It would be accurate to say that the Internet reached a critical mass of user in 1995. I was here in 1992, and 95 is when media started talking about the internet as a necessary thing for businesses etc to get onboard with, and by extension, when loads on servers started to get wild. A communal pool of servers for the web community to lean on during times of extreme demand is still an excellent idea that can solve a lot of problems, but not if we let capitalists run it for profit. Never work.

Windowpane is LSD, but like I said, mostly marketing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsV-VV-u1Lk

Thai Sticks are probably still available in Thailand and still probably amazing. And in the 70s when Mexican ditchweed was all you’d find in North America, it was worth the peril to import the amazing stuff.

Nowadays, anyone with a light can grow equally amazing stuff. I would love to taste some real Thai herb, but it won’t get me more stoned than my homegrown. Thai smugglers are welcome to come to Manitoba and call my bluff, DM me baby.

Windowpane was more or less a marketing label on the same Shakedown Street sheets that made their way around the country in the wake of the Dead. They arrived up here via letters sent home. You can still get sheets but I have no idea who’s making em, probably dodgy Russian chemists whose families are held hostage…

I know almost nothing about ludes.

If it’s punk yer wantin, you’ll want Dead Kennedys and MDC - both old bands (MDC is still kicking as I understand it, tho) but lots and lots of highly relevant stuff.

Notable: on their first LP, Millions Of Dead Cops, which came out in 1984 if I recall correctly, there is a trans-positive tune called America’s So Straight. You wanna talk ahead of the curve…

This is the guy who wrote “867-5309” and “Perfect World” by Huey Lewis. He’s also a friend of sorts, I got my dog from him and his wife. It’s not famous but it’s a decent tune, and anti-ICE as shit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evwhdPn8ONk

It’s rather deliberate at this point. They are at war with general purpose computers, because we depend on those in order to have GNU/Linux, just as we depend on a free and open Internet to have this platform. If they can get the herd to fully embrace these locked-down infernal machines, that will be it, on a certain level. We will have RISC-V and the ability to deploy to FPGAs, but the voice of Little Brother will be heard only on their whim.

Why not rsync directly? Why insert a network share to muddy the process?

Anyways, this is pretty much the “good” use of AI, as I see it. Indeed, if models are more tightly trained to focus on one specific bit of data, such as the manual for an application, a locally-run LLM could transform the help menu into a chatbot that teaches you the app.

This could be the future reality, if the “throw a firehose of money and a bunch of horrible code at it and hope we can charge people who have no money a lot of money to rent our bullshit” brigade are guillotined.

Someday, everyone will have always been against this.

It’s a question of people caring. Many do not.

My response was clearly addressed to people who give a shit, which by your own words, you do not. Why are you bothering me?

“FOSS” is itself Newspeak.

RMS created the concept of Free Software, which has an ethical basis regarding freedom, community, and your ability to use your hardware in any way you like.

“Open Source” was invented by a corporate scumbag who noticed that Free Software was taking over all the server rooms and desperately needed to keep things on a profit-seeking basis. So he lifted the methodology and jettisoned the ethics, and called it Open Source.

If you give a shit, don’t go along with the gaslight. Never say FOSS - software is either Free as in speech, or Open as in corporate bullshit.

The video linked in another comment is just a guy with an annoying voice reading the manifesto, which you can do yourself here. You can even follow down the thread and get a sense of where things are going. It looks to me like a fork is in the offing.

This: https://mwl.link/run-your-own-mail-server.html

I don’t have this book by MWL, but, when I got my first Sysadmin job in 2015, I took over a network almost entirely run on FreeBSD, and I was gifted a couple of other books of his, in particular his ZFS volumes with Allan Jude, and I can say that his work is easy to read and good at giving you the most basic raw facts of the matter. If you really want to understand email, read this book and I guarantee you will get all the information you need.

I am not his marketer, just a person who was helped immensely by his work. He’s on the Fedi as well, you can search in Mastodon.

Understand what a Reverse Proxy is, because you will not escape reading that phrase.

Host things with Docker for now. If you don’t start hosting until you understand everything, you won’t start for a long time and that is silly.

Use Cloudflare for now, because they handle a lot of security stuff for you that you definitely don’t want to screw up. If you don’t know what Cloudflare is, read up on CDNs and why they exist. Their Zero Trust Tunnel is the easiest and safest way to go, as long as you don’t plan to do anarchy or sedition on it, just talk about your household plants and dogs and what not and you’re fine.

California sets emissions standards for cars, which US manufacturers then follow everywhere, because their market is so huge, it is most cost-effective to build for their standards, which are the toughest. What Cali does tends to spread.

Sounds like you’re using a bad OS to me 😂

Agree. We are posting in a nuance-free zone. Gotta go, I can only hold my breath at this many downvotes for so long, I just swam down to add my upvote.

Hi Trey. Stop punching down.

I’m probably repeating what others are saying, but you, friend, are the people who will bring Linux to the world, not us nerds. Your post reflects that you haven’t learned a few things you’re definitely gonna learn, but you are on the right track, like a bloodhound (ie. a thinking person) with a strong scent (something is rotten in silicon valley).

First off, you don’t have to deal with the command line at all, 99% of the time, even on Arch. But Arch is not your only nor your best choice, if that is a specific thing that worries you. Being on the bleeding edge is not what you think - you will get up-to-date GPU drivers on any decent distro, but Arch’s approach means you will have more instances of your graphical desktop breaking in various and weird ways, necessitating a trip to the console on the regular.

Me in particular giving you advice: you should install Debian, because it aims for stability as its primary virtue, sacrificing speed of package updates to get that - they make sure that everything that is being updated continues to work flawlessly together, before it arrives in the regular release cycle. I run it because it never breaks, and if you use the KDE Plasma Desktop you get a full-featured OS that will work the same way other KDE desktops on other distros work. You can even look into Debian Sid, which is their “rolling release” version that tracks pretty closely with Arch’s package updates.

Only caveat with Debian: by default, it will install the Gnome desktop, and you need to select KDE Plasma when you get to a screen where you select your Desktop Environment (DE) during the install process. You can uncheck “Debian Desktop Environment” and “Gnome” which are both selected by default, but you can select which DE you want to use at the login screen, so it won’t hurt you to leave Gnome installed as well - it is more Mac-like and has strong opinions about things like what colour you should be able to use as your desktop background, so I’m not a fan, but I do like their general approach. But KDE Plasma is the one that feels very much like Windows. Others do as well, there are some distros that are actually tooled to look exactly like various Windoze versions.

Others will recommend Linux Mint, and while I used to have reservations based on their lack of work on Wayland support, they seem to be catching up there, and as much as the devs will tell you Wayland is coming no matter what (and unlike the AI slopmerchants, they are correct), but it’s not ready today for quite a lot of things, so it’s not something you need to worry about. Even if you didn’t understand this paragraph, don’t let it get you bunghed up in your head.

Even if you are certain you’re gonna want the up-to-date version of some software, you can still do that on Debian, one way or another - Steam, for instance, I don’t remember what I did when installing it, but it was effortless and I have the same Steam as anyone, far as I know. I certainly have no problem playing my games.

You will be doing stuff in the console no matter what, but vanilla Arch is basically S&M for people who love that kind of pain, and could well put you off of the GNU/Linux OS entirely if being dragged through that slog is not your thing. There are also distros that use Arch as the underlying base, much as Ubuntu and many, many other distros use Debian as the base of theirs.

In other news, Windows has Linux built-in now, so you don’t need to ever install it yourself!