I’ve read recounts of dreams like this before (or perhaps it was iterations of yourself telling it in each case).

And there is the famous Reddit story about the guy to saw the glitching lamp that is very similar.

I too have had this experience myself. When I was around 20, I had a dream where I packed up my stuff and got in my car and moved from my hometown to the nearby larger city. I was living out of my car or staying with friends initially, but after a few months I found a job and started renting my own place. While working part time I started studying for a qualification at the technical college. At that college I met an amazing girl and we started dating. A few months later she moved into my place. I saved enough money to buy a better car, and I sold my old car. I would go driving on the weekends along scenic rural roads. My girlfriend and I got engaged. I got a new job, but it meant we had to move to a different city where we didn’t know anyone. We got married, we had two children (a boy and a girl). My wife disappeared one day, without a trace. Nobody ever worked out what happened to her. Just vanished. So I was raising my children as a single parent. We went on a trip back to my hometown to visit my parents. I went into my old room, layed on my old bed and went to sleep. That night I had a dream where I really needed to pee, but couldn’t find a toilet. I know how those dreams sometimes end, so I forced myself to wake up, I ran to the bathroom and used the toilet. When I got back to bed I felt weirdly empty. My memories of my kids, of my wife, my job, were fading fast. I couldn’t remember their faces. I couldn’t remember where I work. It was like a dream. And then I realised it actually was all a dream. I’d lived around 6 years of my life in the dream, but in reality it was just a couple of hours sleep.

For the next week I was trying to disentangle memories of my life that were real from those from the dream. It hasn’t had any lasting effects on me. I don’t remember much of it anymore, only the parts I recounted above.

+1 for XPipe. This is pretty much exactly what OP is asking for. It also does SSH tunneling, SSH reverse-tunneling, manages connections into containers, and many other things.

Thanks for the reminder, I always forget about this feature, I should use it more.

The term Display Manager is a vestige of the use of X11.

X11 is a Server/Client protocol.

When a user logs in to an XServer, they are given an Xsession. The user can use that Xsession to create one or more X11 Displays (they are just IDs). The X11 Display ID is passed to the X11 client application (that’s what the XDISPLAY environment variable is for). The client apps render their content to that Display ID. This whole thing allows for more than one user to be able to use a single operating system on a single XServer at the same time.

All of that is pretty cumbersome for a user to do themselves in their terminal, that’s what Display Managers are for. They:

• Start the XServer if it isn’t started yet
• Provide a method (eg, login with username and password), to start a new XSession.
• Use that XSession to create an empty X11 Display.
• Look up which is your configured default DE or WM
• Launch the DE or WM with the right parameters, passing it the new XSession and XDisplay

If you’re using Wayland, then the architecture is very different. The Display Manager then simply operates as a login screen.

This is simply a symptom of not being experienced in or knowledgeable in the topic of the conversation.

Not being knowledgeable, or not being smart, is unrelated to IQ. Knowing a great deal about a topic or field is not the same as having a high IQ.

Oh dang, last year I left a job I was in for 8 years, where I was writing software for scientists and researchers (or attempting to). You do spend a lot more time in meetings discussing your software than you do actually writing code. And those projects have the bad habit of being cancelled three quarters the way through, because funding gets pulled, or the researcher just leaves, or quite often they find an off-the-shelf software product that is a better solution.

I suppose the same can be said for authors.

You could be an author who writes epic fantasy novels. Or an author who writes high school text books. Or an author who submits science journal articles. Or an author who writes video game walkthroughs.

See, at my job it’s the other way around. I am responsible for:

• Solution architecture
• Cloud architecture development
• Cloud infrastructure design and implementation
• Data model specification
• Database schema design
• Database administration
• Data cleaning and data review
• ETL
• Server administration
• Web framework developer
• Frontend developer
• Backend API developer
• Mobile app developer
• Documentation author
• Troubleshooting
• Maintenance

Also I have involvement in: Stakeholder engagement, user education and training, project management.

I do the work equivalent of around 3 full-time engineers. So to keep it simple, we call my position just “senior software engineer”. I like your idea of disambiguation to better communicate exactly what you do, but I don’t know what you’d call me.

I’ve been using the tree-style-tabs plugin for the last 4 years, because I like vertical tabs, and nesting it provides.

But now that Firefox actually finally has proper vertical tabs, and tab groups, I can move away from tree-style-tabs (I don’t use any of its other features).

Same. All my life I didn’t like being around kids, being in places with lots of children, being with nieces, nephews etc. I found them loud and unpredictable, like belligerent little drunks with attention seeking problems.

But then I got married, and we had kids, and I suddenly don’t mind anymore. Probably an evolutionary adaptation. But there are still certain kids I can’t tollerate, but that’s more likely the parents fault, not the kids fault.

This is a good one. I’m keeping it to use for others, thanks.

These are some rules of mindset I’ve given to others in the past when trying linux-based operating systems.

1. Don’t try to apply the same computing and productivity patterns you’ve learned from Windows. Don’t try to force Windows concepts onto Linux OS, you will confuse yourself and get frustrated.
2. If something doesn’t work the way you expect it to, doesn’t mean it’s broken.
3. Just because something doesn’t behave the same as in Windows, doesn’t mean it’s worse. It’s probably designed that way for a good reason.
4. If your daily work routine or gaming life revolves around the use programs developed specifically for the Windows platform, you’re gonna need to invest time and effort to try to recreate that in Linux. It may not even be possible to fully replicate it. And that’s not the fault of Linux, it’s not designed to be a drop-in Windows replacement.
5. Everyone has their own taste and preferences. Just like some people prefer driving a manual car and some prefer auto. If you try Linux and hate it, that’s okay, that doesn’t make you bad or wrong, but keep in mind that those who do prefer Linux are not weird or daft or wrong either.

Yeah, I remember reading this last year.

I did Gentoo from stage 1 too back in the day, it’s was a valuable learning experience for me, and those skills helped me to fix things when they went wrong down the track.

Prominent open source projects you’re involved with or have contributed to.

Bro, people normally don’t comment in the form of a regular expression.

Yep, not bricked. Just frozen.

There are two forms of bricked:

1. hard bricked. This is when a software change (eg, installing a custom firmware) caused the system to fail to boot, and there is no possible way to ever get it to run again.
2. soft bricked. Where a software change caused the failure to boot but there is a way (eg, reflashing using UART) to recover back to an older version that does boot.

Both are terms from the Phone modding community (ie, a phone has become as useful as a brick after this update) it’s quite hard to actually brick a modern PC.

If you take the plunge and switch to systemd-boot it’s worth it. It’s the only boot manager I’ve tried in the last decade that feels like an upgrade from GRUB.

In my early 20s I had a part-time job as a pizza delivery driver. When there were no deliveries, I would answer phones or take orders at the counter. One day one of the touchscreen monitors at the counter stopped working. It was just black all the time. So we were told not to use it.

A few days later I was on lunch shift and bored, I was trying random things to see if I could fix the monitor. Switched the inputs, switched to a different VGA cable, etc. At one point I discovered the touch panel was still working, I could interact with the OS, even though nothing was displaying. I was pressing around different areas of the screen and I accidentally found that pressing right in the centre of the screen caused the display to re-appear! It would disappear again after a few seconds. Press that spot again, it came back. I was fascinated by this, I showed some coworkers, they didn’t care.

Over the course of the day it was getting harder to make the display re-appear. It gradually needed to be pressed quite forcefully to come back. I started using my knuckles to knock sharply on the spot, and that was working.

When my manager arrived for the night shift, I was excited to show him my discovery. I said “hey man, I kinda fixed this monitor, watch this!” And I enthusiastically knocked hard on the centre of the screen with my first. The LCD lit up and showed the display, but at the same time shattered in a rainbow ring the shape of my fist.

The look on my manager’s face was of awe and horror. I was trying to explain what I had meant to do, but I realised what it must’ve looked like to him. “Hey man, watch me fix this monitor!” Before smashing the screen with a swift punch. It wasn’t possible to explain it a way that didn’t sound crazy.

In the end I convinced him that the monitor was faulty anyway, and we were going to replace it anyway, so my accident breaking it more is not a big deal.

I love it when the phlebotomist tells me I have nice veins. Makes me feel proud, and I like that it makes their life easier.