can be done in 3-5 minutes, unattended.

Some effort, but still very low. You can get everything started at once while you stand there and stir the rice packet on the stove, everything should wrap up in less than 10 minutes and you’ll have a relatively complete and filling mill for hopefully less than $5 USD but I don’t even fucking know anymore with inflation, tariffs, and out of control groceries. Should still be more cost effective than a lot of alternatives, though.

EDIT: The rice packet can honestly be quite a bit for a single person, depending. You may want to pad it out with a few more things like mushrooms and beans, then you can split the meal in two. Eat half now and save half to be microwaved later to stretch it out and for when you have no prep time at all.

EDIT: More information provided. I disagree with the upvoted comment implying you should leave your system alone because you might break something. You’re using Arch, and part of the reason to use Arch is understanding how you built and maintain your system. Understanding how to inspect your system and perform proper maintenance is a crucial part of that. Read and think carefully before taking any actions and make sure any important information is backed up before taking major actions. Without throwing too much further shade, I find it disappointing so many in the community would take that stance and discourage you from pursuing this further.

When I switched to Arch, I started a notebook in Obsidian with a bunch of different information in it, I have a section devoted to Maintenance. Here are a few things I’ve put in there:

Clean package cache with paccache: https://ostechnix.com/recommended-way-clean-package-cache-arch-linux/

Clean orphaned dependencies: sudo pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qtdq)

• https://man.archlinux.org/man/pacman.8.en
• Qtdg, Q (Query) t (unrequired) d (dependencies) g (groups)
• Rs, R (Remove) s (recursive)

Additionally, you can run pacman -Qe to list the packages you yourself have explicitly installed with pacman, or pacman -Qdt to list the packages that are dependencies of other packages. Use pacman -Qm to list packages not found in the official repositories (i.e., things installed through yay). This will allow you to review packages you may have explicitly installed in the past for some reason, but now find you no longer need.

For yay, I’m unsure if I should be using -Yc, -Sc, or -Scc. If anyone has more info with that, I’d appreciate it.

For flatpak: flatpak uninstall --unused

And for journals: journalctl --vacuum-time 7days

That’s most of the “automatic” stuff, cruft that can be cleaned out with little to no consequence. Other than that, you’ll just have to manually review what you have on your system.

If anyone has other commands or comments on the ones I provided, I’d be happy to accept further advice here as well 😃

Yes, thank you, I think this is exactly what I’ve been feeling but unable to articulate properly.

I do feel there’s a great loss of knowledge in IT, but I’m also aware that I’m motivated by my own opinions and fear of job stability here. There are absolutely times when the cloud makes sense, and those arguments about capex v. opex nail it. I’d love to blame it entirely on greedy execs, but that upfront cost is hard to swallow for a new business, whether you’re planning on super/hyper scaling or not. Cohosting in a datacenter is a great option, but even then, most people simply won’t be willing to invest the time, as you put it.

I’ve had the luck of working for stable institutions like banks and biotech in the past where they built out their infrastructure for security and reliability properly and it was wonderful. I’ve also had the misfortune of working for hyperscaling startups with zero trust architecture built in Azure. It was a nightmare and I hated every day of it.

Like most things, the path forward is going to require a delicate balance, but there’s absolutely no fucking trusting Microsoft. When Europe says, “Hey, we’re getting nervous about your influence here” the response isn’t:

“In a time of geopolitical volatility, we are committed to providing digital stability. That is why today Microsoft is announcing five digital commitments to Europe. These start with an expansion of our cloud and AI infrastructure in Europe, aimed at enabling every country to fully use these technologies to strengthen their economic competitiveness. And they include a promise to uphold Europe’s digital resilience regardless of geopolitical and trade volatility.”

I mean, of course that’s what they’d say, but still. Fuck 'em.

Y’all, I gotta admit I’m really starting to feel old. I still do not fully believe that cloud hosting is the answer for everyone. For businesses of certain sizes, I think running your own stuff and maintaining that IT knowledge within your org is invaluable, but I’m just an IT gremlin who can’t properly articulate his thoughts.

Anyone more knowledgeable care to weigh in?

I appreciate him trying to drum up excitement for the terminal. A lot of people are afraid of it and I understand why, but you don’t need to know everything about it in order to benefit from it.

I wanted to post some Trackmania replays to Bluesky when they first rolled out video, but they only supported up to 50MB. I dreaded having to open kdenlive, figure out how to work the GUI and then also possibly have to do some terrible math to balance size and quality. Maybe this is easier than I expected, but I found this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/520597/how-to-reduce-the-size-of-a-video-to-a-target-size

ffmpeg_resize () {
    file=$1
    target_size_mb=$2  # target size in MB
    target_size=$(( $target_size_mb * 1000 * 1000 * 8 )) # target size in bits
    length=`ffprobe -v error -show_entries format=duration -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 "$file"`
    length_round_up=$(( ${length%.*} + 1 ))
    total_bitrate=$(( $target_size / $length_round_up ))
    audio_bitrate=$(( 128 * 1000 )) # 128k bit rate
    video_bitrate=$(( $total_bitrate - $audio_bitrate ))
    ffmpeg -i "$file" -b:v $video_bitrate -maxrate:v $video_bitrate -bufsize:v $(( $target_size / 20 )) -b:a $audio_bitrate "${file}-${target_size_mb}mb.mp4"
}

ffmpeg_resize file1.mp4 25 # resize `file1.mp4` to 25 MB
ffmpeg_resize file2.mp4 64 # resize `file2.mp4` to 64 MB

I’m not proficient in bash enough to have written this myself, but even I can glance over this and see it’s just doing some math for me while invoking two programs: ffprobe and ffmpeg. Easy peasy.

I put this in my ~/.bashrc and use it all the time now, it’s almost silly how simple this has made things. I get why nerds get super attached to their profiles now, I’m collecting a bunch of scripts and functions that just make life easier.

Currently I’m working on writing some scripts with ratbagctl (https://github.com/libratbag/libratbag) so when I launch a game through Steam it’ll automatically set my Logitech mouse profile for that game. You know, the thing the Logitech mouse software makes you sign up for an account and connect to the internet for. All of the control, none of the bloat 😝

For those not in the know, “Trusted Computing” is a very specific THING and maybe not what you’d expect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing

TC is controversial as the hardware is not only secured for its owner, but also against its owner, leading opponents of the technology like free software activist Richard Stallman to deride it as “treacherous computing”,[3][4] and certain scholarly articles to use scare quotes when referring to the technology.[5][6]

You can pretty much guess where I land.

a backup of your bitlocker key is in your Microsoft account, and normally nowhere else. It’s pretty easy for Microsoft to lock you out of your ow computer and data completely, if they wanted.

You make a good point, I’m missing the forest for the trees. Why even bother theorizing that BitLocker may be compromised when they’re removing local accounts for consumers and forcing the key to be uploaded to their servers anyway?

Yep! They don’t teach this stuff because consumer level cyber security is in the absolute pits of despair and moreover, they’re trying to do away with what little we have access to. Governments and police agencies like how easy it is to access files.

Personally I don’t bother with full disk encryption (FDE) since I don’t really have anything private on my main computer. Just a bunch of game files, comics, movies, etc. Anything extremely important such as tax documents, personal data, etc. is honestly very small and I keep in a little Proton Drive folder, <1GB total. I think the best approach is to simply educate yourself and be aware of what’s worth protecting and how best to protect that. Just enabling FDE and thinking you’re safe ignores all the other avenues that personal data can be stolen.

My current pet conspiracy theory is that FDE with BitLocker isn’t even worth it on Windows due to the TPM requirement. Why is that a bad thing? Your system probably has fTPM supported by the BIOS, why not just enable that?

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windows-itpro-blog/tpm-2-0-–-a-necessity-for-a-secure-and-future-proof-windows-11/4339066

Integrating with features like Secure Boot and Windows Hello for Business, TPM 2.0 enhances security by ensuring that only verified software is executed and protecting confidential details.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5283799 (I don’t believe we’ll see this EXACT implementation of DRM, I’m just providing an example of TPM being used for DRM and that these ideas have been in consideration since at least 2009).

Now, if I were Microsoft and I wanted to exert an excessive amount of control over your system by making sure you couldn’t run any inauthentic or “pirated” software to bring it more inline with the walled garden Apple approach they’ve been salivating over for the past decade+, you’d first need to ensure you had a good baseline enabled. You know, kind of like the thing you’d do by forcing everyone into an OS upgrade and trashing a lot of old hardware.

It won’t be instantaneous, I don’t know exactly how or what it’s going to look like when they start tightening their grip. Again, this is all speculation, but it’s not hard to connect the dots and their behavior over the past couple years does not give them the benefit of the doubt. Microsoft is no longer a company that can be assumed to be acting in the best interest of the average consumer, they’re not doing this for your security. They want to know that your computer is a “trusted platform”.

EDIT: Further lunatic conspiracy theories: BitLocker is/will be backdoored so Microsoft forcing you into that ecosystem further guarantees they have access to your system. This all stinks to me, like your landlord telling you how you can arrange the furniture in your own apartment.

A lot of the advice out there is anecdotal - ask a dozen people, get a dozen answers.

For my part, I installed plain Arch on a custom built system. I use the Nvidia proprietary drivers for my 3080 and I’ve had no issues with drivers or gaming. If you’re talking retro, RetroArch or other assorted emulators have you covered no prob. If you’re talking modern stuff, Elden Ring works online with its Easy Anti-Cheat and I play a ton of Trackmania which chains Uplay launcher (ugh) and have even managed to install mods with Openplanet which is a Windows only mod manager. One time my friend was telling me about an old Windows 3.1 pinball game. I downloaded it from abandonware (https://www.myabandonware.com/game/3-d-ultra-pinball-creep-night-3fh) and just launched the installer with WINE, it even placed a shortcut for it on my app launcher (kinda hated that actually 😅). I feel like that worked more flawlessly than it would have on Windows 11. Most games simply launch with Proton, however sometimes you do get weird issues that may involve trying some different versions of Proton. Dark Souls III for example still gets angry at anything beyond 8.X or whatever.

I think a lot of people look at the troubleshooting you have to do in Linux and dread it as an utter failstate of the system. Not true. In Windows when your system is hosed you’re likely down for a reinstall or patiently waiting for Microsoft to do their part and patch it. On Linux, when something goes wrong you pop the hood and take a look. You don’t HAVE to do it, you GET to do it.

Moral of the story is, your best bet is to try a dual boot if you can and give it a go yourself. I suspect the issues a lot of people are having is because they get too carried away with customizations and system configs. I try to keep most things basic unless I have a really good reason to alter them.

Just used the default for one big partition. I used to do tedious partition configurations, but it always ended up biting me down the road more than helping. This drive is for the OS, games, and working files. I have a 16TB NAS that holds anything worth saving, so if I need to nuke the whole thing and do a reinstall, all I really end up doing is downloading a bunch of Steam games again.

I’m a big Linux advocate these days and my best advice is to set realistic expectations. If your intent is to recreate your Windows experience exactly, you’ll always be left disappointed. There’s simply nothing better than OneNote at what it does, but I migrated my note taking habits over to Obsidian and I’m perfectly happy there now. Turns out I didn’t need 90% of OneNote’s immense functionality.

At the end of the day though, Linux is FOSS: it’s made by people, for people, to solve the computing problems people have. There are a variety of solutions out there. Reexamine your workflows and be open to fitting new solutions to them, there are just SO MANY choices out there for how to handle most problems.

Aside from that, there’s always going to be a small learning curve. People tend to view that as simply a hassle that takes time to overcome and while that’s not entirely wrong, it very much undercuts the real value of learning how to operate and maintain the OS that you most likely use every day, all day. It’s extremely hard to accurately describe the value of investing that time and having an OS that isn’t bloated with corporate nonsense and fighting you to dictate your workflows into their intended patterns so they can agitate you with ads and paid services at every step. There’s a reason we all come out sounding like zealots and while I acknowledge it can feel a little cult-ish, who you gonna trust? Your online nerd community or a corporation who has shown time and time again that they do not value you as an individual user?

It’s not entirely clear from the post, but allow me to provide some further context as I received this same pop-up myself.

I had purchased a legit Windows 10 Pro license with my own money for a custom built PC. Was always a trim installation because that’s how I roll. Still got this out of nowhere when I booted back into my Windows partition the other day, was unclear what app or process pushed it. Some update either added a new app responsible for pushing these desktop level ads or enabled a pre-existing notification feature I had previously disabled. Just a typical Win10 toast notification a few moments after logging in. Dismissed it quickly and did not care to investigate, but that’s about as bad as you can really get, IMHO. They’ve slowly been pushing the bounds, but here we are: ads straight to the desktop.

I use Arch on all my systems now. It does great for gaming on both my beefy gaming PC and my little work laptop (within their respective punching weights). I haven’t felt the need to explore CachyOS or any other variants for performance gains and I really do appreciate how bare bones Arch is. Just having the lightweight OS that isn’t doing a darn thing beyond what I’ve asked it to claws back plenty of performance, although I’m speaking more in contrast to Windows than other distros having any sort of bloat.

Still, Arch has been the first distro I really committed to, I’ve been on it for a year and a half now and learning how to build it out taught me a lot about Linux.

Also, I’m just never sure how long some of this offshoot distros will hold on for, you know? Is that unfounded?

I cannot upvote this enough. “Just migrate to X, it’s every bit as good!” when end users know it’s not is a disingenuous argument and even if they don’t have the technical know-how to explain exactly why they feel this way, they’ll feel the deception. It only reinforces a growing distrust in tech.

The argument has to be made honestly. It’s not quite as good, but almost. Those few things you’ll miss will require an adjustment, but the overall value (a lot of times just literally, it costs less!) will become evident.

I know we’re all Linux nerds here and enthused to get people onboard, but the battle right now we’re facing is one of trust and security and must be grounded in those notions because while great strides have been made in convenience and accessibility, big corps will always be able to bankroll themselves over those points.

As someone who has worked in the tech industry near Seattle, I don’t know how well known it is to the wider populace or people in Europe, but open source is absolutely anathema here. It’s seen as insecure, unstable, and unreliable.

I work in IT so I’ve tangentially worked across a number of sectors supporting their stacks and it’s pervasive within the American culture. There is a major de-prioritization of in-house IT knowledge and sysadmins in favor of enterprise support contracts. When shit hits the fan, it’s less important to have a knowledgeable team and more important to have a foot to stamp down on until the issue is resolved. Often that foot has another foot that stamps down, onward and onward until someone manages to engage the MSP or cloud provider that set the service up initially with their scant documentation.

It’s a nightmare both for tech workers and from a cyber security perspective. A lot of this contains my own personal bias and perspective on the matters, but let me say, I have stared into the void and I can’t stop screaming.

I think one of my favorite examples was using simple salt to trap them within the confines of white lines that they didn’t think they could cross over. I really appreciate the imagery of using salt circles to entrap the robotic demons …

No, I get it. There’s this unspoken understanding that barcodes are strictly utilitarian and unobserved as their nature. In stylizing them, there’s an acknowledgement of being unexpectedly seen by the human consumer and not the intended digital scanning device.

Of course you’ll still meet individuals with a wide range of beliefs and I don’t think you can boil a complex group down to a simple answer; but yes.

A few years back now it came out that Violent J’s daughter was a furry, and like a good dad he supported her and at least tangentially got into the furry community which is very LGBTQ+. This opened up a really weird friendship between the groups, but from what I understand the Juggalos also have a history of being very anti-fascist which also jived with the progressive furries.

While I haven’t met many myself, I fully accept the alliance. They’re both alternative cultures which can look odd from the outside, but as you pointed out I think they both heavily focus on acceptance, respect, and support. It’s a good unifying thread! Juggalos and furries will show you who they are without shame, I trust and respect that.