I’m always on unstable. Any time I try to stick to stable, I invariably need something-or-other that’s only on unstable.

To add to the other replies: This is what AI is for. Not to replace labor, but to enhance the ruling class’ ability to exploit labor.

As a convenient side effect: If you use AI to spam people with bug reports, you’re basically DDoSing them… unless they then decide to use AI to help triage the avalanche. And wouldn’t you know it, Google just happens to sell AI to help you solve this problem they made for you!

“Nice FOSS project you got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”

And also also: If FOSS in general turns into a ghost town… where are you gonna turn to get that boilerplate code you need to do a common task? That’s right, AI baby! All roads lead to boiling the Great Lakes so Nvidia can pay itself back.

I see what you’re saying, but the fact that it can be ambiguous is actually what makes it so useful to fascist organizers.

They thrive on phrases that allow them to wink at each other when they want to, but claim innocence if someone calls them out.

I loved my Eee PC so much.

I’ve been watching and hoping for a modern ARM equivalent, but haven’t seen anything quite right so far.

Eh, every distro is trade-offs. There’s not a straightforward “better or worse”.

The worst mistake you could make? Making it hard for you to change your mind later.

So take notes on what you modify, try to keep your data/configs consolidated so you could easily migrate to a new distro, etc.

And ideally have your hardware set up so that you can try booting a new distro without losing your existing setup.

If you’re not deliberately min-maxing the CAP Theorem or doing EDA, there’s no reason to use microservices and every reason not to.

It is not just an implementation detail or a matter of preference. There are fundamental UX implications.

That can be a net positive for users (and developers). But if you’re doing it “just cuz”, you’re gonna have a bad time.

I often want to know the status code of a curl request, but I don’t want that extra information to mess with the response body that it prints to stdout.

What to do?

Render an image instead, of course!

curlcat takes the same params as curl, but it uses iTerm2’s imgcat tool to draw an “HTTP Cat” of the status code.

It even sends the image to stderr instead of stdout, so you can still pipe curlcat to jq or something.

#!/usr/bin/env zsh

stdoutfile=$( mktemp )
curl -sw "\n%{http_code}" $@ > $stdoutfile
exitcode=$?

if [[ $exitcode == 0 ]]; then
  statuscode=$( cat $stdoutfile | tail -1 )

  if [[ ! -f $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode ]]; then
    curl -so $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode https://http.cat/$statuscode
  fi

  imgcat $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode 1>&2
fi

cat $stdoutfile | ghead -n -1

exit $exitcode

Note: This is macOS-specific, as written, but as long as your terminal supports images, you should be able to adapt it just fine.

The process is supposed to be sustainable. That doesn’t mean you can take one activity and do it to the exclusion of all others and have that be sustainable.

Edit:

Also, regretably, I’m using the now-common framing where “agile” === Scrum.

If we wanna get pure about it, the manifesto doesn’t say anything about sprints. (And also, you don’t do agile… you do a process which is agile. It’s a set of criteria to measure a process against, not a process itself.)

And reasonable people can definitely assert that Scrum does not meet all the criteria in the agile manifesto — at least, as Scrum is usually practiced.

It’s funny (or depressing), because the original concept of agile is very well aligned with an open source/inner source philosophy.

The whole premise of a sprint is supposed to be that you move quickly and with purpose for a short period of time, and then you stop and refactor and work on your tools or whatever other “non value-add” stuff tends to be neglected by conventional deliverable-focused processes.

The term “sprint” is supposed to make it clear that it’s not a sustainable 100%-of-the-time every-single-day pace. It’s one mode of many.

Buuuut that’s not how it turned out, is it?

It’s the #1 thing that drives me crazy about Linux.

It seems obvious. You’ve got a Windows/Apple/Super key and a Control key. So you’d think Control would be for control characters and Windows/Apple/Super would be for application things.

I can understand Windows fucking this up, cuz the terminal experience is such a low priority. But Linux?

There’s some projects like Kinto and Toshy which try to fix it, but neither work on NixOS quite yet.

The real question is all the stuff beyond just having the distro installed. The packages, the services, the configs, the application data.

If you leave all that stuff the way it was installed via the old package manager, it may have some bad assumptions baked in and may be incompatible with packages you install with the new package manager.

And if you clear all of it out and reinstall it, have you really gained anything vs. just doing a clean install?

There’s a reason you have a home dir. Just copy that forward along with whatever other config files you might’ve customized.

Btw, if the ability to make drastic changes while still maintaining continuity is an important feature for you, maybe check out NixOS.

upower -d can provide some useful info on-demand. I think there’s a daemon component to it too, which may have variable log levels.

Not really. There are barely any chips out there.

Oct 2021: 200 billion ARM chips

Nov 2023: 1 billion RISC-V chips, hoping to hit 16 billion by 2030

Nov 2024: 300 billion ARM chips

Cool, but… why not just NixOS?

ARM support. Every SoC is a new horror.

Armbian does great work, but if you want another distro you’re gonna have to go on a lil adventure.

Damn, my bad for mentioning a thing that may become relevant if they need new hardware.

I guess I’ll just leave them along with the other comments, which… suggest they’ll probably need new hardware.

It won’t work on Android, but you could probably replace Android or attach a mini PC.

Idk if this helps, but I recently learned Plasma BigScreen is a thing.

Apple’s still doing it.

If it gets any more powerful, it might be able to solve the halting problem.