Stage 2:

Documents folder? You want to rule my whole computer, dictate some nonsensical folder structure and then you act like, out of the goodness of your heart, I can have this little set of folders, deep in your weird structure, to store my stuff? And you’re even telling me how to sort it? On my own hard drive connected to my own computer?

I liked agile as it was practiced in the “Extreme Programming” days.

• Rather than attempt to design the perfect system from the get-go, you accept that software architecture is a living, moving target that needs to evolve as your understanding of the problem evolves.

• Rather than stare down a mountain of ill-defined work, you have neat little user stories that can be completed in a few days at most and you just move around some Kanban cards instead of feeding a soul-sucking bureaucratic ticketing, time tracking and monitoring system.

• Rather than sweat and enter crunch mode for deadlines, the project owners see how many user stories (or story points or perfect hours) the team completes per week and can use a velocity graph / burndown chart to estimate when all work will be completed.

.

But it’s just a corporate buzzword now. “We’re agile” often enough means “we have no plan, take no responsibility and expect the team to wing it somehow” or “we cargo cult a few agile ideas that feel good to management, like endless meetings with infinite course changes where everyone gives feel-good responses to the managers.”

Having a goal, a specification, a release plan, a vision and someone who is responsible and approachable (the “project owner”) are all part of the agile manifesto, not something it tries to do away with. I would be sad if agile faces the same fate as the waterfall model back in its time and even sadder if we return to the time-tracking-ticket-system-with-Gantt-chart hell as the default.

Maybe we need a new term or an “agility index” to separate the cases of “incompetent manager uses buzzword to cover up messy planning” from the cases of “project owner with a clearly defined goal creates a low-bureaucracy work environment for his team.” :)

I’m always hopeful, but at this point, I seriously doubt Russia’s sincerity. Past ceasefire agreements, for example, were broken by Russian attacks, usually within hours of the agreement taking effect.

So… this AI company gets gaming teens to “donate” their computing power, rather than pay for render farms / GPU clouds?

And then oblivious parents pay the power bills, effectively covering the computing costs of the AI porn company?

Sounds completely ethical to me /s.

When you have a bunch of computers networked, each of them is assigned a unique number, so when other computers send data on the wire, they can say who it is meant for (imagine each blurb of data starting out like: “yo, I’m sending these next 500 bytes for computer 0A123FBC32, here they come”).

Now the right computer will listen, but it doesn’t know what program the data is for - is it a chunk of a file your browser is downloading? Or the email your email app wants to display? Or perhaps a join request from your buddy’s computer for the Minecraft game you’re hosting?

So in addition to the unique number of the target computer, the data also specifies a “port number”, which tells the computer which of its running programs the data is meant for (programs ask the computer’s operating system: “if any network data arrives on port XY, give it to me”). Some ports have become standards - for example, a program that serves web pages to other computers would typically ask the operating system that any data arriving on the computer that indicates port numbers 80 and 443 should be given to it, and when a web browser wants to fetch a web page, it will send a request to the computer serving the page, defaulting to port 80 o 443.

If you dig deeper, you’ll find that there are even more unique numbers involved and routers/firewalls let data through not only by port number but also by distinguishing between data that is the initial request to another computer’s port number and data that is an answer to an earlier seen request – and more.

Linux Unix since 1979: upon booting, the kernel shall run a single “init” process with unlimited permissions. Said process should be as small and simple as humanly possible and its only duty will be to spawn other, more restricted processes.

Linux since 2010: let’s write an enormous, complex system(d) that does everything from launching processes to maintaining user login sessions to DNS caching to device mounting to running daemons and monitoring daemons. All we need to do is write flawless code with no security issues.

Linux since 2015: We should patch unrelated packages so they send notifications to our humongous system manager whether they’re still running properly. It’s totally fine to make a bridge from a process that accepts data from outside before even logging in and our absolutely secure system manager.

Excuse the cheap systemd trolling, yes, it is actually splitting into several, less-privileged processes, but I do consider the entire design unsound. Not least because it creates a single, large provider of connection points that becomes ever more difficult to replace or create alternatives to (similarly to web standard if only a single browser implementation existed).

Yes, I do that on all my VMs about every 3-5 weeks when it turns itself on again.

I love the “Let’s finish setting up your device” popup that prevents me from using my VMs regularly.

Like some condescending peddler trying to slam-dunk your agreement as a foregone conclusion.

Come on, buddy, let’s do those remaining tasks, let’s have Microsoft scan your face, tell Microsoft about your phone, let’s go and install those Microsoft apps missing from your phone, and your laptop, too, and then we go buy that Office subscription and have you store your important files on Microsoft’s servers and we really need to get around to switching to Microsoft’s web browser now.

And the only option you get is “Yes” or “Remind me later.”

If you turn it off (and it needs to be turned off in two places), it’ll be back on as soon as Microsoft publishes the tiniest update to any of its unwanted services. Harrghrrr! (artery popping noises)

I have a Windows VM that runs Visual Studio and a small number of developer tools so I can test my code on Windows. And another windows VM that runs Daz3D, Clip Studio Paint and the Epic Launcher (to download stuff from the Unreal Engine Marketplace).

Sometimes I misuse either VM by creating a snapshot and installing Garmin Connect so I can update the music library on my watch :)

SuSE Linux (a German distribution), some niche, single CD distrubution, Debian for a while and, finally, since ~2006, Gentoo on my servers and since ~2015 Gentoo as my desktop.

Debian and its derivatives never felt right for me. I find too many drawbacks with binary packages (non-configurable build options, therefore dependencies that can’t be disabled, relying on humans to keep ABI compatiblity, trouble integrating my own packages or unstable versions) and I just don’t like systemd.

It’s weird, I’ve seen more than enough of those “Install Gentoo” memes, but I find it the most pleasant system to run in the long term.

I’m a little put off by the inconvenient command line and the mandatory bells and whistles (flathub is nice and all, but must it be baked into the main executable rather than having the package manager as an optional thing on top?).

So far, AppImage just looks superior to me. Works without installing a runtime into my system, no need to become root and integrate an app into a system-wide managed package repository, I can just run it.

But if you piss him off, he’ll turn right back into Windows95man and send you into DLL-hell.

I’m not up-to-date with current NAS systems anymore – I’m running an older QNAP NAS (TS-453), and it has their proprietary “Container Station” which can run web applications in Docker + LXD containers. Not FOSS, though the containers very much are and can be moved to other systems.

As an alternative, FreeNAS/TrueNAS sells NAS systems where at least the software side is FOSS. They’re quite expensive, though.

The prices of other brands also quickly breach silly levels, but a basic 2-bay NAS is about ~$250 for QNAP, ~$200 for Synology and ~$1000 for a TrueNAS. Without hard drives.

If you’re not interested in the data storage side, a Mini PC w/Proxmox (popular Docker/LXD container engine w/browser-based management) or even a direct install on a Raspberry PI are possible for under $100.

I’m running a few on my NAS:

• Taiga to manage projects. It’s as easy and pleasant to use as Trello, but with velocity/burndown charts and the whole “agile” thing, but you can also turn parts of it on and off (per project even).

• Trilium completely cured me of messy note-taking habits, simply by winning on the convenience side. I was firmly in the “folder tree of markdown documents” and “my Sublime Text tabs of random notes have no number” camp before.

• I’m considering Habitica which lets you set up rewards and achievements for your real life (i.e. apply addictive reward/progress loop from video games to motivate your real self to do things). Also Wger for exercise tracking, but I’m not sure they’re the right thing for my ticket/tracking-averse self (I wish there was something that covered the whole MyFitnessPal/FitDay and the whole Polar Personal Trainer/Garmin Connect side, but FOSS and self-hosted).

For leisure, I also run Stash (it bills itself as an organizer for your porn library, but it’s really good for any kind of clips), Jellyfin for my music and movies and currently both Mango and Kavita for books and comics.

To add to what others have already answered, if Ukraine accepted such a “deal”, more war would be coming to Europe.

• When Russia still falsely assumed they could destroy Ukraine in just weeks, they were already prepared to march right through into Moldova (there’s ample reporting from mainstream and non-mainstream publications an internet search will reveal)
• Intense propaganda is currently aimed at Europe’s right wingers to seed distrust and destabilize Europe and to form positive opinions on Russia
• Hungary is controlled by a pro-Russian far-right dictator, Poland just barely teetered back from the brink
• Germany’s fascist party wants “Dexit,” (and “Brexit” was a Russian undertaking, too). Yes, pro-Russian far-right parties again, both. Same old.
• Russia is working with Republicans to pull the US out of NATO and destroy America from the inside out (surprise, another pro-Russian far-right party)
• A heavily Russian-influenced billionaire bought Twitter and allowed unchecked government propaganda from Russia under the guise of free speech to aid in the previous undertaking.

I have every reason to believe that Russia will just move on to the next target and that things would be far worse in Europe already if Ukraine wasn’t keeping a large portion of Russian resources aimed at them.

Also consider that any time Russia offered a ceasefire (such agreements were accepted several times), they always used it to safely rush supplies to the front lines and broke the ceasefire immediately after, often just hours after it was instated.

It’s like when YouTube influencers get invited, all expenses covered plus pocket money, to a sweatshop in China, given a guided tour showing all the utterly happy workers and absolutely fantastic work conditions.

And said influencers then return home and gush over said sweatshop, don’t disclose the paid expenses and perhaps even dunk on real journalists that infiltrated the company and collected evidence for months (the real case I’m referring to: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/30/1184974003/shein-influencers-china-factory-trip-backlash).

I’m happy when actual investigative journalists report from Russia, but those tend to live dangerously and won’t get interviews with the regime’s higher-ups or the tyrant himself. Media in Russia are under complete government control, so Tucker even getting that interview is a clear tell.

Q1: Select (see Q3) + F2

Q2: Same way as double-click people. A file only opens if I click, not when I press the mouse button and drag the file around.

Q3: I draw a small selection frame over it, or press the control key when clicking (I have the hand there any, especially if my next input will be Ctrl+C/X and Ctrl+V

Q4: I just do. Sometimes I relax by playing shooters with the “invert mouse” option turned on :D

I have never had a cell phone or smart phone in my life, single-click was the default when I switched to Linux, I gave it a try and I liked it.

…and, hear me out, that will be perfect for keeping messages untraceable by the government. Every single of those 200,000 computers will have full copies of all the messages ever transmitted, unencrypted, but they’ll never be able to tell who wrote them and who they were for.

The problem I have with the “hypocrisy” argument is that, here, it’s used as a cheap attack on the messenger.

As in the old meme:

(poor peasant doing labor: “we should improve society somewhat”, grinning contemporary person: “yet you participate in society, curious! I am very intelligent.”)

I can accept it when influential people, even those that cause a whole lot of emissions themselves, advocate for climate programs. We won’t get anywhere if, whoever wants to talk about the environment, first has to become a cave dweller and give up their reach before they’re allowed to speak up.

On the other hand, when Fox News, a channel that generally panders to the coal lobby, car industry and oil barons, suddenly becomes concerned about someone’s CO2 emissions just to serve up another smear, that is hypocrisy, plain and simple.