LLMs are pretty good at reverse dictionary lookup. If I’m struggling to remember a particular word, I can describe the term very loosely and usually get exactly what I’m looking for. Which makes sense, given how they work under the hood.

I’ve also occasionally used them for study assistance, like creating mnemonics. I always hated the old mnemonic I learned in school for the OSI model because it had absolutely nothing to do with computers or communication; it was some arbitrary mnemonic about pizza. Was able to make an entirely new mnemonic actually related to the subject matter which makes it way easier to remember: “Precise Data Navigation Takes Some Planning Ahead”. Pretty handy.

“Existence” by Excision

Short, sweet, and catchy. They did a good job with that one.

Damn, that’s a shame.

I had the privilege to see them live about 8 years ago and it was an incredible show. Dickinson has incredible stage presence; really puts a lot of energy into the show to keep the crowd engaged.

The giant animatronic zombie freaked me out a bit. It was enormous and moved realistically enough to be unsettling since I wasn’t that far away from it. Most metal shit I’ve ever seen in person.

Probably! He was a very smart guy (way more formal education in computer science than I), so I’ve always assumed there was some truth to what he said, but he didn’t elaborate further and I didn’t like bothering him with unnecessary questions, so I never followed up on the topic despite my confusion.

Not a teacher, per se, but the senior dev on my old team once said something that left me scratching my head. We were trying to troubleshoot an inconsistent bug in our software, and I said, “Maybe it’s a race condition,” to which he replied, “There’s no such thing.”

Still trying to figure out what he meant by that.

Agreed. I’ve learned most of what I know about computers by fixing broken stuff. Like you, my first serious daily driver was Manjaro. And after dealing with broken systems time and time again, I’m tired, boss. My daily driver for the last 2 years has been Mint and I love it to death for how stable and functional it is. But the lessons I learned along the way with other distros have been invaluable.

I’m a big fan of this one:

“Somebody that I used to Know” by Linkin Park

I’m sad to see that the original got taken down, but someone reuploaded it here.

Does the device show up if you open Gparted? Maybe it needs to be formatted. Though I guess it’d still show up with ‘lsusb’ even if it needed formatting.

I wanna say fwupd/lvfs manages firmware updates on Arch (and lots of other distros) these days.

You may be able to roll back the latest firmware update with fwupdmgr. What’s the output of fwupdmgr get-devices in your terminal? Also, what is the make/model of the ethernet port that is now on the fritz? You can search for it on the website here: https://fwupd.org/ in the “search for firmware” bar at the top, then you may be able to install the old version with fwupdmgr.

I’m not familiar with EndeavourOS, but I’ll ask a few questions to get the troubleshooting process started:

With the ethernet cable plugged in, can you access your local router config page (if you have one)? e.g.: 192.168.1.1. If not, what happens when you ping the router’s address in the terminal?

If you’re able to successfully ping/access your router, can you ping a well-known IP address such as 8.8.8.8 (google DNS) or 1.1.1.1 (cloudflare DNS)?

I think using Apple products involves paying money to a company who actively hurts you and limits your rights

Vendor lock-in and walled gardens aren’t an Apple-specific problem, though. I’m not saying Apple doesn’t have problems that they are particularly bad for, just that “paying money to a company who actively hurts you and limits your rights” isn’t unique enough to Apple for me to consider someone not “walking the walk” for buying their products. Most mainstream phone brands have locked bootloaders that limit your rights to affect the hardware you purchased, but I’m not going to suggest someone isn’t “walking the walk” with regard to their consumer rights for owning one.

I’m not much of an absolutist. One can only do so much. But Apple is putting unreasonable constraints on consumers, and it should not be tolerated.

I agree they’re putting unreasonable constraints on consumers. I do not agree with labelling those who do tolerate it as not caring about their rights or not “walking the walk” when everyone has different, if arbitrary, desires, goals, and limitations that are unique to them.

But if you care enough not to be ignorant and you still tolerate it, you might have a problem walking the walk rather than just talking the talk.

I think it’s disingenuous to suggest that people are only “walking the walk” if they take every single avenue possible to protect every single right they believe they have. I run Linux on every device I own, but the CPUs on those systems are still largely vulnerable to privacy violations from things like Intel Management Engine and other vectors caused by closed-source blobs in the firmware. Am I only “walking the walk” if I also go the extra mile to flash Coreboot or Libreboot to my devices?

If you believe in your right to privacy, you shouldn’t own a cell phone at all, should you? Even a dumb flip phone allows governments and other private entities with enough power or resources to monitor your location at all times.

I don’t think it has to be all-or-nothing when it comes to caring about your rights. I care about my rights, but might still have to deal with a Windows PC for select use cases.

I have friends who undoubtedly care about their rights and simultaneously own an iPhone. Does it make them a hypocrite? I don’t think so. I think it means that “caring about your rights” is situationally, and generally, really difficult to put into practice in 2024 and not everyone can go full RMS and completely forgo all cell phone use on principle.

Jokingly: “Linux is free if your time is worthless”

Though this tongue-in-cheek tagline takes the “free as in free beer” misinterpretation of the term “free software”, I’ve always found it a fun way to describe the time investment you’ll need to make if you’ve spent your whole life using Windows before making the switch.

I’m in a similar boat to you; whether the blobs constitute a security threat seems to still be up in the air. I read through the issue thread on github a few months back and it seemed the vast majority of the blobs were built by scripts contained in the repository, but some weren’t documented well, leading to uncertainty.

The comment by Long0x0 on Aug 05 lists a lot of the blob files.

There’s no way to srsly prevent a full-bloat browser from messing with its environment.

Can you elaborate on this? I’m curious as to what manner a browser like Firefox could be exploited in order to affect its environment outside of something like a sandbox escape.

As others have pointed out, there’s a lot to hate about ads since the industry is routinely dishonest, insulting, obnoxious, deceptive, intrusive, and all manner of unpleasant. I’ve been adblocking religiously for most of my life for these reasons.

So I think a more interesting question might be the other way around: “What do you like about commercials?”

The only commercials I’ve ever liked are the ones for local small businesses. The ones with a nonexistent production budget that aren’t beating the viewer over the head with blatant lies or dishonest sales tactics.

Adult Swim used to have faux-ad bumpers for the fictional business “Strickland Propane” from King of the Hill, featuring the honest-to-a-fault character Hank Hill as the spokesman, which I felt captured that vibe well.

Rhett and Link also made a funny homage to these kinds of commercials in this classic skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnOyMSEWNTs

Overall I think this is well written. I agree with @poVoq@slrpnk.net that the section on picking an instance could be improved, since which instance one picks can be rather important, since federation/defederation is dictated by individual instances.

And a minor typo I noticed:

leaving Mastodon out to try

I assume that should be “out to dry”.