Vim/Neovim has orgmode too, these days 🤪

At times, I’ve also juggled (in addition to vim and tmux) hotkeys for my current tiling WM of choice and extra hotkeys to swap between machines via barrier. I’m not sure how I’m able remember what I had for breakfast, much less someone’s name.

Not sure if directly relevant, but there’s been a rush of really good PC games lately after a long dry spell.

I do, too, and drove one for many years. I’ll be the one to splash cold water on the conversation, though.

Driving a stick arguably requires the use of both hands and legs, which is great and partly the reason why so many enjoy it - that sense of engagement. It’s far less boring.

But here’s the deal. Injure any one of those appendages and driving a manual becomes a whole lot less fun. In some cases, you can get by, but it’s less than ideal. Having your arm closest to the shift in a sling, for example, makes your vehicle undrivable.

It won’t matter to most people… right up until the moment it does.

Secret sauce: it’s much easier to get an employer on board with buying you a Thinkpad as part of a bulk order than it is to get them to spring for any of these more obscure models as a one-off.

I’ve used vim with a smattering of essential plugins for years to do this, and only this year moved to Neovim for the same.

It’s not Open Source, but I’ve also taken a hefty liking to Obsidian’s canvas mode. Likewise, I share a small selection of lists with my other half via Google Keep.

Legit. Piracy related to home PC software has been around since the advent of home PCs. Before the concept of LANfests or LAN parties even existed, there were copy parties. I still have vivid memories of 8+ 1541 drives daisy-chained to a single C64. University servers hosting warez… Usenet… there’s likely earlier examples I’m not aware of.

Before that, people were hacking phone systems in order to call long distance for free. This ain’t nothin new.

Not something I’ve indulged in for 30+ years, though. I pay for everything, now. Guilty conscience, I suppose. 😁

Syslog (rsyslod) is usually the standard answer for the average sysadmin, but it depends a lot on your needs. A lot of newer loggers output as pure JSON, which offer benefits to readability and more approachable search logic/filters/queries (I’m so tired of regex).

When you start venturing down the road of finding the right way to store and forward the output of logging drivers from Docker containers, as one example, rsyslod starts to feel dated.

The easy answers if you want to throw money at the problem are solutions like Splunk, Datadog, or New Relic. If you don’t want to (and most people wouldn’t), then alternatives certainly exist, but some of them are just as heavy on system resources. Greylog has relative feature parity with Splunk Enterprise, but consumes just as much compute and storage if not more, and I found it to be a much larger pain in the butt to administer and keep running.

The likeliest answer to this problem is Grafana Loki, just based on what I’ve read of its capabilities, but I haven’t had a chance to circle back and test it out. Someone here who has might be able to weigh in and speak to its strengths/weaknesses.

This has been on my radar for a while, and I keep putting it off. How are you liking it?

Grafana’s Loki sounded incredibly useful and performant, with the added benefit of reducing storage requirements significantly under some situations.

The logical fallacy here being that, based on that context alone, you should care because you will have something to hide in the future. Saying you have nothing to hide is always used in the context of one’s sense of guilt, or lack thereof, based on past actions. A counterargument would then be to ask why you should be allowed to hide your future wrongs.

For many, the subject has nothing to do with that. It’s about not wanting to be monetized without consent. There’s also benefits in the form of protection against identity theft or social engineering. For others, the simple right to fundamental personal privacy itself is important - it’s about not having all of one’s life’s details on public display.

Also known as “none of your goddamn business.”

As a tangent, because it’s now stuck in my head and needs expression - the more thought you give to the problems introduced by technology that blur or step over this line, the more you realize how much harder it’s becoming to prevent outcomes where privacy is lost.

Only engaging AI under tightly controlled circumstances is one thing; having it in the background perceiving everything you say and do on your desktop is a very different conversation. No matter what assurances are given that your privacy is protected, almost every situation like it that’s arisen since the advent of personal computers has resulted in a loss of control through duplicity, intrusion, sabotage, bad design, or floundering integrity.

It warmed my nerd heart that the first thing I spotted in the mpvpaper repo was an animated Steins Gate background.

I feel this. The most disgusting thing I’ve ever had to do was clean my chain-smoking parents’ house after their passing so we could put it up for sale. I can vividly imagine what the inside of a smoker’s PC must look like, just based on that experience.

Minimal issues here. Set up Arch, install nVidia, add build hooks before next kernel update, carry on.

This is the most insidious conundrum related to AI usage. At the end of the day, a LLM’s top priority is to ensure that your question is answered in a way that satisfies that model. The accuracy of its answers are a secondary concern. If forced to choose between making up BS so it can have a response that looks right versus admitting it doesn’t have enough information to answer, it can and often will choose the former. Thus the “hallucination” problem was born.

The chance of getting your answer lightly sprinkled with made up stuff is disturbingly high. This transfers the cognitive load of the AI user from “what is the answer” to “I must repeatedly go verify everything in this answer because I can’t trust it”.

Not an insurmountable obstacle, and they will likely solve it sooner rather than later, but AI right now is arguably the perfect extension of the modern internet - take absolutely everything you read with at least a grain of salt… and keep a pile of salt cubes close by.

One of the main reasons my wife hasn’t taken the Linux plunge is Photoshop support and a lack of feature-complete alternatives with sane UI design choices. We would gladly pay for a Linux version of Photoshop at this point.

It"s dawning on me now as I write this that Proton could be the secret sauce that slays this monster. Has anyone tried adding Photoshop as a non-Steam app to the Steam client, lately?

As others have stated, the cleanest option for a single monitor setup is to either share a specific window, or start making use of multiple virtual desktops, sometimes referred to as workspaces. Windows, Mac, and Linux are all capable of it, now - the only difference is how you set up, arrange, and navigate them.

Linux options offer the most versatility, Mac’s implementation is a decent balance between ease of use and scalability (with caveats), and the Windows native implementation is the newest entrant to this playing field… but it’s an adequate offering that gets the job done for this use case.

As a Texan, I feel I have the right to ask this very important question…

Has anyone else noticed how the symmetry of the inner and outer shape of a cowboy hat is strongly reminiscent of an inverted toilet bowl?

Just curious.

When a small but dedicated group of vocal people started unironically and emphatically believing the planet was a pancake, I lost a significant portion of my lingering reserves of hope for the future of mankind.

Extremist politics and all the associated mindsets have long since jumped a row of sharks in my mind by comparison.

That doesn’t represent disinterest by the developers. In fact, that’s a big red circled F on a report card to them, and including that comment is intentionally bringing attention to a glaring deficiency. It’s very likely that they have a plugin implemented in their IDE which surfaces TODO items vividly, and their associated Jira task or epic can’t be closed out until all of the remaining work is complete.

I’d be more worried if the code presented a clear danger to privacy and DIDN’T directly address concerns in one form or another. You should be praising this dev for raising awareness to his peers and making sure this gets done, not the opposite.

AI happened. The promises, benefits, opportunity for massive financial gain, and the clear and present danger of how transformative it can be have all caused internet-bases companies to throw out the rulebook and lose their collective minds.