It does predate them. They didn’t invent it, and I never said they did. I said their actions are the reason the US reveres wealth today, as in it’s the most contemporary set of events that have reinvigorated that well-practiced strategy.

If you’re looking for specific historical knowledge, as in citations, here you go:

https://history.princeton.edu/about/publications/one-nation-under-god-how-corporate-america-invented-christian-america

https://youtu.be/LvmwGwnJf7c?t=598

Great, congrats. You are today’s biggest pedant. Here’s your prize.

I’ve never tried this myself, but 3-in-1 is a naptha-based oil mixture. I wonder if a valve oil for brass instruments would work. It’s usually thin, is petroleum based, and often has anti-corrosive compounds.

Another option could be common mineral oil.

And a final thought, if your tools are in a box, camphor tablets are supposed to be able to protect tools by interacting with the oxygen and depositing a protective layer as it sublimates.

I don’t know which of these are specifically Canadian, but you should be able to find non-American options.

The blockchain thing feels really icky to me, so while I’ll keep SimpleX as a plan C, my plan B is Meshtastic or Meshcore.

Why you should not use a platform owned by billionaires who are sympathetic to the government.

Emacs can do everything.

Sure, but why it exists today in the US is a direct result of the robber barons’ influence in the early 1900s. The core idea isn’t new, but this instance is.

It’s in my plan to switch, actually. The only reason I haven’t is because I need to make sure I know how to use certain Pipewire inputs with the window manager. I’ve seen that it does work, but I need to know how to do it myself before I make the switch.

Smithay, yes

I know you don’t necessarily mean it this way, but there’s a very interesting (and infuriating) history to why the US reveres the wealthy. The short version is that the ultra wealthy were pissed about the New Deal, so they used fundamentalist Christianity to tie the idea of wealth to holy favor from Yahweh.

We will have to overcome that idea if we hope to gain real class consciousness.

It tracks your devices, and it’s proprietary software. Furthermore, from what I understand about the PC software, it runs at the kernel level (ring 0). I don’t believe it can do that with an Android or iPhone app, though.

Either way, if being tracked on a whim is within your threat model, you should assume this is spying on you. Most modern phones already have some kind of “Find My Device” tracking, so this seems like you’re just adding an extra pair of eyes.

On the other hand, if the newbie wants figure out how things work, starting with an atomic distribution doesn’t really sound like the easiest starting point. Is it though? Could be mistaken.

This is where I would agree with you, except to clarify and say, “It depends.” There’s plenty to figure out, and there’s a lot you can learn about when it comes to understanding what layer(s) a piece of software runs in. A driven newbie could find it rewarding to figure out this new paradigm. I once read a post from someone who installed Aurora on a grandparent’s laptop, and the grandparent ran with it and learned how to use everything themselves. It’s good to know who the end user is.

It also highlights some of the pitfalls and old practices of relying upon sudo without good reason. Lots of software only needs to run in local userspace, for example, and devs should really take into consideration what permissions they actually need, rather than choosing what’s easiest and expedient.

And then there’s rpm-ostree thing. I really need to read more about that, but that sounds like yet another layer in an already very tall cake.

It’s not so much another layer but dividing the existing cake into very distinct layers. You have an immutable system layer, you have an app layer for apps that you apply with rpm-ostree, and you have the user layer where your Distroboxes and Flatpaks live.

The benefit of this structure is that you can swap out the system layer at will. In theory, you could swap from a Gnome-based system to a Niri-based one, and rather than keeping all the Gnome apps and settings, you now just have the Niri ones. This ability to swap out the system layer makes it so system updates are much safer and less prone to conflicts, and they’re much more scalable for large deployments.

But do read more about it. There’s pros and cons to it, and then you can really get into the weeds with bootc…

Do I think a newbie needs to know this stuff from the get go? Probably not. I think that particularly since atomic distros have been around for several years now, the Flatpak ecosystem has grown quite a bit. There’s a lot already there that will work for most people. There’s a possibility they would need to layer something within their first year (I needed Java, for example), but it’s not likely they’d need it often if at all.

If they can’t help but tinker or theme, though, I would steer them away from atomic distros entirely. As interesting as they are, they’re geared towards duplicability, not bespoke modifications. My daily desktop driver is CachyOS, and I tinker with that, but the laptop with Bazzite is one I need to have maximum uptime.

I dunno. There’s probably plenty of examples where companies soldered RAM instead of installing SODIMM slots, even when they had space. I agree that it makes sense, but sense isn’t always a factor when a company starts crunching the production cost numbers.

Cool, I tried to find the info, but obviously didn’t find that detail. It makes sense, all things considered

Ideally, you don’t. You can layer packages with rpm-ostree, but that’s typically something you want to do very intentionally and sparingly, not as a first resort for installing packages.

Instead, everything is typically installed in userspace via Flatpak/AppImage or using the distrobox command to create podman containers (where you can install software using its package manager, depending on what base distro you chose for it).

When you update, you are replacing the current system image with a new one, so if there’s a problem with the new system, you can just rpm-ostree rollback to the previous one.

Let me know if you have other questions. I run Bazzite on a laptop daily.

Is it upgradeable? I assumed it would be soldered in.

Maybe we’ll see, “Some soldering required,” instead 😂

I have the first generation, and once I learned how to properly use it and set up the pads and gyro, it quickly became one of my favorite controllers of all time.

I hope this next one will be even better.

which I could have played many more hours, just because I didn’t have the patience to get past a level/battle/boss, whatever

I appreciate your feelings, but I need to point out that you don’t actually know that you would have continued playing that game. Let’s say you had this tool to help you clear a boss (and we’re being very generous in assuming it can). Most games ramp up in difficulty, and many bosses or hurdles act as skill checks. What do you suppose would happen when you got to the next difficult spot? It almost certainly wouldn’t be easier than before.

I get that there’s difficult games out there that are hard for the sake of being hard (Fromsoft has some of the most egregious examples), but that might just be a sign that those games aren’t actually your cup of tea, and that’s okay, even if it’s from a flaw in the game design. If you’re not having fun with a game anymore, you should give yourself permission to walk away.

If you drop a game for any reason, you are never required to pick it back up, and this idea that we all need to “work through our backlog” is making what’s supposed to be a fun hobby into a chore.

Wake me when they make the contemporary analog to the Apple 2e. Otherwise, this just sounds like a bunch of giant corporations that continue peacocking around in an effort to get VC money.

I applaud the scientists, however, who do this kind of stuff for the love of discovery. Good luck to all of them.

I sometimes remember that there’s gamers out there who have disabilities…

And then I remember my friend who has to use a mouth controller to play games, and I’m certain they wouldn’t want this shit anywhere near them. What a demoralizing feeling to have a computer play the game for you. Yuck.