I’m right there with you. Never stop flying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv1a-OrikdM

Not sure if directly relevant, but there’s been a rush of really good PC games lately after a long dry spell.

I do, too, and drove one for many years. I’ll be the one to splash cold water on the conversation, though.

Driving a stick arguably requires the use of both hands and legs, which is great and partly the reason why so many enjoy it - that sense of engagement. It’s far less boring.

But here’s the deal. Injure any one of those appendages and driving a manual becomes a whole lot less fun. In some cases, you can get by, but it’s less than ideal. Having your arm closest to the shift in a sling, for example, makes your vehicle undrivable.

It won’t matter to most people… right up until the moment it does.

Or even better, btop

Only community I truly care about that hasn’t budged is the Neovim subreddit still going strong without a care in the world. Everyone’s still highly motivated and active there, so it’s really the only place to go where I can keep up the the community’s momentum.

Honestly? This hole in the wall food store in my home town managed to pick up a pretty early release of the arcade game Robotron. I was instantly enthralled, visiting arcades any time I could. From there, I played on friends’ Atari 2600s and Commodores until I managed to get my own C64, and I’ve never stopped since. From there, I migrated through their products and stayed a diehard fan till the mid-90’s - C128, Amiga 1000, Amiga 500, and Amiga 2000.

I played a few early x86 games on demo machines in stores, but I didn’t finally relent and build my own x86 rig until the release of the Descent 1 demo, which single-handedly destroyed all of my remaining resolve. I already considered myself a pretty consistent gamer, but that was the nail in the coffin. The rest, as they say, is history. It was only 4 years later that EverQuest came out, too, and that swallowed me whole.

Secret sauce: it’s much easier to get an employer on board with buying you a Thinkpad as part of a bulk order than it is to get them to spring for any of these more obscure models as a one-off.

I’ve used vim with a smattering of essential plugins for years to do this, and only this year moved to Neovim for the same.

It’s not Open Source, but I’ve also taken a hefty liking to Obsidian’s canvas mode. Likewise, I share a small selection of lists with my other half via Google Keep.

I’m no scholar, but I’m certainly a regular consumer of Japanese culture and content as much as the next nerd. This sentiment by China and Korea makes me wonder whether there’s any remaining vestiges of Japanese culture and mindset that are actually worthy of their concern, or if their bias is 100% rooted in historical events.

Legit. Piracy related to home PC software has been around since the advent of home PCs. Before the concept of LANfests or LAN parties even existed, there were copy parties. I still have vivid memories of 8+ 1541 drives daisy-chained to a single C64. University servers hosting warez… Usenet… there’s likely earlier examples I’m not aware of.

Before that, people were hacking phone systems in order to call long distance for free. This ain’t nothin new.

Not something I’ve indulged in for 30+ years, though. I pay for everything, now. Guilty conscience, I suppose. 😁

Only reason I’m holding on to my Windows partition at this point is for rare scenarios like needing to reprogram my VKB stick, which only has a Windows executable. Other than that, I’ve not fired it up in months. And I’m a pretty rabid gamer.

It’s taken a long damn time to get here.

Syslog (rsyslod) is usually the standard answer for the average sysadmin, but it depends a lot on your needs. A lot of newer loggers output as pure JSON, which offer benefits to readability and more approachable search logic/filters/queries (I’m so tired of regex).

When you start venturing down the road of finding the right way to store and forward the output of logging drivers from Docker containers, as one example, rsyslod starts to feel dated.

The easy answers if you want to throw money at the problem are solutions like Splunk, Datadog, or New Relic. If you don’t want to (and most people wouldn’t), then alternatives certainly exist, but some of them are just as heavy on system resources. Greylog has relative feature parity with Splunk Enterprise, but consumes just as much compute and storage if not more, and I found it to be a much larger pain in the butt to administer and keep running.

The likeliest answer to this problem is Grafana Loki, just based on what I’ve read of its capabilities, but I haven’t had a chance to circle back and test it out. Someone here who has might be able to weigh in and speak to its strengths/weaknesses.

This has been on my radar for a while, and I keep putting it off. How are you liking it?

Grafana’s Loki sounded incredibly useful and performant, with the added benefit of reducing storage requirements significantly under some situations.

The logical fallacy here being that, based on that context alone, you should care because you will have something to hide in the future. Saying you have nothing to hide is always used in the context of one’s sense of guilt, or lack thereof, based on past actions. A counterargument would then be to ask why you should be allowed to hide your future wrongs.

For many, the subject has nothing to do with that. It’s about not wanting to be monetized without consent. There’s also benefits in the form of protection against identity theft or social engineering. For others, the simple right to fundamental personal privacy itself is important - it’s about not having all of one’s life’s details on public display.

Also known as “none of your goddamn business.”

As a tangent, because it’s now stuck in my head and needs expression - the more thought you give to the problems introduced by technology that blur or step over this line, the more you realize how much harder it’s becoming to prevent outcomes where privacy is lost.

Only engaging AI under tightly controlled circumstances is one thing; having it in the background perceiving everything you say and do on your desktop is a very different conversation. No matter what assurances are given that your privacy is protected, almost every situation like it that’s arisen since the advent of personal computers has resulted in a loss of control through duplicity, intrusion, sabotage, bad design, or floundering integrity.

It warmed my nerd heart that the first thing I spotted in the mpvpaper repo was an animated Steins Gate background.

I feel this. The most disgusting thing I’ve ever had to do was clean my chain-smoking parents’ house after their passing so we could put it up for sale. I can vividly imagine what the inside of a smoker’s PC must look like, just based on that experience.

Minimal issues here. Set up Arch, install nVidia, add build hooks before next kernel update, carry on.

This is the most insidious conundrum related to AI usage. At the end of the day, a LLM’s top priority is to ensure that your question is answered in a way that satisfies that model. The accuracy of its answers are a secondary concern. If forced to choose between making up BS so it can have a response that looks right versus admitting it doesn’t have enough information to answer, it can and often will choose the former. Thus the “hallucination” problem was born.

The chance of getting your answer lightly sprinkled with made up stuff is disturbingly high. This transfers the cognitive load of the AI user from “what is the answer” to “I must repeatedly go verify everything in this answer because I can’t trust it”.

Not an insurmountable obstacle, and they will likely solve it sooner rather than later, but AI right now is arguably the perfect extension of the modern internet - take absolutely everything you read with at least a grain of salt… and keep a pile of salt cubes close by.

Me, either.

Well, KaliDOS instead of Xbox, but still…

I suspect there’s some variance between distros that would alter your opinion slightly, but I can also still appreciate the before-systemd days where some Linux versions kept the important bits in a single rc file. Your preference is understandable.