Recently I joked to less techy friends that in the patch of the internet I most often lurk, there are two “genders”: anarchist, trans, cat girls, and libertarian techbros. This seems similar to the joke that was made about Arch.

I run arch btw. I am neither trans, nor a catgirl, but there is no question about where I belong — I have the programming socks, after all. Besides, anarchist trans catgirls throw the best parties

I remember way back when I was still intimidated by the command line, I was having issues with a video, and the only info I could find was on using ffmpeg to do some conversions directly. I laugh at the memory of me being nonplussed at trying to launch ffmpeg and expecting a GUI to pop up.

I am glad that I spent some time getting to know ffmpeg directly. There’s been a few times where knowing that it was ffmpeg under the hood helped me.

It’s because C sounds like “sea”. It’s a joke that’s more about the sea-faring kind of pirate than the online kind

I would be sad, because I would be unable to see how pretty I look

The constant stream of piracy related utilities that end in “rr” never ceases to amuse me.

Bonus joke! “What’s a pirate’s favourite letter of the alphabet?”

(People often say Arrrrr! here, especially if you seed that context earlier in the conversation)

“You’d think so, but actually it’s C”

The year of the Linux desktop, babeyyyyyy!!!

Fun fact! The Roman emperor Diocletian abdicated the throne after he stabilised the Roman empire after the Crisis of the Third Century. He retired to his villa in what is now Croatia to grow cabbages. This was an unprecedented move — typically an emperor served for the rest of their life and/or were violently overthrown. However, it took only a few years for the peace that Diocletian had established to begin to crumble into civil war again; when his friends and colleagues beseeched him to return to stabilise things, he was reported to have said “If only you knew the peace and tranquility I gain from tending and growing my cabbages, you would understand the impossibility of such a request!”^[1][2]

I sincerely wish Dylan a life of as much peace and tranquility as the MVP ex-emperor Diocletian.

[1]: I don’t remember the source of this particular translation, but the original source for this is Epitome de Caesaribus 39.6

[2]: A different translation of the same line is “If you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor, he definitely wouldn’t dare suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never-satisfied greed.”. I prefer this one, because it makes it sound like he was disproportionately proud of his cabbages rather than just glad to be away from the shitstorm of Roman politics. However, the one I actually used fit the sentiment of my comment better.

n.b. I am not a Historian, just a scientist whose late best friend was a Historian, and thus I am morally obligated to use what he taught me to make shitposts.

Edit: formatting

I appreciate that your title makes it clear that this is an old article. Certainly it’s still relevant, but going into the article with knowledge of its age calibrates my mindset

I’ve not used it, but I’ve heard a lot of good things about Helix

Thank you for the reminder that I’ve been meaning to buy a menstrual cup.

I like that having a controller gives me more versatility in my seating position when gaming. At my desk, I can use either the controller or mouse and keyboard. If I get tired in that position, the long wire on my controller means I can sit elsewhere and play (my desk is positioned such that I can just rotate my monitor and play it from my sofa if I want).

I also enjoy that a controller is more portable than my mouse and keyboard for playing games on my laptop when away from home.

I hadn’t considered this, so thanks for the info

When you get a moment, you could try switching over to the tty again, login to the shell, and then try typing in the command btop (which I think is the Bazzite specific version of the default “top” command, and should be installed by default). Top is basically a task manager, and you can see what programs are running (and taking up resources) right there in the terminal. If your system freezes up, you can often unfreeze it by killing the unresponsive programs. It’s probably useful to familiarise yourself with that interface before you need it.

I didn’t get the joke until I read your explanation, but now I do get it, I think that it’s a very funny joke.

I’ve never had things break after doing updates in Arch. Am I doing something different to most people in the “pacman -Syu” memes, or is the likelihood of breaking stuff overdone as a joke

Echoing Jubilant Jaguar’s sentiment about defaults mattering, I think that sometimes an excess amount of choice can be overwhelming such that a user is less empowered to make choices about things they do care about (Leading to a less steep learning curve). Sensible defaults need not remove anyone’s choice

I was telling a friend about him the other day. She said she found it odd how it seems like he became a martyr for his ideals, in that the way that he is remembered is almost like he’s a mythological figure, more ideal than man. I agreed with her that the loss of humanity due to such a high profile death is tragic, but that it wasn’t the internet who turned him into a martyr, but the FBI (and whoever else was pushing for his prosecution).

They threw the book at Aaron Schwartz because they wanted to set a precedent. They wanted to turn him into a symbol, and that led to his death. I’m proud of how the internet rallied around him and made him into a different kind of symbol, but like you, I feel sad to think about what could have been if he hadn’t been killed (I know that he died by suicide, but saying that he “died” felt too passive). It sucks that he’s just a part of history now.

A huge aspect of this also is that it disproportionately benefits academics and students in parts of the world where there is less institutional access to journal subscriptions. That is to say that SciHub has been a significant force for democratising knowledge and countering historic inequities.

I revived a friend’s old laptop by installing Linux on it, and I told her that using Linux entitled her to a small amount of “nerd creds”. Years later, she told me that it did end up eliciting mild approval from a woman who ended up being her partner for multiple years. The system works!