Squiddles

There’s something called “Brook’s Law” that basically observes that a software project which onboards more developers in order to catch up will fall further behind. I hope they’re careful about how they allocate new developers or they’ll end up doing a year of onboarding, rewriting core code, and have no meaningful updates for 6-12 months. I know they have the resources to spare, and that scenario worked out okay for Valheim, but I hope the game doesn’t lose momentum because they overhire or don’t allocate enough senior devs to continue feature development while they catch the new devs up to speed.

Edit to add: I don’t think it actually matters in this instance if they don’t have a large player base by the time the game is feature complete. They don’t have continuous revenue streams like a live service game, so hiring more devs is ultimately just about making sure they have enough talent to make good on their early access promises. The company could probably dissolve tomorrow and all the staff could live the rest of their lives in luxury never working again. It’d be a dick move, but they already sold an insane number of copies.

Some people learn that way, but most don’t. It’s usually better to start with a working environment and work on one thing at a time until you learn enough that you’re ready to dig down another layer. Start with little mysteries and learn the structure of things and how to troubleshoot before jumping in the deep end. Having a system that’s hopelessly broken and you don’t know why or how to fix it is just likely to turn people away from Linux entirely. People don’t win extra points for suffering needlessly.

The bigger problem when running Arch is that there’s a very high gap between “the bootloader makes the kernel run” and “functional desktop system”. The installation guide will get you to the first one. For someone who’s used to Windows, even as an IT pro, learning Arch is a firehose that’s hard to drink from.

Once you’ve pacstrap’d and set up a user you reboot and start your new OS. Except you have no internet because you didn’t know you had to install dhcpcd. Fine, install that–except your user isn’t in sudoers, so you have to figure out how to get back to being root to edit the sudoers file. With visudo. Ten minutes later you’ve figured out how to find and edit the right line. Another ten to get out of vi. Then once that’s sorted you’re sitting at a terminal you don’t know any commands for with no idea how to get to a graphical environment.

You look on your phone and find a recommendation for XFCE4 as a lightweight and simple DE. Great, install that. Try to launch it, and…a bunch of arcane errors. Another hour of troubleshooting and you learn that you missed xorg, which for some reason isn’t a dependency of XFCE4. O…kay. You don’t want to have to launch it every time you boot, so you go digging and find out you need a desktop manager. Takes some time, but you finally install one and enable the service in systemd, which you have to do manually for some reason.

Finally you get to a graphical environment, and…the fonts are all weird, and unicode symbols are just placeholders. Wait, fonts. You have to install fonts. More research, but you get there. Finally you launch a browser and are delighted to find something familiar. It all works the same. Great! Let’s watch a video to make sure playback is working, and…no sound.

Okay, more research, and turns out you missed pulseaudio. Install that, start the daemon aaaand…no audio. Fine, how do you check the audio level? Ah, there’s an XFCE4 plugin for pulseaudio. Find that, install it, put it on your panel, click it and…pavucontrol isn’t installed. Whatever that is. Okay, install it and try again. Great! So, for some reason the default audio level when you install is 0. Turn that up and you finally hear sound! Hours after starting the process.

And every. little. thing. is like that. For weeks. Especially with Nvidia, and especially if you make the mistake of following a recent guide that shunts you into a Wayland environment. Every time you need to do something there are 20 options, five of which are well-documented but deprecated, the first three you try don’t work for reasons you don’t understand, then you finally find something that works well enough. Rinse, repeat, for every little thing.

And this is coming from a complete Arch stan. I love Arch. It’s my only distro these days. I’m on Hyprland, my neovim is tricked out, everything is slick, responsive, just takes a couple keystrokes to accomplish anything I want to do, and I have everything set up exactly how I want it. It took a long time to get there, though, and I’ve been using Linux off and on for over 20 years, maining it for the last 10.

Arch, because I can never be happy except when I’m bickering with a machine.

Seriously, though, I like the control and the learning factor. I enjoy knowing what my computer is doing and why, AUR is great, and the documentation is generally top-notch. Once you get past the point in the learning curve where everything is on fire and you don’t know why (don’t forget the ‘linux’ package when you pacstrap, kids!), it’s a delight to use

A couple days ago I tried Hyprland just to see what it was like. I’ve been on XFCE for over a decade and expected to play with Hyprland for a couple hours, go “Huh, that’s cool”, and uninstall it, but I think the switch may be permanent. It’s fantastic

It’s a reference to the way that a certain youtuber ends their videos. “Crime Pays but Botany Doesn’t”. Highly recommend checking out that channel–dude just loves botany and running his mouth.

The USDA hosting info on the program on the Agricultural Marketing Service site seems a bit on-the-nose for the quote, and I had trouble finding anything useful on that site (not sure if it’s an awful site or I’m just tired), but I did finally find a link to the actual regulations defining USDA Organic and the National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances for organic production.

The quote is correct in that USDA Organic doesn’t distinguish organic produce from conventional in terms of safety, nutrition, or quality. It does distinguish from conventional in a lot of other ways, like land management, GMO being unavailable, and extra announced and unannounced inspections for compliance. I’d be curious to see an environmental impact assessment on organic production vs conventional, and a comparison of the types and associated risks of pesticide residues found on organic/conventional crops: those are the two things that are usually brought up when discussion organic crops. There’s a fair bit more to it than I thought. Definitely not just a “marketing tool”, though it is definitely that too.

Yes, NIST now recommends against requiring periodic password changes in their official guidance document.

I used to be omniaural too, so I get where you’re coming from, but have you seen the whistleblower videos from the airpod factory? Sick.

Thanks for taking the time to respond, even though I was critical! Sure, I have no disagreement with anything you said in your reply. I’m also involved in hobbies where bad information can hurt people (including canning and foraging for mushrooms), and I’m obviously against knowledgeable people being removed from positions of authority in these communities. This post bolds the text about being worried that new mods may miss something that the old mods wouldn’t, which could lead to someone getting hurt. I saw that, and that a couple of early comments latched onto it as a focus. I had broccoli in a wok that I needed to get back to and just fired off a quick comment as a bit of infernal advocacy that the replacement of mod powers probably isn’t as dire as the quote makes it sound.

I mean, Reddit deserves to be punished, and there are many reasons to be upset (I personally shredded all my contributions and deleted my account in protest), but I kinda feel like the canning safety issue might be overblown. Nothing is stopping them from staying and calling out unsafe recipes with comments/in association with the new moderators. Sure, they have to go through the new mods to fully remove things, and their removal in the first place raises significant ethical questions, but calling this a safety issue because “someone else could get it wrong” seems like they’re reaching.

All the time. I’ve worn the same style of clothing (all the same color, same style of pants, variable T-shirt to avoid questions about if I’ve done laundry, specific overshirt) and have kept the same hair/facial hair for most of my life. I’ve thought about wearing another color, but someone would say something and I know I’d get flustered or withdrawn, which would draw more attention.

Social lunches are the worst, especially business lunches. I hate eating in front of other people, but have to force myself to or they’ll ask me why I’m not eating. Then I think am I eating too much and not engaging with the other people? Do they want me to be doing that or are they going to ask me why I’m being so quiet? Do they expect me to comment on the food? Now that I’m thinking about what I’m doing have I started chewing weird? Eventually I’m just looking around like a cornered chipmunk between twitchy nibbles of food, which…doesn’t help. Thankfully my friends all know my discomforts by now, so they don’t care if I scarf food in another room and come back, and the pandemic made business lunches stop for the most part.