Funny you should say that, because…

https://vim-adventures.com/

Real wizards use ed

It will cause a critical error during boot if the device isn’t given the nofail mount option, which is not included in the defaults option, and then fails to mount. For more details, look in the fstab(5) man page, and for even more detail, the mount(8) man page.

Found that out for myself when not having my external harddrive enclosure turned on with a formatted drive in it caused the pc to boot into recovery mode (it was not the primary drive). I had just copy-pasted the options from my root partition, thinking I could take the shortcut instead of reading documentation.

There’s probably other ways that a borked fstab can cause a fail to boot, but that’s just the one I know of from experience.

To the feature creep: that’s kind of the point. Why have a million little configs, when I could have one big one? Don’t answer that, it’s rhetorical. I get that there are use cases, but the average user doesn’t like having to tweak every component of the OS separately before getting to doom-scrolling.

And that feature creep and large-scale adoption inevitably has led to a wider attack surface with more targets, so ofc there will be more CVEs, which—by the way—is a terrible metric of relative security.

You know what has 0 CVEs? DVWA.

You know what has more CVEs and a higher level of privilege than systemd? The linux kernel.

And don’tme get started on how bughunters can abuse CVEs for a quick buck. Seriously: these people’s job is seeing how they can abuse systems to get unintended outcomes that benefit them, why would we expect CVEs to be special?

TL;DR: That point is akin to Trump’s argument that COVID testing was bad because it led to more active cases (implied: being discovered).

I’m gonna laugh if it’s something as simple as a botched fstab config.

In the past, it’s usually been the case that the more ignorant I am about the computer system, the stronger my opinions are.

When I first started trying out Linux, I was pissed at it and would regularly rant to anyone who would listen. All because my laptop wouldn’t properly sleep: it would turn off, then in a few minutes come back on; turns out the WiFi card had a power setting that was causing it to wake the computer up from sleep.

After a year of avoiding the laptop, a friend who was visiting from out of town and uses Arch btw took one look at it, diagnosed and fixed it in minutes. I felt like a jackass for blaming the linux world for intel’s non-free WiFi driver being shit. (in my defense, I had never needed to toggle this setting when the laptop was originally running Windows).

The worst part is that I’m a sysadmin, diagnosing and fixing computer problems should be my specialty. Instead I failed to put in the minimum amount of effort and just wrote the entire thing off as a lost cause. Easier then questioning my own infallibility, I suppose.

Debian is the best and I don’t know what to do with it

What the fuck.

This is your brain on racism.

This is a hypothetical that has no clear bearing connection to common practice.

In other words, I could just reverse this to contradict it and have equal weight to my hypothetical: devs should always use GPL, because if their software gets widely adopted to the point where companies are forced to use it, it’s better that it’s copyleft.

Well, ideally you’re choosing your license based on the cases where it differs from others and not the majority of times where it doesn’t make a difference.

Someone aiming to make Free software should use a copyleft license that protects the four freedoms, instead of hoping people abide by the honor system.

Also, no one can 100% accurately predict which of their projects will get big. Sure, a radical overhaul of TCP has good odds, but remember left-pad? Who could have foreseen that? Or maybe the TCP revision still never makes it big: QUIC and HTTP/3 are great ideas, and yet they are still struggling to unseat HTTP/2 as the worldwide standard.

Correction: you don’t work around dangerous things assuming you’ll make a mistake long

Bitwarden. Hands down the best decision I made in regards to web safety was switching to a proper password manager.

Close second is uBlock Origin.

Also make sure to use DecentralEyes for easy enhanced privacy.

I use NoScript, but that level of granular control isn’t everyone’s cup of tea

it’s not a “gen” thing. They are still used by bots and scammers and pirates and and well-meaning n00bs who unknowingly abuse the service. They’re just also used for privacy now.

In the year 2025
if man is still alive
if woman can survive…

I’vw become so brainwashed by the FOSS Difference™ that if I see something exclusive to proprietary OSes, I assume it’s 99% marketing and not actually an important nor useful feature. I have no idea what HDR is, but it sounds like a marketing acronym for something that’s done worse than the FOSS equivalent

Also, my life is objectively better since I stopped using Adobe outside work.

Without knowing a better way, my go-to solution woukd just be getting an full installation image and diffing my files with the files on it

Not to mention that self-hosting/federation comes with a million small headaches.

If the devs are paid, do you want to pay them to work on the project or work on maintaining a contact infrastructure?

If they aren’t paid, do you want them using what little free time they have working on the app or working on maintaining a communications network?

If it’s someone else’s forum/matrix/chat server, are you okay with 1. a third party having access to your communications and 2. being able to force a comms blackout for any reason whatsoever?

Or would you rather they use their time and money focusing on finding a provider who meets every need of the project AND every user?

He’s outspoken and the youtube algo seems to be pushing his content to everyone now. He used to be focused on Right To Repair, but has since branched out to privacy and FOSS

He’s not particularly “bro”-y, but with the direction his rhetoric is headed, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see him making guest appearances in the conspiracy corner of the grift-o-sphere

references sexual assault when talking about the behavior of software vendors with their customers

Yeah, that kinda pushed me away too. I get it, it’s an apt comparison for people who feel entitled to completely invade your privacy and do whatever they want inside your home, and it grabs the attention of the people who have just accepted no privacy as the norm… But it still makes me really uncomfortable

ZPAQ is for cool people with massive space savings

z is for gzip archives only.

tar xf for eXtract the File

I’ll give you the most extreme solutions I can think of, and let you decide how much of each you want to enact.

First and foremost: use a secure and privacy friendly OS—Qubes on a burner pc or GrapheneOS on a burner phone—with secure and privacy-friendly networking—use DNS-over-HTTPS, or self-host as much of the infrastructure as you can, consider a VPN, keep the device on an isolated VLAN—use a secure/private web browser like LibreWolf.

General rules of online interaction apply for maintaining privacy within the servers: e.g. don’t talk specifics about your location, your age, your physical appearance, your childhood, your employer, etc.

As with most modern apps, the web app is necessarily less intrusive than the installable binary. Use the web app when you can, and limit your usage to only when you can use the web app on a computer and network you own—privacy enforcing habits are more important than all the software stopgaps in the world.

If you absolutely must use a binary, consider breaking Discord’s TOS and using a modified front-end: I know some people who use Aliucord for Android, and I just this moment learned about GoofCord for desktop

don’t install/run any software without verifying the integrity of the developers/distributors and binaries yourself, or building from source and verifying the code

It’s better to have Discord stealing your browsing data to sell you shit than have some random github malware rootkitting your phone.