rozodru

I use the dendritic approach for my NixOS configuration. put everything in individual modules. then I go back and further cut up those modules to be even more specific. It’s gotten so bad I even have modules for almost every individual WM/DE to just turn them on and off within the flake. They’re just so fun to build. it’s addictive. I need help.

man as a NixOS user i’m too busy perfecting my configuration to care about what other users are doing.

It. Is. Never. Perfect.

DOOM Emacs ruined me. I love it.

The thing with us Millennials is we had to learn like multiple generations worth of stuff and then proceed to not only teach the older generation what we learned but also the younger generations. So naturally there are gaps.

It didn’t include us because we taught ourselves a lot of things because we had to, there was no one teaching us these things. We went from living in the early 80s and having dial up phones, tvs with maybe 3 channels, and for the vast majority of us no access to a computer. then suddenly we transition to cable tv, computers, cell phones, the internet, how to use the internet, how to build websites for the internet, how to communicate with others on the internet, online gaming, smart phones, how to use smart phones, high speed internet, CRT tvs to Plasma to HD, Beta to VHS to Laser discs to DVDs to bluray. having access to very little information to suddenly having access to all the information.

We had to learn how to use ALL this stuff and then teach Gen X and older how to use it followed up by Gen Z and younger. and that’s just the technology. that’s not including all the massive changes to society that happened during our formative years.

The younger generations don’t have any of these massive leaps because it’s all kind of stagnated or regressed. They’re not “forced” to learn anything new to use it or navigate it because we already did that for them. Gen Z doesn’t have to create content like we did, it’s all provided for them and most of it is of poor quality. Our content creation consisted of building our own websites, PHP forums, IRC rooms, building our own social networks, chatrooms, games, etc. They don’t have to do this.

And as far as education it’s the same deal. Remember we were told that we had to learn all this math because we’d never be able to “carry around a calculator with us at all times”. or we had to learn cursive because “that’s how everyone writes”. or that we MUST go to college because THAT’S the only way to get a job. Again because of the technology we built Gen Z and younger doesn’t need any of that, they don’t need to learn it and they’re not learning it.

At the end of the day we thought we’d be making their lives easier with what we HAD to learn but in turn, we’ve made their lives harder because we didn’t tell them WHY we had to learn it. we just handed it all to them and said “good luck.”

For stuff like the SNES it wasn’t a big deal. just open the console. cut out the plastic peg and you’re playing Japanese SNES games. a grade school friend of mine at the time showed me this. His Dad travelled to Japan for business all the time and would bring back SNES games for him. His dad tried playing the games in the US SNES but noticed that the games wouldn’t slide in correctly. then he saw that on US SNES cartridges there was a notch in all the cartridge cases while the Japanese cartridges didn’t have this notch. Looked inside the console and sure enough there’s a plastic peg sticking out that lined up with the US cartridges. so he figured “what if I remove the peg?” sure enough once the peg was cut out the US SNES could play Japanese SNES games. That was Nintendos region lock prevention, a plastic peg.

For the PS1 a local comic shop was selling chips for it. bought a chip, my dad took the PS1 and chip into work with him one day and got his buddy to solder it in for me. worked like a charm.

For the PS2 I just ended up importing a translucent blue PS2 from Japan. it was just easier that way.

For the Dreamcast literally just had to get a boot disc and you were good to go.

I started playing Minecraft last week for the first time ever. I’m 43 years old. It’s fun. it’s a lot of damn fun. I can just do whatever, build whatever, farm, and I don’t have to interact with anyone if I don’t want to. I’m having a blast with it.

For years I just dismissed it as a little kids game and at this point I’m kicking myself for not trying it sooner.

I think the “using it as a diary” claim is just an excuse/her attempt to get out of it. MORE than likely it was a prompt asking Claude the best way to shoot up a sheriffs office.

yup if something went wrong with Windows you might as well just try to fix it based purely on hopes and dreams or pray to whatever god you believed in that there was someone who knew the answer in some random IRC room. the “troubleshooting” crap on the MS website was absolutely worthless. and chances are the site would just timeout on you before you could actually find anything.

I had completely forgotten just how awful microsofts websites were back in the early 00’s. Gates saying the site kept timing out or would go down all time is very much true and happened with everyone. Microsoft’s website would CONSTANTLY time out. downloading ANYTHING via microsoft was an absolute crap shoot if it would actually download or not.

I remember having a computer in the late 90s that only came with Netscape. In order to play games like X-Wing vs Tie Fighter online more easily than direct IP connection to someone you had to use Microsofts Internet Gaming Zone. in order to use that you HAD to have Internet Explorer, it wouldn’t work with Netscape. So you’d have to spend an entire day downloading IE and MOST of the time the download would time out or crash so THEN you had to use a download manager to prevent you from losing progress on the download for when Microsofts site would go down which again, was constantly. updating the OS was even more painful as again Microsofts online service would always go down.

If you think Microsoft is bad now, man it was A LOT worse back in the day for reliability.

i don’t even use menus anymore. it’s slow. heck I even hate using the mouse these days. We had the right idea back in the 80s and early 90s by running everything via the command line. it’s faster. Now to open stuff I just use a launcher. it’s faster to type what I want to run then it is to use a mouse to go find it in a menu.

building a browser from scratch is just an insanely difficult task to begin with. Building a browser from scratch tailored to each specific platform instead of doing something like QT is just idiotic. There’s a very good reason why the majority of todays browsers are forks of Chromium or Firefox and why very few are their own from scratch. Building a web browser is probably one of, if not the most, complicated bits of software to build other than building an OS from scratch.

I’m not a fan of Kagi, I can’t justify paying for a search engine especially after honestly trying it and getting mediocre search results. I was optimistic about Orion but after following the development for awhile I knew it wasn’t going to pan out. they spread themselves too thin on that project and it sows further doubt for Kagi overall.

I’ve also been trying to find more physical media lately. I’ve also recently gotten into “retro tech” for computers and other things. I’ve seen a huge uptick in that lately. It’s fun to go back to PCs I used to use in the 90s and early 00s and get them working again. and in most cases, all the parts and stuff still work just fine. I’ve started going to shows and small conventions for retro computer stuff and seeing what other people are working on and restoring is awesome. Seeing people getting old 30+ year old computers working with modern-ish Linux is really cool.

I just finished a project rebuilding a PC with parts from around '97 and '98 that is currently running Windows 98. thing booted on the first go after everything was put together. zero issues. Also because of this stuff I’ve learned to fix motherboards and finally, after decades of promising myself to learn how, I’ve learned how to solder. that stuff is fun. repairing motherboards and other various boards, switching out chips and capacitors, its REALLY fun.

only “big” release I can think of for the PC is WoW Forever.

this has been happening since…well…forever and it hasn’t radicalized the population yet. Unfortunately this won’t do it either. us peons are kept in our place by design. there are so many institutions, policies, rules, etc stacked against us to prevent us from radicalizing and rioting and placing the 1% head’s on pikes. I could stand on street corner with a megaphone yelling that we need to kill the rich, we the people need to take back what’s ours, and try to rally people to my cause but we all know I’d be viewed as a crazy person and/or arrested. Potential leaders to lead a radicalized people are promptly put down.

Serfdom never went away. it was repackaged.

from a sys admins perspective it’s painfully easy to deploy across hundreds of machines. NixOS is declaritive and immutable. you can take one system configuration of NixOS and throw the same config on as many machines as you want. packages, dotfiles, whatever are all replicated the exact same way on each machine. You can lock all the packages/apps, configs, kernels, etc to a specific version therefore a sysadmin may only need to upgrade the lot once a year. if a user some how breaks their system it’s as easy a fix as rolling back to the previous generation with a single menu option.

So basically say you have your computer and you want to replicate your exact setup to hundreds of other computers. with NixOS it’s as simple as setting up a git repo for your nixos config, pushing to it, installing nixos on every other computer then cloning your repo to all the machines and rebuilding. done. now you have hundreds of other computers that all behave and work the same way your computer does.

If something needs updating or a fix needs to be rolled out all a sysadmin has to do is fix it on one machine, push the change, pull it for every other machine and rebuild. done.

I assumed the same as you when I tried out the BSDs. I went with FreeBSD first because I assumed that was the better supported one. Wifi was absolutely horrible on it. connection would constantly drop, or was slow, etc. on OpenBSD i haven’t had those issues. Also had a lot of issues setting up a VM on FreeBSD and getting certain USB devices to work correctly. neither of those issues on OpenBSD.

I daily drive OpenBSD. I found it easier to set up than NetBSD which apparently is ass backwards as open is supposed to be harder. for the life of me I just couldn’t wrap my head around getting the amdgpu drivers working on NetBSD.

I also found OpenBSD slightly better supported for various hardware than FreeBSD. Wifi works better on it, these old ass logitech headphones I have work flawlessly on OpenBSD when on FreeBSD they just didn’t work at all and gave off horrible feedback or I couldn’t turn the mic off. Also found setting up a Debian VM much easier on OpenBSD than FreeBSD (still a chore though)

Also OpenBSD for whatever reason probably has the most solid and decently sized gaming community than the other ones.

It’s a great OS that just stays out of your way. really fun to tinker with. Just don’t expect to do EVERYTHING on it. for surfing, certain dev work, etc it’s great.

honestly just installing Gentoo is a great way to learn various aspects of linux. It’s a process, a lengthy one, but if you manage to install it successfully you can pretty much install any distro or BSD with absolute ease and not even think about it.

reminds me when I built a star wars themed website in the mid to late 90s on Geocities and I wanted a forum but I didn’t know how to make a php forum (nor had I anywhere to host it) so I found this defunct Star Wars forum and kinda just hijacked it and linked to it from my site and made threads on there.

Kids are smart. they’ll find a work around for just about anything. Age verification doesn’t work except when it comes to the companies that thirst for the data it provides.

you completely missed the point. it was an example of how quickly things have changed for us and the fact we have to teach the older generations these things and we also have to teach the younger one the same things too. Most previous generations had to simply teach the younger. We on the other hand had to teach multiple generations. Thus, we’re tired.