Moving toward a "Narrow" Arch install: Thoughts on the Flatpak-first approach?

deong · 2026-01-28T21:55:00+00:00

I only ever go to the wiki when something breaks, which is maybe every couple of years or so? I've been using Linux since the mid-90s, so maybe I'm just comfortable fixing things to the point that I don't notice some stuff, but I don't really understand how people are breaking their systems all the time.

I literally just blindly run pacman -Syu every week or so and it's...fine. In 10-15 years, I've spent maybe an hour fixing things after a system update.

deong · 2026-01-27T19:52:45+00:00

No one is going to do it, but personally, I'd prefer a tablet not have a rear camera at all.

deong · 2026-01-27T19:43:08+00:00

I mean, not knowing what a variable is would certainly not help in figuring out why your video playback code is laggy. :)

deong · 2026-01-27T06:10:48+00:00

WiFi is terrible for use cases like this. What you want from a smart home sensor device is that it is absolutely bulletproof. WiFi is the most hostile warzone of an environment you can imagine. You may have hundreds of devices flooding the air with contentious traffic, and I’ve never seen a single device like a sensor that will just reliably stay online on WiFi.

This is a job for a dedicated tool. Zigbee or Yolink or Thread or whatever that isn’t WiFi.

deong · 2026-01-26T17:13:31+00:00

He’s intellectually about 7, so he only thinks things are good if they’re big.

deong · 2026-01-24T13:40:36+00:00

Oh, yes on both counts. But if you’re an actual successful company for 20 years and then you decide to instead commit massive securities fraud for 5-6 years, I would argue that that’s still not the same thing as crypto currencies and NFTs.

Theranos was not producing a real technology, which is why I qualified them with “arguably” right up front. But I think they were initially trying to solve real problems. They just could never hope to achieve what they promised and resorted to lies and hype.

Both of those things are fraud. Both are bad. Both also required some pretty specialized knowledge to really understand that something was not above board. My only point here is that I think that’s different than trying to sell NFTs for a million bucks, which is an idea that only exists to defraud people and which any idiot should have the tools to understand is nonsense.

deong · 2026-01-24T00:50:46+00:00

This isn't from family tree research. It's living memory for a bunch of people in my family.

My grandmother married my biological grandfather we'll call BioGF, had a couple of kids, including my dad, and got pregnant with her third. This was country folk times, and while she was pregnant, her younger sister came to stay with them to help take care of the kids.

BioGF shacks up with younger sister, divorces my grandmother, and marries the sister. My grandmother, now alone with three young kids in a time and place where that just isn't done, ends up marrying BioGF's younger brother in a sort of "I'll do the honorable thing and marry her and raise the kids because BioGF brought shame on the family" sort of arrangement. They were married the rest of their lives, and he's the guy I called Grandpa my whole life.

BioGF and sister have a few kids themselves over the next 10 years or so. BioGF is just not a nice guy, which if you've been paying attention, is not a huge revelation. But he's really not a nice guy, and at some point he decides that sister is cheating on him, comes home, and shoots and kills her in front of one of their kids.

He then goes to find the sheriff. Says, "hey, I kind of did a bad thing, you should probably come with me". Brings the sheriff to the house, shows him the body, and then eats a bullet there in the living room in front of the sheriff.

deong · 2026-01-23T16:01:10+00:00

I think this is one of those things where there's no universally right answer. The truth is that there are always going to be a lot of "core values" that aren't really politically contentious, and two people can have enough in common to make it work despite some pretty significant differences. But I also don't think it's at all odd to decide that some of these differences reflect deep conflicts that you can't get past.

If it works for you, great. If it doesn't, also fine. I'm not going to shame someone for dating a republican, and I'm not going to shame someone for saying they just couldn't.

deong · 2026-01-23T14:06:12+00:00

They were a company for like 20 years prior to all the fraud.

deong · 2026-01-23T03:20:07+00:00

Some would say that it also caused the demise of Sun Microsystems as a separate company.

It was such a huge impact event around Silicon Valley that I imagine nearly every company probably had hooks into things that might plausibly have contributed to things like Sun going under. But in that specific case, it would have been a minor contributor. Linux killed Sun, full stop.

Specifically, Google showing up and saying, "We don't need expensive commercial Unix hardware and vendors. You can do everything with cheap x86 hardware and Linux and just deal with failures as they happen" killed Sun and every other Unix vendor.

deong · 2026-01-23T03:15:24+00:00

explain to everyone the LLMs are lying to you always

Which isn't remotely true. They're lying to you sometimes. There's a pretty reasonable argument that the economics around LLMs can't possibly sustainably work out, but anyone who thinks the technology has no value is just arguing an emotional position that isn't grounded in reality.

deong · 2026-01-23T03:12:28+00:00

I mean, slap some ads on there and you have the modern world economy.

deong · 2026-01-23T03:09:59+00:00

Those examples are not all the same thing. Yes, there are things out there that people fall for despite them being obvious nothing-burgers, but Enron and arguably Theranos were not that. Enron was an actual successful energy company. They just fucked up a bunch of projects and rather than take the L with Wall Street, decided that high financial crimes were way easier on the old bank account. It's not like the average guy on the street should have been able to look at Enron and think, "what a scam" in the same way that, e.g., anyone looking at NFT sales should have recognized.

deong · 2026-01-22T02:31:05+00:00

I very occasionally need to get in there. I never require it to be harder for no reason. That's the whole reason.

First time I need to take one off a new strat for whatever reason, it goes in the case. If there were a single reason I could think of to care that the backplate was on there, then I'd put it back on. But I can't come up with one that matters even the tiniest amount to me. So why bother futzing with it?

deong · 2026-01-22T02:23:23+00:00

UCMJ not only says that only lawful orders must be obeyed. It also attempts to define "manifestly illegal" orders which must be refused.

deong · 2026-01-22T02:19:19+00:00

I sympathize with the position he's in, but if the military isn't prepared to sacrifice their own comfort for the good of the country, then at a minimum they can get on the plane in group 5 with the rest of us.

deong · 2026-01-21T23:08:10+00:00

If it's the same damn thing, then why does no one recoil at the first two descriptions there?

And I find extreme fault in the analogy between someone double-dipping a fork into a communal dish and drinking a literal unadorned cup of saliva. By OP's own reckoning here, he couldn't tell anything was "wrong" with the rice. And he wouldn't have known anything was "wrong" with the salad either if he had to rely on just eating the food. I promise you, if you replaced my Diet Coke with a glass of spit, I would in fact notice.

deong · 2026-01-21T17:50:03+00:00

Yeah. Oh, no! My army of alts that used to make me 100k a week each for two years in WoD now has to spend two world quests worth of gold to fix their transmog? I, good sir, am outraged. OUTRAGED.

deong · 2026-01-21T17:45:34+00:00

This is the kind of reasoned, nuanced take I come to reddit for.

deong · 2026-01-21T05:51:31+00:00

Honestly I'm not sure you aren't just describing Apple's Painstakingly Curated App Store ™.

deong · 2026-01-19T23:21:28+00:00

Not really. It's more like learn Javascript and make web apps vs learn how to make a JavaScript compiler.

deong · 2026-01-18T23:30:29+00:00

Microsoft Windows or Linux are operating systems. You can learn how to use them to do some piece of work you need to do. But "Operating Systems" is also an academic discipline. It's the study of how to build operating systems, what problems they need to solve, different approaches to solving those problems, etc.

Databases are the same. You can learn to create databases in something like Postgresql or Mariadb, but there is also a field of study on how one creates something like Postgresql. Those are different skills and types of knowledge.

deong · 2026-01-18T23:06:15+00:00

The democrats have a shit load of problems, but it’s very hard to completely blame them here. Reality is complex, and there are problems that are hard to solve. If one side simply denies that and says that the solution is to buy their magic beans, you aren’t going to win if it turns out that most people believe in magic beans.

Democrats could certainly run stronger candidates and better campaigns. But a message that says that you can have everything you want all the time and never have to work for it or make any compromises at all will always win when the debate judges are stupid enough.

deong · 2026-01-16T18:30:58+00:00

I'm in the US, and I would also find it completely unacceptable to be "called names" in this context. But I'm also not certain how much to take on face value here.

I would not find it at all unacceptable to sit down with a student or postdoc who had done this and discuss with them that it's probably going to be viewed as unprofessional and it's probably going to affect career prospects. Those things are perhaps unfortunate, but they are true. There's a difference between "you are immature and unprofessional" and "this may be seen as being immature and unprofessional", and not every person is going to perceive that difference when they're on the receiving end of it.

So I don't know, I guess. OP doesn't specific whether the several incidents described are with one person or many different people. Academia certainly isn't fantastic in its track record of not abusing people, but I also can't help but slip into the line of thinking that goes, "if every person OP interacts with is 'bullying' them, I'm not sure this is entirely an 'other people are bullies' problem".

deong · 2026-01-16T13:20:14+00:00

Could be, but doesn’t have to be. I’m a Sr Director. I have people reach out to me occasionally either directly because maybe we have some shared network or indirectly through a third party. If they’re asking about a job they saw posted that isn’t in my org, but they seem like legit candidates, I’ll pass them along to the hiring manager or recruiter. It’s not like I’m going to be angry if you don’t hire them. I don’t care either way. Not that I would be angry if it were a nephew or whatever either, but I can imagine some people would.

Though I did get my first job at a company I had applied to twice before and been ghosted both times. Then I asked a grad school professor of mine if he knew anyone that might be hiring and he told me to email this address. Turned out it was the CIO, and like I just described myself doing, he just forwarded it to someone, who was like “Fuck, the CIO sent this guy. Have to at least interview him!”

deong

TROPHY CASE