The Linux Command Line book opened up a lot to me. How Linux Works is very good, but the command line is so essential, and that book gives you some great starting knowledge like aliases and shell scripting.

Especially aliases. Take note of aliases, when you start using aliases it can change your world once you realize how much you can accomplish with what essentially are one line programs you wrote for you own personal needs.

Welcome beyond the pale, friend. You’ve made it to the other side. Only freedom awaits, should you have the determination to work for it.

Brilliant rundown. No notes. 👏

Sadly, I’m in very much agreement with you on this. I love the Linux OS to death, but I’m very very much into learning as much as I can about computers right now, and I am not representative of the majority of computer users.

I understand now why updates are required, why they sometimes break things, and ultimately what has to be done either by myself or, usually, others, to fix them.

But most people seem to go absolute ape shit when things don’t work as expected, and I think that has to do more with human societies not cultivating enough patient, non-stressed, curious, people. And that’s what bums me out more than this whole Windows vs Linux thing…

I definitely hear you on that, and in some ways, it’s a shame more people don’t have the option to learn more about how their computer works.

The Linux OS is, in my experience, one of the most amazing things I’ve ever taken the time to learn. In my pursuit of not only learning programming and computer science fundamentals, but also the internals of the Linux operating system, I’ve gained a granular control over my computing devices that has allowed me to be spared the onslaught of forced “AI in everything” that has recently been pushed down people’s throats. I also have minimal exposure to invasive advertisements, and other unwanted features.

But the cost for access to said knowledge was an immense amount of time studying, an equivalent amount of patience, and a strong desire to learn difficult subjects. That’s a cost the majority of users are unable or unwilling to pay. They simply dont have the time and/or desire, and that’s just reality.

Ultimately, I don’t think it’s acknowledged enough that it requires a vast amount of privilege to have the time and energy to devote to such endeavors such as learning how Linux, the command line, and Computer Systems more broadly, work. I think this is because to acknowledge such would open the discussion up to the more broader topics of the qualities of our education systems and our cultivation of more positively reinforced learning models, which is a much more difficult topic to navigate and argue about when contrasted with the “It’s easy to install Linux. Windows bad, so just do it.” argument that pervades the discussion space.

That’s fair. I maintain a Fedora installation for my elderly mother, whose Windows laptop is on its last legs. I revitalized a 15 year old desktop with Fedora for her, installed everything she needed (browser, file manager, libreoffice, iscan, brother printer drivers, password manager, zoom meetings, etc.). But yeah, every month I hop on, open up a terminal and run sudo dnf upgrade, and every 6 months run the Fedora major version update.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m impressed my Mom has been able to get all her business done using Fedora, but I definitely am acting sysadmin should anything in the slightest go wrong or confuse her. That said, I think she could run the upgrades if I left her with extensive notes (but if anything went wrong, she’d lose her shit, ngl).

I don’t know, I think a Linux distribution with automatic updates would be a good thing if you could ensure every user would be guaranteed to not be greeted with any issues upon reboot from said update.

But yeah, sadly, even on the most user friendly of distros, you still have to have a decent familiarity with the command line , and have the patience and knowledge of where to look for, and then read and comprehend, the documentation. And I doubt there will ever be a time in the future where 100% of users are comfortable with all that, though imho if you use any computer at all, you should at least try.

https://homestarrunner.com/

https://homestarrunner.com/

I think two figures of Greek mythology that I like and I suspect might resonate with many today are that of Sisyphus and Cassandra. I’ve personally felt like both of these figures many times in my life, and I guess both stories just resonate with me .

I personally dislike Narcissus. Not the story mind you, I just can’t fathom liking the world’s first narcissist.

Maybe a little out of left field, but the animated show Star Trek: Lower Decks. I’m not much of a Trekkie at all, but Lower Decks is funny, endearing, and even though each season has an overarching plot, much of the episode plots are relatively self contained.

Highly recommend it.

Same. If we think the largest military power in the world, run by the biggest imbeciles to ever wield said power, is going out with a whimper, and not a bang, then we’re all in for a very rude awakening.

Mull with plenty of extensions and changes in about:config and JavaScript off by default.

Vanadium if on GrapheneOS if more features needed (i.e. JavaScript), barring that, Mulch appears to be equivalent.

Buy a house in a safe neighborhood for myself. Establish at least one housing complex for the homeless with medical, psychiatric, and general care staff as close as possible to said safe neighborhood. Repeat until all that is left is enough to keep said complexes staffed and operational for at least 5 years.

Keep at least $1,000,000 to invest into the stock market in various ETFs, REITs, and LEAP Option calls. All profits go back to maintaining and establishing more housing complexes for the homeless.

All my free time would be spent figuring out how to end the homelessness crisis. If ever accomplished, focus my efforts on the public education system, and praying I somehow have the willpower to avoid corruption.

I thought codeberg was just a really well maintained and customized gitea instance…?

I’m part of the problem, and probably won’t change.

I’m new to C and Rust, but from what I can gather, C and C++ are not memory safe by default because they require the programmer to manually allocate memory onto the heap as needed and then free said memory, and then remember not to use said freed memory again. There is a lot of “ceremony” around this and it’s easy to make mistakes, which result in memory leaks, use after free errors, undefined behavior, security bugs, etc.

Most high level languages (Python, JavaScript, Java, Golang, etc.) use a garbage collector (also known by the acronym, GC), which very essentially looks for when memory can be freed within your program and performs this allocation/deallocation ceremony for you. There are, however, disadvantages to running a garbage collector. Running a garbage collector costs allocation of memory itself, and it is not inherently efficient (depending on how the garbage collector itself was implemented).

Rust’s solution to this utilizes techniques built around the concept of memory ownership, which is enforced using what is known as the Borrow Checker. In essence, Rust prevents memory leaks by ensuring that a variable (i.e. a reference to a value stored in memory) cannot be utilized in multiple different scopes of the program, but rather must be either copied (a new variable with the same value stored in a different space of memory), or the variable must be passed directly to the new scope, afterwards which it cannot be utilized outside of the scope it was passed to (hence the term of it being “borrowed”.)

Im not sure, but I believe this is why Rust is more efficient than a garbage collected language because the techniques used in garbage collection can be computationally and resource intensive. These techniques include tracing, reference counting, and escape analysis.

This is as opposed to Rust’s memory management model, which prevents memory leaks by explicit memory allocation of mutable variables which prevents the presence of dangling pointers being left within the codebase.

From my little experience working with both C and Rust, as well as languages like JS/TS and Python, is that Rust cuts the difference between the low level languages like C and the GC languages like Python in that you don’t have to manually allocate and deallocate memory every time you need to use the heap, but you need to keep track of which scope owns which memory at any given time, otherwise the compiler (and hopefully long before that, your linter) will complain at you and prevent you from even compiling a binary in the first place.

Lastly, a point of interest. C++ has an optional borrow checker of sorts in its use of RAII.

Hope this helps sort things out a bit. Really there aren’t many memory safe languages that use the ownership model. All GC languages are memory safe (assuming the GC is implemented well), but the computational cost of that memory safety is higher than with Rust.

In short, Rust’s Ownership model makes Rust one of the few memory safe languages that is nearly as efficient as manually memory allocated languages like C, while still memory safe like with GC languages.

Thank you for that breakdown. I’m a big fan of Firefox, but have been aware of there being issues with Mozilla for some time now (albeit from the periphery). I figured when these cases came against Google, that even though I generally supported the breakup of the monopoly, I knew that a story like this one would eventually land.

If Mozilla is indeed burning money instead of putting the majority of it towards Firefox and, to a lesser extent, Thunderbird, then yeah, they’re going to need to reassess their budget and where to allocate their assets as without big moneybags Google forking over the funds, it’d be within their best interests to really invest hard into making their browser better.

Thanks again.

Just out of curiosity, where does the 20% estimate come from?

If she was in it for honest love, then I’d be more accepting of what you’re describing. I’m less put off by the age gap and more put off by the marrying for money part. This happens all the time, and it’s one of the many reasons I hate capitalism and consumerism, as it ultimately makes the choice to marry for money a “reasonable choice”.

I understand that “marriage is a business contract” has been a more true statement than “marriage is a love pact” for most of human history. But that doesn’t make it right. Marrying for love, IMHO is the only reason to feel good about a marriage, because ultimately that’s the only actually good thing about marriage. The rest of it is theater and performance.

She’s an adult, she can make all the mistakes she wants, and in our fucked up capitalist society, what your daughter is doing is considered not a mistake, but a reasonable financial decision. And that is what sickens me.

It’s one of those “hate the game, not the player,” situations, sadly. Cuz you can stop a single player, the game on the other hand…

Bring back your Advocacy division. Lower the pay for your CEO. Secure funding from other entities so that you are no longer dependent on Google. Focus more on implementing better security measures on Linux and Android, specifically within the domain of sandboxing your open processes. Keep about:config and manifest v2 options available.

Great work. They haven’t commented on this matter for some time now and its good to see an updated comment on this issue.

I use Graphene OS, but do use Mull. I also use Vanadium and base Chromium. Each for different uses. Mull for general browsing (I have many extensions, but I feel a bit more secure by running NoScript).

Vanadium is for when I need more functionality, and raw Chromium for inspecting responsive design of my own sites.

The GrapheneOS community is a great asset to the Android ecosystem, and their mentality has always seemed to be security above all else (even above privacy), which is a voice that is needed in any organization.

Again, thanks for doing this investigation.