wltr

It is indeed, but if we’d think about it longer … we couldn’t trust any review to be genuine in the past too.

It wasn’t that bad though, that’s for sure. I do remember me buying some tech solely on the basis of having positive reviews. These days, I’d rather buy what’s cheaply (or for the sane price, depending on what I’m looking for) available online locally, and tweak from there.

I found a nice essay on the topic recently, the boring internet.

These days, not that genuine reviews are completely gone. They’re funnelled to some dark web channels (Instagram / Facebook et al), or live in private chats (e.g. me recommending something to friends). Personally, I’m trying to support others to start their own websites. For whatever hobbies they have. Unfortunately, not many are interested though. However, I believe that’s a matter of time before they realise that the social media platforms are optimised for engagement for the engagement’s sake. Which isn’t what I’m looking for. I’m totally ok with my blog being read by tens, not hundreds or thousands. Especially when these people are engaged in a mindful discussion, not just sending me millions of useless likes to pump my dopamine for no real reason.

I believe we’d see the reborn internet (if it’s dead now) at some point.

Hey, I used Reddit for years, I guess as anyone else here, and even with that Appolo client, it was so much worse than what I have now with Mlem client. (Speaking of iPhones right now.) And the quality of the conversation is so much better in here, even despite (or thanks to, who knows) not many people in here, really.

I think Reddit is better only for when you need a lot of people in the comments for some reason. But now I think you don’t need that for most of the cases. All you need is just some people to hang around, otherwise there’s tumbleweed and it’s not as useful too. But the number of people we all need, it’s not that big, actually!

I mean, fuck Reddit.

Do you mind elaborating on that Wallpaper Engine thing and also Natalia shell. What are they? I’m familiar with Niri, but never used it myself. (Not sure I like scrolling logic, I use barebones Sway.)

I’d like to compliment on it changing that when you open a full screen app. Yet, these tiny pixels look so little difference that it looks very much off to me indeed. And I’d prefer to have no dock at all. So I use Sway for myself. It’s that I interact with KDE sometimes.

Ah. Sorry everyone. The math is wrong! (It’s getting into the night here.)

It’s the BMW that is longer, not the tank. So that’s not the size to compensate. Unless …

Did you mean to do math better, or did you mean to state the size of the BMW owner?

It’s nice to have you back! Thanks for letting me know! I’m glad my curiosity triggered you to discover this thing. Net positive for both of us! :)

I came from a background where piracy is paramount and nobody buys a single license of software, including government. All government software like Windows, offices and whatnot is pirated. Well it was when I lived there, decades ago, and I won’t be surprised to learn things didn’t change. It took me a long time to get the idea of buying software. (Frankly, I failed at it, because I prefer open source now, mostly out of principle.)

What strikes me is how easier piracy is. Throughout my younger years, I had a full blown Microsoft everything (before I learned there’s Linux) and never paid anything to them. (They are okay with it, as apparently I had to grow up being a Microsoft guy, lol. First thing I did when I earned my own money, I bought a MacBook Pro.)

It’s funny to discover things like this. Microslop and Adobe. Turned out their software is shit, and someone buys it, lol. Just imagine buying a Microsoft Office license! A perpetual one!

I won’t lie, still difficult for me. Like, are all these people for real? I hope you just rofl like everyone else, and it’s sarcasm. You must be trolling us all!

I second this. The only issue for me was not knowing what to install and use.

E.g. I didn’t know about the sound, and used something old (PulseAudio?) before I learned it should be PipeWire / WirePlumber (or something like that). Honestly, I still don’t understand that properly.

But the point is, I had my sound working ok. Then I had some use case, when it didn’t work. Perhaps with my Bluetooth headphones. Then I just switched to a better newer system, and the thing was resolved automatically.

Theoretically, there might be other aspects of the system when you simply not aware of them. But I think there are not too many, after all. Since I use my Arch Linux computers (PC and laptops, and even a couple of once-Windows tablets now running Arch too) all the time, I mostly settled. And now I don’t even need to reinstall, and setup things, like ever. I needed to migrate to a newer laptop, and to some other computer, I just cloned my system, and was done with it.

With any derivative distro, there’s no confidence in it being present in, say, 5 years. I’m pretty confident in Arch at this point.

Not saying them, derivative distros are bad. If they allow new people jump wagon, great. They’re comfortable with Arch, and perhaps it’s even trivial to rebase such a distro to pure Arch at some point. And I hope them (these distros) contribute to the mainline, not just parasitising off the original work, like DHH et al.

He is ham.

They understand that’s their position is by chance. In a parallel universe with the exactly sent things happening, there’s still a chance they’d have nothing they have here. They’re terrified of losing what they have, not understanding that would make them free, losing everything. Plus, I genuinely believe they’re simply dumb enough to not understand many simple things.

Do you mind elaborating more on the topic? I see them stressing that the licence is AGPL and it didn’t change. Is there anything else that is not obvious from the first glance?

I found the post to be useless. As a cherry on top, empty blog. I wonder who are the people who have nothing to say, then they post like one silly piece of word salad, then they don’t post for years again. I’d prefer reading someone who actually posts regularly, and is able toto communicate their mind clearly.

Here … I mean, why did you start so many projects, and why did you abandoned them? I too have an ADHD, like many others these days, I believe. Yet, for me, a GPT allows make progress when I’m stuck and don’t know where to start to continue working on my abandoned project. The massive improvement to me is the ability to communicate. To have my mind written, the problem clearly formulated. I have never paid for any subscription and I would never pay them. It would be less convenient when this shit won’t be given for free to folks like me. By that point, I expect I’d just run some less powerful local model. The value I get is from the ability to communicate and have feedback, sometimes (oftentimes) on topic. Yes, it’s slop. The longer the chat, the sloppier it is. But I usually have up to 10 messages conversations, and I use it only in my browser, for like an hour or two a day, tops. Most times, it’s much less than that. About 4 hours a week, summarised.

I usually hit the free limit with Claude and that’s where I stop. I almost never hit that limit with ChatGPT for some reason. Weirdly, Gemini was absolutely useless to me. I tried it thrice and never opened it again. I have no use for it.

I am not that good to juggle gazillion of projects and languages too. So I don’t. I work on one project, sometimes two or three, but they are highly related, they are almost the same, or solve the same thing from different angels.

I’d love to discuss it, but this particular piece has zero value. To me, there’s not much to discuss.

And, it’s irrelevant to my ADHD. Perhaps because I actually do something with it, and I have no Instagram, Facebook et al. I don’t doom scroll, so the dopamine is here only when I’m able to write some tiny helpful script with one prompt. When things go into some complex work, a GPT always produces incredible useless shit. So, I’ve learned there’s no point in using it that way. So, I use it with very small tasks only.

There screens simultaneously, I can only laugh at these delusional folks who believe they’re being efficient.

I like the way you formulate things. It’s similar similar to me, these periods of over fixation on something. Then something else. And I believe keeping these notes on Linux public is also helpful for both you and some (random or not) users. I try to avoid too personal information in the posts, but sometimes I think it doesn’t even matter. E.g. I was obfuscating some things like MAC addresses, then I thought what if I won’t, what would happen? Is there any attack surface? Still, I design this blogging system (my current hyper fixation) as to have most things public, with some private notes when necessary. As some bonus (or not), I have close to zero motivation to write for myself. Yet writing publicly or to someone is captivating and I have this motivation. Even in those cases when not many people read me. Or even when there’s nobody at all. Right now I have my blog on my Raspberry Pi, I want to polish some things here and there before deploying it publicly. And yet it’s truly interesting to work on, for some reason.

I wish more people would do that. I’d love to read some ‘life journey’ kind of honest blog of some total rando, given that person would write honestly and not hustling, trying to sell something to someone. But rather writing stupid ordinary things, their life reflections, that type of thing. I’m willing to have a blog like that for myself too. But I just cannot come up with the implementation: what should it be? Just a randomly generated domain? Should I obscure names and places? I thought of using some rare language (e.g. Finnish) to also support that language, learn it, and avoid having too many readers I don’t welcome. But that is trivial to translate, so I’m not really sure. I want both honest content and not being attacked personally (especially irl) by some people while expressing myself. Some content, like political, sometimes is not even safe to publish, depending on the topic and the whereabouts of the person. That’s some completely different topic, there are should be plenty of examples, but the indie web I explored was quite poor on that. Even to get some ideas. Perhaps, I may make more attempts on this. I don’t know.

Yeah, sorry:) have a great night, it’s late now here in my place.

Blogging been a great help for me recently. In many aspects. I haven’t deployed mine yet, but it’s not far from it. I’d really recommend, especially if you learn something new. To each their own, but it looks like that’s the only proper way for me to learn.

Thanks! A great read it was! Do you have / plans to have a blog by the way? You write quite well and interesting to read.

See you around, have a great day.

Oh wow, Solus is something I have never heard of. Or even if I did, I don’t remember. I gave it a quick glance, I it’s a Linux distro, so nothing too niche, right? Why did you pick it? I’d really love to find some blogs where people write on their daily experience with some things Linux. (I’m trying to start one, we’ll see how it goes.)

MacBook Air M1, it should mostly work with Asahi Linux project. The hardware is really impressive. I thought of getting a modern ThinkPad instead, but it’s just an ugly heavy moist machine in comparison. From a laptop, I don’t need a tank. I have that tank in my primary desktop computer. A laptop is more of a lightweight toy to me. So that was my thinking behind the MacBook Air M1 running Gentoo idea. I expect it to be very well supported as it’s probably the best value you can get (assuming used, and assuming 10/10 repeatability is not a concern).

I have a used Microsoft Surface RT3 (they would become Go line with the next model) running Arch Linux. I don’t even consider that device to sport Gentoo. I’m not well versed with Gentoo, but I remember you can actually compile from another machine, so theoretically I can use Gentoo even on a Raspberry Pi (well, that Surface I mentioned isn’t really far from my Raspberry Pi 2B). But to get there, I need to learn all those things :) It’s more like a chicken and egg problem now. I have a somewhat powerful PC (if we can call a quad core Intel i7 that), which I could use as a Gentoo compile machine. But it runs Arch and it’s my primary machine, so migrating it to Gentoo would not be very easy.

Theoretically, an M1 Air is even more powerful than that. So, a perfect storm. All that is theoretical at this point though :)

Oh, that’s sad. Thanks for informing me (and others) on that part! Considering the war in Ukraine (where I live now), there’s a no way, I’m going to use it then. In this case, I agree. Having a European solution is better than using Russian or even USian.

Thanks a lot! I’d explore that. I don’t know about others here, but I’m not even considering a non-self-hosted solution. But it’s great to know upfront that it would require a powerful server to have languages other than English.

I think FreeBSD is actually great, I’m looking for a reason to install it on anything just to have it around.

And Gentoo too. I’m currently on a MacBook Pro (2014, Intel era) with Arch Linux. Weirdly, the hardware support is great, and it feels like even better than macOS. For some reason, some other MacBooks I have are much worse with some things Linux. Eg sleep and battery life estimation. But apart from that, they’re better than macOS, as they’re long obsolete.

I want to have Gentoo somewhere, and I’m just not sure where to start. It surely have to be a separate machine to not hurry with the install and setting it up. (However, I expect that most if not all my user configs would just work, assuming the same software stack.) But that machine is expected to be powerful too!

At this point, I think of getting a MacBook Air M1, perhaps the next year. Or maybe even years, depending on real life events, that’s rather a cool toy to me at this point than a real need. But ideally, I’d like to have it when being obsolete (not supported with macOS updates) and Neo having at least two or better three generations. Which would make its price to value very attractive. I thought of having Gentoo there, since Arch is not supported, and I’m not a big fan of Arch Arm project.

I would like to use Gentoo so much, I thought of actually getting a used somewhat broken MacBook Air (I’ve seen one with partially broken screen for like a bit over €100), and use it as a test machine. Then, just buy another one, in a better shape when it would enter its obsolete state, which would inevitably happen at some sooner rather than later point.

I expect it would be just perfect for Gentoo. FreeBSD, I have no idea. Thought of getting a tiny PC just for it, without any purpose in mind. Perhaps I’d find one along the way. I’ve researched briefly, and there are either Mac minis of 2014 with a very nice idle energy consumption and price locally (about €100 or even less). Or some N100 Chinese similar computer, but I have no idea about the hardware support.