And a lot of people would call that incapable.

This is a form of learned, or rather forced to internalize, helplessness. People don’t even want to understand things, even though they absolutely could and ought.

Why, though?

A french press is literally the easiest way to make coffee. There’s hardly anything to fuck up and it’s dirt cheap - like 10€ at Ikea.

I think you don’t distinguish enough between professionals and capables.

All your points are either “sysadmin” or “complete buffoon” and nothing in between. That’s not how reality works.

You absolutely are expected to be able to check your oil and just a few years ago, you were expected to be able to change your tires. That doesn’t make you a car mechanic, but a capable user.

I’m absolutely not a car guy, but I know how to change a tire. Why? Because it’s necessary knowledge. I also know how to file my taxes, even though I’m not an accountant or tax consultant. Again, because it’s necessary.

The sentiment should rather be, that the system maintains itself. And that’s actually something I would get behind.

Tinkering around is cool, but I’m in my 30s and when my girlfriend’s build pipeline finishes, I’ll be a father, I can’t spend 4h every week fixing stuff, I need a reliable platform to work on. Currently that is indeed a mix of Debian and Nix for me.

At least the normal update process should work completely transparently for the user.

Not a sysadmin, but a capable user.

People shouldn’t just accept technology as magic. They should understand at least the basic principles of the technology around them. Corporations want us to be dumb and incapable. Look at cars, you seriously can’t expect a normal person to fix anything on them. But that’s not because of inherent complexity, but because corporations want us to just buy new parts when they think it’s time.

Sapere aude was true in the 19th century and it’s true today as well.

I use Karch, btw.

Usually ~/devel/

On my work laptop I have separate subdirs for each project and basically try to mirror the Gitlab group/project structure because some fucktards like to split every project into 20 repos.

Though, technically not anyone can access every piece, so I guess we could dismiss it as a thing of the past.

That’s how words work, yes.

The threat of public information for most people is not a data broker, but their neighbor. And unless you have a particularly psychopathic neighbor, they can’t realistically access data from a data broker.

It’s threat modeling like every cyber security. My phone’s password protects me from a random thief, but if a state actor really wants my data, they will get it, but the chances of them even trying are very low for me personally.

Exactly. But mods here are too butthurt to accept that and rather delete my comments, so they can live in their delusions - which was my point

As I wrote: sanctions. That’s what compliance means.

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

That’s not “readily available”, and it’s certainly not given voluntarily by users, it’s often straight up illegal. That’s a very different case.

Isn’t that pretty much a thing of the past? This meme is maybe true for Facebook, but most sub 40 people don’t use that anyway and the “public diary” days are also pretty over. Sure, you can stitch together a lot from geolocating Instagram posts and LinkedIn information, but it’s not like it’s the searchable database Facebook was in 2012.

That would be a way to get rid of German comments, sure. But it’s also another layer of hassle. Usually, the comments are just a few lines to explain weird behavior.

The naming problem is nearly unsolvable, though. Unless you want to map every concept to a random string, but that’s not feasible either.

That depends, actually.

In general, I try to keep everything English, since we do have some international colleagues.

However, I work with a bunch of projects that have some legal/administrative background and certain words have very precisely defined meanings, that can’t be easily translated (at least not in one word, so that the next guy can back-translate the word). So in these cases, I sometimes write comments that explain the domain problem in German, because it’s much much easier and whoever touches that code better understand the German terms or screw everything up. Unfortunately class and method names are often a weird language mix.

It’s not a perfect solution, but given the legal complexities behind seemingly simple words, it’s the best of the worst.

I’ve done the horrible deed of updating Debian, for example.

Distros like Arch get a pass, but Debian screwed me over several times. For example a few years ago, some driver decided to make itself clinge onto old kernel versions. So the boot partition got full and left me in a weird start where I had to manually remove old kernels and track down the driver at fault.

Recoverable, but annoying, and on a system I use for work it would be really really expensive.

Fedora used to nuke itself sometimes if you upgraded an install from version n to n+1, n+2, … Like a config not being migrated properly, a package conflict because of renamed packages and versions, yada yada yada.

If you didn’t experience that, you either were very lucky, only used enterprise distros, or simply reinstalled often enough for it not to be an issue.

2 days per frame.

That’s a question a hacker shouldn’t ever ask.

I mean, what is his point? We should have worse software because then the devs are volunteers?

Is Linux now supposed to work like early Olympics?