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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • If you go that route, and assuming you’re in the US, I’d recommend looking for a government civilian job rather than a contractor position. The pay will be slightly lower, but you’ll have pretty steady pay increases year-to-year, the benefits will almost certainly be better, and you’ll have better job security.

    The major downside will be that you’ll likely wind up working for/with a bunch of people who are just trying to keep their heads down and coast until retirement. A major upside will be that you’ll almost certainly be able to retire comfortably.


  • I would say the potential for misuse, while definitely present, is outweighed by the potential benefits.

    A creep watching you from their basement is less likely to act on their dangerous impulses.

    An overcrowded bar, poses a lot of risks in itself and the ability to determine how crowded the bar is without having to be physically present can mitigate your exposure to those risks.

    In a crowded bar you have a higher risk of being drugged or assaulted because security and staff will likely be distracted or simply unable to notice and intervene. Also, in the event of an emergency that requires you to be able exit quickly, such as a fire or earthquake not only will it be much more difficult to leave it’s also more likely that people will panic and exasperate the problem.

    Is a camera with a public live feed the best way to achieve that? No, probably not. But it’s simple, cheap, and gets the job done.

    A bar is also a public venue. In a public place you have absolutely no reasonable expectation of privacy. So, while in most circumstances it’s unreasonable to expect that you’re being recorded, it’s equally unreasonable to expect that you’re not.





  • The candy crush thing, or more generally the fact that since Windows 8 they preload third-party applications, is a relatively speaking small problem. However, the fact the specific applications that get preinstalled are based on a targeted advertising profile for the user signed into the PC, assuming you sign in with a Microsoft account is a bigger problem. While I’m sure they take every possible effort to make those profiles anonymous the data in aggregate is impossible to anonymize. There is a setting in Windows to disable that data collection, at least for advertising purposes, but it gets toggled back on “accidentally” after some updates.

    They also have a number of features, like copilot (the chat bot), previously they had Cortana, that do similar kinds of data extraction. Mostly, in order to actually process the user request, but also to be used to train the model. They store it in an anonymized form, but again, it’s impossible to actually do that in practice.

    That’s just two things that are installed and enabled by default that: collect user data for, what I and many others find to be unwanted purposes, don’t give the user the option to disable that data collection (only limit it), and seemingly doesn’t even consistently respect the users choice in that matter. That is by definition spyware.

    They also place advertising on the desktop for things like OneDrive subscriptions, MS Office, and other paid Microsoft services. Those preinstalled apps I mentioned before are effectively ads for those applications, many of which are paid apps or have paid components to them. That is by definition adware.

    Spyware and adware are forms of malware. Which makes Microsoft a malware vendor.



  • They mention in the post that they have a list of official clients you can choose to donate to.

    So, if there’s a client you use every day and that you love, consider finding it’s author in our list of official clients, and sending them a little something instead (or too).

    It would probably be helpful if they included a link to that list in the post, though it is just one click from the projects homepage, and made it clearer that the list does include at least some subset of third-party clients. Though it would also be reasonable to infer that from the quote.


  • Something I only saw mentioned in a somewhat snarky comment in this thread (apologies if I missed it elsewhere) is that Windows has the option to do a full system image backup.

    If you have an external hdd or a nas, from the Windows Backup applet in control panel (not settings) you can create a system image that will contain a full backup of your C: drive and, optionally other drives in your system. You can then restore that backup from the recovery options in your windows install media.

    For the windows install media, I’d recommend using the windows media creation tool to create a usb installer on a separate usb key from your Linux installer and then setting it aside just in case. Trying to create windows install media from within Linux is, while not impossible, difficult.

    Obviously, you should do all of this before committing to installing Linux to disk. Most Linux install media also functions as a live Linux environment from which you can try things out and see if things will work for you.







  • This is some good advice. I’d add two caveats though: - For learning the distro’s package manager, while I’d say it’s definitely good to learn it (and do so early on), I’d also say beginners should probably stay away from the command line version of it unless it’s absolutely needed. - For running commands from random websites rather than a blanket prohibition, I’d say don’t do it unless you can confidently say you understand what the command will do and are willing to take the risk that you’re wrong.






  • Bookworm, Trixie, and Sid all currently support a total of 10 different architectures.

    And looking through the Wikipedia article for Debian’s version history, most of the dropped architectures were functionally obsolete when they were dropped, or like the Motorola 68000, when support was added. (notable exceptions being IA-64 which was dropped 4 years before intel discontinued it, SPARC which is still supported by Oracle, and PowerPC.)