My incredible hatred and rage for not understanding things powers me on the cycle of trying and failing hundreds of times till I figure it out. Then I screw it all up somehow and the cycle begins again.

In kernel maintainer’s Linux, Arch boot you

The Ubuntu version is still probably the best. You won’t have to think about graphics drivers or printers. It all sort of just… Works. They rip the awful out of Ubuntu and keep the excellent, world class, support in place. You’d be hard pressed for find a better commercial and non-commercial support. You can easily search for any problems you do run into and there will not be some esoteric DISCORD as your support. There are countless forms with literally thousands of people probably somewhat knowledgeable on how to address issues. Things like CUDA and dev work are also extremely supported. My barometer is how much time I have to crap away to get a printer and scanner work. Both of which just work with Linux Mint out of the box.

Mint is still basically mint from several years ago. Having tried a dizzying array of them it continues to be easy and hated on because it doesn’t involve text based configing your life away. That said, because it lags behind compared to other distros in updating the kernel, the thing that makes new hardware work, it can have a hard time with things made recently. Try the edge ISO, which has a newer kernel. The team is working on more frequent updates, Wayland (a thing you ideally never have to ever know what it is), and just delivers a comfortable desktop experience since I first screwed up my computers with Linux in 2007.

No programming language, development philosophy, or technology can save you from projects and business lacking clarity. Your ability to communicate and be understood is as/perhaps more important than the quality of your ideas. Consistency is better than perfection.

Had really good experience with this option. Namecheap seems quite reasonable. Also, self hosting on other’s domain can cause a lot of issues as you try creating enough paths for everything. I have found subdomain routing to work much better as a lot of applications get sad when their host url is something like blarg.com/gitea or something.

It’s not even about trust. It’s that I am confident I will have no clue who is a real life human being anymore soon. Autogenerated images, video, and text is practically in its infancy but already exists in the uncanny valley of being impossible to determine which is real and which is not. Imagine 5 years from now when perfectly lifelike high res video of practically anything you can imagine can be generated on the fly. Essentially the only thing I will have any certainty on is what I can witness in person. Or, if I have a circle of trust I can choose to believe content published by certain organizations or groups.

It may actually push us away from tech and back to the community, which could be good assuming we survive the transition.

Good luck watermarking plaintext and locally run models. There is no good option. If you want certainty that you are dealing with a human you lose privacy. If you want privacy you cannot know where the plain text came from unless you sign each file cryptographically. Then you only know it came from a certain source, but there is no guarantee how that source made the text. Welcome to the new world.

Ghostwriter and syncthing. Ghostwriter really has a good focus mode that really gets me in the right spot for writing. I use Markor if I am on Android and syncthing still works there as well.

Something that produces a wealth of plausible web traffic on my connection and browser that woefully misleads anyone monitoring it as to what I actually am browsing. Rather than hiding my traffic or ensuring some hyper level of encryption I simply want to use maybe an LLM or something to create such a close facimilie to “normal” online traffic that my online fingerprint becomes useless as sub 5% of my traffic is actually real.

Essentially I want privacy through drowning out everything with noise. It seems like the harder the to unwind in the end if done in a clever way. That plus some basic security protections and I will feel fairly secure.

Could also use scoop, but people get a little nervous running random powershell scripts off the internet. I have no fear of it. Scoop is also excellent for people with a little more tech savvy.

I prefer to leave edge never clicked by using winget. It comes default on Win 11 (Most likely new install, not an advertisement for that dumpster fire). For windows 10 you can use the Microsoft Store to install AppInstaller which will get you winget. Winget is a MS product.

I mainly like doing this because Edge does a bunch of setup when clicked for the first time. This avoids all that.

winget install --id=Google.Chrome -e

Or you can ever do slightly prevent the backslide in marketshare for Firefox.

winget install --id=Mozilla.Firefox -e

Just run powershell or windows terminal and use those commands and you can leave edge where it belongs.

More info here. https://winstall.app/apps/Mozilla.Firefox https://phoenixnap.com/kb/install-winget

Ubuntu should be fine especially given GNOME clearly borrows some visual concepts from OSX. I prefer Linux Mint myself, but that uses Ubuntu as a base so I’m not exactly blazing a brave trail. Most games I have work. Unless some anti-cheat is involved that the dev does not support Linux with you will most likely be OK. Baulder Gate 3 works excellent and that has sucked up most of my time. Join the ranks. Pump up the valve hardware survey Linux numbers. Make the business people in control of the devs care about linux support somewhat. Free yourself form the whims of Microsoft.

I’m an OS enthusiast apparently. I somehow enjoy blowing my OS up, getting irrationally irritated at how something behaves and trying something different. I would rather walk through a pile of Arch documentation than rely on Microsoft’s word that they won’t dick over the whole damn market. My efforts yield one more count towards a market share relevant enough for developers to care about. Gaming on windows feels like I am betraying all the sass I have given MS and if I truly believe this stuff I gotta at least try to use it for what reasonably works.

To me it is blocking expression that presents no plausible harm to anyone. Yelling fire in a crowd to start a panic, making a specific threat, and intentionally spreading lies as to defame all strike me as harmful language and should be curtailed somehow. All expression of any kind not plausibly causing harm should be allowed and equal in the market of ideas despite my personal opinion of them which is a bitter pill to swallow when neonazis appear all to common. The is my opinion.

I’d rather chew glass

And it’s not like it has zero application. But vaguely gesturing at a trendy technology and saying “we sure gotta leverage this guy’s” is not a feature. Why are you doing this? What is the downside? Should we be doing this? Let’s do a ChatGPT is not a strategy.

Analytics? Customer empathy gathering? Market research? Why bother? They just saw a post on LinkedIn about a Blockchain ChatGPT AI Machine Learning NFT. You really need to keep your eye on the ball on how we can work together to shoehorn any of that in the product so I can seem smart posting it on LinkedIn too. I’m never gonna hit CEO gaining market insight. Gotta fleece everyone with the most fancy sounding thing I have no clue about today. Don’t worry. I’ll forget by the time you have it released and complain about the new maintenance burden though. We need more features!!!

I’ll do you one better. The hardest part of making crap people like is the damn people. I have been a product manager for a decade and I can confidently say if I deliver exactly what the customer asks for I would be an utter failure. Requirements and software that fulfill what a customer says they want will ultimately lead to them asking for something they previously didn’t realize because it actually turns out they have no idea what they want, have an agenda, or the conditions have shifted from under you and what they said no longer holds water.

I could go on a tirade about this but my two cents is you gotta listen to what everyone says, but assume they are a human at the end of the day. It’s too damn easy for me to suck up dev time with what people want. Hell, just one word can keep a dev team busy for a long time. Internationalization! Boo!

I also need to build an environment where the dev team doesn’t despise the business due to a history of constantly shifting goalposts, borderline abusive metrics, and expectations that just create a battered development team. For some reason hiring a PM aligns with an org hitting the point where the original dev team has lost critical members because of terrible burnout and a culture of blaming people and not process. Takes a lot of therapeutic communication to remedy that.

TLDR; People. People are the reason all things are difficult.