Good article. I learned long ago that, at least the case of your development environment, it’s best to install the latest upstream release instead of just relying on the system provided version. Go makes doing this extremely easy relative to some other languages out there.

I’ve argued this for point for so many years and have become exhausted to the point where I don’t even bother any more.

Free software advocates, God bless them, are fighting a good fight but we will never see the average computer user giving up functionality for the sake of some computing ideology; whether that ideology be free software, privacy or security focused. I’m glad some people are willing to do so as I believe strongly that the world would not be where it is today if it weren’t for it’s existence offer the last two or three decades. But the reality is that 90% of the world views computers, phones and tablets as tools; a means to achieving an end, not the end in and of itself. There may be some subset of people who are willing to give up some convenience or utility if they believe strongly enough in one of these ideologies, but most of them will never care about the license of their software as long as it gets the job done. But this is precisely why we need people who do care about these ideologies because software freedom ultimately is important and people do benefit from it. It just needs to be as good as, if not better than, it’s non-free counterparts

I recently started uses dotbot for managing dot files across my systems. It sounds very similar, in terms of the simplicity of the implementation, to yadm. You define a config file in yaml or json and run the “install” script which calls the dotbot utility, passing in your config file. With a simple change to the install script, I’ve been able to create multiple config files, one per environment (work, home, linux, mac, etc.) and I’ve been thinking about how I could automatically sync changes to git whenever I edit a config file. Leaning towards setting up an autocmd in neovim to automatically commit and push changes on save when I have one of the config files open. Just not yet sure how to do this in a way that would only run the sync for the configs and not every json or yaml file on my system. I’ve only ever set up autocmds for specific file extensions but the syntax leads me to believe it’s flexible enough that any arbitrarily specific file name or path could work the same.

This sounds really similar to how I do things but I use Ansible. What are the advantages to something like yadm, that is specifically designed for dot file management, and a generic config management utility like Ansible?

Red House by Sarah Messer

In her critically acclaimed, ingenious memoir, Sarah Messer explores America’s fascination with history, family, and Great Houses. Her Massachusetts childhood home had sheltered the Hatch family for 325 years when her parents bought it in 1965. The will of the house’s original owner, Walter Hatch—which stipulated Red House was to be passed down, “never to be sold or mortgaged from my children and grandchildren forever”—still hung in the living room. In Red House, Messer explores the strange and enriching consequences of growing up with another family’s birthright. Answering the riddle of when shelter becomes first a home and then an identity, Messer has created a classic exploration of heritage, community, and the role architecture plays in our national identity.

I recently found this book at a book store in Vermont while on a road trip and I’ve absolutely fallen in love with it.

Yeah, neither is great. Needs to be called something like “Employee Business Relations” maybe?

Boundaries. Establish them and defend them with every ounce of your being. If you don’t, most employers will grind you in to the dirt and send you out to pasture when you eventually crack under the pressure. Better to establish healthy boundaries up front. Not only will you find yourself more frequently surrounded by people you like and share mutual respect with, you will be happier and land fewer “shit” jobs because employers looking for people to send to the meat grinder will see that they can’t grind you down and you’ll be filtered from the hiring pool before you ever have to suffer at their hands.

100%. The rebranding of some HR departments as “People Officers” or “People Team” drives me bonkers. When push comes to shove, they will always protect the interests of the business before the interests of the employee. Full stop.

There’s a difference between complaining and providing constructive feedback. This post falls in the former category. If you are a user of a free product and you don’t like how it works, you are entitled to a full, no questions asked, refund. You’re welcome to make suggestions but devs who work hard to provide something at no cost and on their own time owe nobody anything. I’ve seen this play out year after year in the open source community and it’s led to a lot of very good projects shutting down when the developer gets fed up with the demands and behavior of the community of users.

This is something I struggle with too. On the one hand, I don’t want to say all instances are bad but there exists, definitely in Asian countries, sex work that caters specifically to ethnically based fetishes. On the one hand, fine, whatever gets your jimmy’s off as long as it’s consensual but I also think that these are often going to result in more exploitative environments when they occur in lower income areas.

I’ll answer with a simple test. Do the following first on your phone and then on a piece of paper:

Design a thing, something physical; a box, a house, a chair, whatever. In addition to the diagram, this note must include a description of the item, the bill of materials, the dimensions and, if applicable, assembly instructions that you could confidently hand to someone else and have them follow. Ideally, you should include the dimensions of the object directly on the sketch itself.

Now give this to someone and see how accurately they can reproduce the item while you go off and make a phone call.

I run Ubuntu on a 2011 MacBook Air. I have to believe a 2012 Pro would also run it without issue

Exactly right. Facebook will factor this in as am expected cost of doing business (if they didn’t already) and their stock will go up. This isn’t a penalty, this is just like paying a bribe. In the end, both are just lining the pockets of officials more interested in appearing to do something for the next news cycle so they can get re-elected.

I think reality lies somewhere in the middle. Yes you have to read and yes you have to configure things but the docs are all on the wiki. There’s a point where this is easier than figuring out how to undo the defaults on, say, Ubuntu and do your own thing without official documentation on it.

Honestly… I don’t get this. It’s a bit more work than other distros but I think that Linux users often get to a point in their Linux journey where customizing a system with defaults is more difficult than just starting from a blank slate.

Are we just going to pretend Debian doesn’t exist?

Yes! I saw his channel mentioned by others so I chose to leave it off my list but that channel is a true gem!

Project Farm is neat but I find his videos a bit repetitive. Great resource for finding comparisons of specific things, though.

The majority of the content I consume comes from YouTube these days. Here are a couple of my favorite channels:

• Usagi Electric - old computers and vacuum tubes
• Diesel Creek - big equipment restoration and salvage
• Robot Cantina - silly car projects
• Look Mum, No Computer - analog synth madness
• RCTestFlight - RC cars, drones, etc.
• Project Air - experimental RC stuff
• BPS.Space - Amateur Rocketry
• Tasting History - Food history
• Tokyo Lens - exploring and discovery in Tokyo
• Integza - mad science stuff
• Jeff Geerling - Raspberry Pis etc.
• Nile Red - backyard chemistry
• Studson Studio - making models from garbage
• Mr. Chickadee - super chill, traditional woodworking

I have away more niche channels too for bicycles, retro computing and model building. Just too many to list here unless someone’s interested. I can make a list for a particular niche.

So turn my argument around and replace performance with disk capacity. Cost per gigabyte is so low now that you’ll end up spending more money in electricity compiling the dependency out than you would by having the disk space to not worry about it in the first place.