Finally got my crap together. Career taking off, got rid of my toxic relationships, adopted several cats, getting into really good shape.

I work in IT, many of the managers are pushing it. Nothing draconian, there are a few true believers, but the general vibe is like everybody is trying to push it because they feel like they’ll be judged if they don’t push it.

Two of my coworkers are true believers in the slop, one of them is constantly saying he’s been, “consulting with ChatGPT” like it’s an oracle or something. Ironically, he’s the least productive member of the team. It takes him days to do stuff that takes us a few hours.

That’s rough, I’m sorry too, it never gets easier. 💔 stay strong, the important thing is that they feel safe and loved 💙

Let me share my personal story. Trigger warning for anybody reading this, there’s a lot of details.

My spouse and I had a beloved cat who was amazing. Rescued her as a kitten, the runt of her litter. She was born sickly and got worse for a while, we thought she wouldn’t make it for several weeks.

But we nursed her back to health and she started to thrive. She never got big, even fully grown, she was 6.5 lbs. Most people thought she was still a kitten, but she had 60 lbs of attitude lol.

She was a wonderful cat, full of life, playful, fierce, super smart, my spouse and I were totally in love with her.

Then one day, she stopped eating and started acting really lethargic. We went through all the typical potential causes. Tooth pain, upset stomach, constipation, UTI, etc.

Took her to the vet several times. After almost 2 weeks of us barely able to get her to eat more than a few bites of her usual favorite treats per day, we had them scan her for potential blockages or other stomach issues.

Vet came back with the results, it was cancer, her entire abdomen was filled with large tumors. 100% terminal, the vet said that there was no way to remove it all without killing her from the internal trauma because the cancer had spread so far and was completely surrounding many of her organs.

We were absolutely devastated. She was only about 3 and a half years old. The vet said it was just bad luck, it was rare to see this kind of cancer in a young otherwise healthy cat, but it did sometimes happen.

Even still, we asked about chemotherapy, (yes they do that for pets sometimes). The vet said that at best, it would only give us 1-3 more months if we were lucky, and she would be drugged up so much that she would basically be in a state of dillusion the whole time. Plus it would have cost between $4,000- and $8,000. Which was far beyond anything we could afford.

My spouse and I went home, cried our eyes out for the next 2 days, and talked about end of life care. Our primary vet had given us a pamphlet about in-home euthanasia. They come to your home, you can lay down and cuddle with your pet, play music or talk to them. The vet administers a shot, and after about 10-15 minutes, they fall asleep and then…they’re gone.

We chose that option and it was as positive of an experience as it can be, when doing something so sad.

We laid down on both sides of her, placed her on her favorite blanket, and just gently pet her, kissed her, and quietly told her what a brave girl she was and how much we loved her. Our vet was super calm and respectful. After she administered the shot, she let us be with her, and checked her pulse every 5 minutes or so. After the third time, she quietly told us, “Alright, she’s passed. Take all the time you need. When you’re ready, I’ll take her back with me.”

The vet handled the cremation and a week or two later my spouse and I got our cat’s ashes delivered to us in a little urn, with a clipping of her hair and a little paw print in clay. There was a hand-written note from the vet with her condolences, signed by a bunch of the vet techs, it was very sweet.

It’s a brutally hard choice to make, but I think it’s the right one. Our cat was in so much pain, she was malnourished, exhausted, dehydrated, she had lost all the joy that a healthy life provided her. Looking into her eyes and seeing her in so much pain, that’s what convinced me and my spouse to do it. I think it would have been selfish for us to keep her alive in that state waiting for her to die “naturally” or forcing a massive cocktail of drugs into her just so we could get a few more days or weeks with her.

I don’t condemn people for putting it off, I get it, it was one of the hardest decicions I’ve had to make as an adult. I wept like a baby before and after it for many days. If you haven’t seen it before, I can’t describe it. But there is a certain “look” an animal gets when it’s near the end. They know, they are smart, they have a soul of some kind I think, they can sense it. As somebody who is an animal lover and has had pets all my life, you learn what it looks like. It’s a look of pain and pleading, a look that says, “I’m in pain, and I’m tired, it’s time for me to go.”

Some people say that pets can’t tell you if they want to be done, but I think they can, it’s that look in their eyes of desperation, and when you’re my age and you’ve had to say goodbye to numerous pets over the years, you learn what it looks like.

~/Repos (For all the github and other code repositories I work in)

~/Scripts (All my random Bash scripts, sometimes for testing out stuff)

~/Junk (Mostly used for testing programs or small project components that aren’t mature enough to have their own repo)

Left wing (actual OG) Libertarianism is great. Right wing Libertarianism is basically a bunch of antisocial/intellectually lazy people who think the ideal society is one where everybody has a few acres of land with a little shack that they built themselves where they subsist on potatoes, carrots, and chicken eggs and stockpile gold and silver to trade with another libertarian twice a year.

We are rapidly depleting our healthy soil due mainly to destructive factory farming techniques used across the world.

Just one inch of healthy soil takes centuries to form from the slow breakdown of organic matter by a whole host of micro-ecosystems.

The desertification of massive swaths of our planet continues largely unabated.

Welcome to the club! Make sure to set up automatic Timeshift snapshots, just in case you break something badly, you’ll be glad you have a recent daily or weekly backup instead of a manual one from months ago.

Also, a friendly reminder, Timeshift is not a backup of your data. It snapshots your systems settings, especially critical functions which allows you to restore functionality, but you still should have your actual user data backed up somewhere else.

Another tip: familiarize yourself with Timeshift in the terminal. The GUI works great, but if you break your system badly enough, your desktop environment won’t load. (Don’t ask me how I know.) In that case, Timeshift is awesome because it will still run fine if you only can access it from the terminal. The commands are easy, and you don’t have to memorize. Just type timeshift --help and it will list out all the commands you’ll need to know.

“Yes, I’m sure I typed my password correctly.”

Working in IT, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that and how many times it’s been wrong.

“Hacking” is essentially effective and insightful tinkering. All great hackers in history have been insatiability curious about how things work.

They poke and prod and test and experiment, and every now and then, they find something interesting. Unexpected behavior, hidden code, useful bugs, etc.

Exploiting software vulnerabilities is only a small segment of hacking. Figuring out how to hook up a Raspberry Pi to your thermostat to control it remotely is hacking. Splicing a custom microcontroller into your old keyboard to give it all sorts of extra functions is hacking. Flashing a custom BIOS onto your GPU to unlock special overclocking features is hacking.

If you want to be great at “hacking” including software exploits, you need to understand computers at a deep level. You need to study electronics, logic, low level programming like Assembly and C, networking, circuits, operating systems and kernels, compilers, parsers, abstraction layers, encryption, and more.

The more concepts you learn and understand, the more interesting insights you will get from poking around, and the better you’ll get at using and developing tools to do even more advanced and interesting things.

There is no fast track, you have to take it slow and steady. Know what a computer is. Not the physical object, the abstract concept of a computer, a Von Neumann architecture, a Turing machine, what it means to be Turing complete, what is “code” and how does a static collection of tiny gates run it? The more stuff you skip, the worse you’ll be. But if all you want is the aesthetic of a “hacker” then just install Kali Linux, open the terminal and run tmux with a few panes, start btop, cmatrix, and neofetch in them. Put on a hoodie. Dim your lights and hunch over the keyboard for maximum effect.

Love to see it! I got my parents onto Linux Mint about a year ago and it’s been great for them.

Their home PC is way too old to upgrade to Windows 11, plus I didn’t want them subjected to Microsoft’s trash software and spying, so Linux it was.

Themed it similar to Windows 10, even changed the “Start” menu icon to the Windows 10 logo so my parents felt safe using it lol.

The problem with replacing Discord isn’t the tech or features. Discord doesn’t do anything special that hasn’t existed in other software for 15-20 years.

The key difficulty is overcoming the network effect. All the big streamers use Discord, which means their millions of viewers are going to use Discord also, which means that most of their friends will too, and thus, you have a default app that almost everybody uses.

It took a massive amount of effort for me to just get three of my friends to sign up with Matrix and join a group server for gaming, and two of them stopped using it after just a month or two. I only have a single friend who is still using it, and they only use it when the two of us are gaming.

I’m going to assume worst case scenario, rotting bloated corpse that stinks, is covered in flies, and is floating high and very visibly on the surface of the water.

In that case, I would need the pool to be probably Olympic sized and be on the long end away from the corpse.

My instinct says that would be enough for me to not be too horrified beyond the initial horror of seeing it in the pool.

This will become more and more true in more and more cases as time goes on.

Linux is built on a far more efficient kernel, and the culture of Linux development is very much the same.

Meanwhile Microsoft will continue to enshitify its projects, shove more AI garbage onto its users, and prioritize profits over everything else.

Linux has been the standard OS for decades in the low power computing space, Microsoft can’t compete.

I love how she starts off by saying her legal team recommended she not do that…then proceeds to do it anyways lol.

Onision had a pretty spectacular implosion, but he was always a pretty wild and controversial figure. Shane Dawson was another pretty massive one. Miranda Sings was also huge, then all the weird and creepy chats and stage moments came out, sank her whole brand.

Voyager user here, just some general bugginess. It’s not bad, but sometimes weird stuff happens, like when I minimize the app on my phone and then switch back, the main toolbar is misaligned.

True, it still does vary even chipset to chipset. Some Nvidia and Intel cards do just work depending on the distro, others require more work.

It also depends on how “techie” the user is. My parents are 0% techie, so I have to do anything and everything for them if they have questions or issues.

But a Windows power user can handle some terminal use and other basic system modifications. And honestly now days, most of that stuff is super easy. Like Linux mint has a dedicated driver app that allows you to use a simple GUI to install Nvidia drivers, it’s super easy.

Hard to summarize, because it differs so much from person to person.

I installed Linux on my parent’s computer. They don’t need to know anything about Linux, because everything they use is identical to their old Windows PC. They click the icon for Chrome to open the browser. They Click the icon for LibreOffice to type up a “Word” doc and print it by clicking “file > print”

As far as they’re concerned, they are still using Windows.

For a gamer, they will need to know a little about Proton, possibly Lutris and the Hero launcher. They might need to know about installing nVidia drivers or tweaking a few things in the Steam launch options to get games to run better.

It’s tough to know exactly what a new Linux user will “need” to know in order to use Linux.

Typically it refers to leftists who strongly defend/advocate for authoritarian statist approaches to socialism/communism.