We must establish a new order of monks, who all get up at 6am UTC. We can call them in sync

I’m intrigued, I’m not a big fan of DC movies but I’m willing to give them another chance. Could you give me a quick synopsis?

The bad batch is apparently also great, along with the latest clone war seasons (according to my friend at least)

I’m just not ready… Seeing Star wars just fills me with negative feelings. I hope I’ll get there one day - I loved the EU and the more they accept back into cannon the more I want to get back into it… But I just can’t give it another chance yet

No, the writing was just bad.

I strongly prefer strong female leads (and my tastes only get more LGBT when it comes to novels), but those movies were terrible. Just horrendous. I still can’t bring myself to watch episode 9, or anything star wars since then

I’m not even that big a star wars fan. I love sci-fi and fantasy, because I love the new ideas they contain - star wars was never special to me, it was just good

I’ll never forget leaving the theater after episode 7, my whole department took off to see it on release. I just remember everyone being relatively satisfied, even the extreme star wars nerds, but I just looked at my team lead who I shared an office with. .

We used to talk about Star wars all the time, especially the extended universe, but we looked at each other and I saw pain in his expression, and I knew I shared the same look. I don’t think we ever spoke about Star wars again

And after episode 8, I now just feel dread when I see a blaster.

It wasn’t that nostalgic for me, it wasn’t that my standards were unreachable - they were just bad movies.

They actually use consultants like McKinley, who are the coordinating force behind a lot of the obviously self-destructive decisions companies are making in lockstep

Because they’re using hacktivist groups as a proxy. They just deny all involvement, and probably keep it all isolated from the fancy military grade tools and techniques

If there’s any chance they’ve heard about a concept, I’ll ask if they’ve heard of it and take them at their word (without comment either way).

And if they’re kinda nodding impatiently, I’ll wrap up the explanation and move on to the deeper level

At first, people will sometimes be defensive or lie about knowing a topic, but after you establish there’s no judgement either way with you I’ve found people become less hesitant about admitting ignorance and will even want to hear your explanation of something to check their knowledge

I also do the flip side - I pride myself on admitting when I don’t know something, so that might play in too

Nah, I’m thinking much bigger. I’ve got an AI that can transcribe video, I’m working on one to summarize and put facts into a knowledge graph, I’ve got one that can hold a conversation, and I’ve got a script that scrapes sites and does natural language processing. I just need an agent to tie the pieces together and some control scripts to manage the containerized pieces

The idea is, my assistant will go out, read up on programming topics and build knowledge graphs with references to the source, and I’ll fix my biggest issue - shittified searches crippling my work speed

Then, I’ll send it off to find content. It’ll transcribe/summarize videos and rank them, research topics and come back with reports, and trawl my socials to find new things I might find interesting

I plan to take all that, then let my assistant create video channels to watch and additional content to read if Lemmy is slow. And if my friends and family show interest, I’ll add in hosting and an internal social media and convince them to run additional nodes at home

I’ve been working on it for a while because I saw this coming, I’ve got most of the key pieces already.

And that’s the bubble of Internet I’m building - AI curation of my Internet life, it’ll happily work away the hours deshittifying a bubble of Internet

Seriously… The closer to three edge we get, the faster enshitification goes. No one is writing algorithms with users in mind… Not for a paycheck anyways

We’re getting to the point where we all need to carve out bubbles of curated Internet for our friends and family

In our current economic system? Absolutely, declining population is a huge problem.

As far as physics? The world doesn’t care about imaginary human numbers. Production continues to soar through the roof

We made all of this up. At any point, we could say “hey, this is a dumb game that’s making people suffer, let’s figure out something else”

I’d personally love an ev bike, but it’d be wasted on me right now. I really want an electric car because you could run the AC all night and power a computer - I want a little hotel on wheels

Just pause awkwardly for a second, long enough to be felt but not long enough for them to start talking again, and bring up something unrelated

It’ll hit them with the feeling of social rejection, but without the confrontation or giving them anything to latch onto. Nothing to get offended about or argue against, there’s nothing to react to there

It might take longer, but it’s not a request to stop - it’s training them to not bring it up. It’ll make them uncomfortable to talk about it - even if they force themselves it’ll be uncomfortable for them

(Unless they’re high on the spectrum, in which case direct is better all around)

This is exactly why HR departments exist. Had OP collected evidence, told management with a paper trail, and they failed to stop it? Or worse, told off OP because they don’t want to deal with it?

The jerk could maybe get charged with a misdemeanor related to harassment or misuse of technology… Maybe the UK has something harsher or more specific, but at the end of the day it’s a bit extreme to put someone in jail or pay OPs wages if they were forced out of work

The company on the other hand? They have a legal obligation to maintain a safe work environment. They also have deeper, easier to access pockets. A lot easier to get a lawyer to pursue that, which is expensive even if they win in the end

If they’re clearly shown to have not taken reasonable action, they’d at least be on the hook for any lost wages or medical costs (not sure what decent therapy runs over there, less than the US I’m sure but I’m guessing not cheap). Even if OP quits or decides not to show up, it could be until they get a new job at similar pay with some extra thrown on top

HR’s job is to cut this off before OP needs to be paid off, or much worse finds a lawyer. They don’t care about the employees, so safest could be to fire the guy - the least they’re going to do is officially reprimand the guy and follow up with OP to make sure it’s not worsening and OP isn’t feeling litigious

Well hey listen, I appreciate it. I would’ve spent who knows how long waffling between distos that I don’t feel drawn to, and even if I came across an atomic flavor, I probably would’ve just assumed it was marketing fluff

Good ideas need advocates, and this is a good idea… It’s a promise of an OS I want, not just running from one I don’t

I’m probably going to look at bazzite first. If I have containers that can run LLMs on my GPU, that checks off everything on my wish list except gaming. I’ll read up on it though, you’ve given me the context I need to care about learning more

Ok, when I googled it earlier I saw “containers and roll back to previous version” and I made a note to do more reading

Your write up was good, much clearer than what’s on fedora and Wikipedia. And the fact you pitched immutable OS’s in general first caught my attention… The concept is a no brainer. Decouple the os and the rest of the software, and don’t bother digging into one of a kind conflicts when updating things - just make it rebuildable and create it fresh. You never know when the wrong bit will flip

Nix’s “learn this one thing, configure it once, and you’re done” stuck in my head. And after a different distros, a couple lines installed Nvidia, Nvidia’s docker package and docker

But then I had to configure WiFi and spend half an hour learning why I couldn’t mount an external drive and how to manage it… I still have no regrets, I’ve got a USB that should start converting my friends and family’s old PCs into a self organizing AI/self hosting cluster… Hopefully it works next month lol

But not what I want in a daily driver. I want something that’ll quickly do what I tell it and gracefully handle the fact I have 6 versions of Java and no idea why I need a version from 2018 specifically. And that I’m going to add a repo to install something and instantly forget what I did if it seems like the best path forward at the time

You’ve sold that pretty well - my takeaway was that atomic fedora is very modular and low side effect and also an interchangable foundation I can swap out and roll back easily… At this point, if it can run containers and the drivers I need, it sounds like a great option.

I used to use VMs so every 6-12 months I could start clean with the latest and run setup scripts for my dependencies… It was just easier than debugging some conflict. This sounds even cleaner - I swap out the base at will, and the stuff I’ve built on it should stay intact. Plus it sounds much more testable

So my main concern is will it run on an HP omen - it has zero Linux support and a bunch of concerning driver needs, but it does have a second m2 slot… What’s the worst that can happen? Except apparently some models forget they have fans in Linux and I just know the iGPU-GPU switch will cause some problem with sleeping… But Windows is only going to get worse

Now that you’ve convinced me this might be the best course (I only see less problems than other distros would have), and I’ve talked myself into giving it a go, is there any recommended reading or key concepts I should look into? Any particular flavor(s) you’d point me to first?

Fedora Atomic a chance, it’s an extremely nice family of distros (e.g. Bluefin/ Aurora, Bazzite, etc.)!

Can you elaborate on this? I landed on nix for my PC turned server and haven’t regretted it, but I’ve been hesitant to go all in on my main laptop (I’m wary of my laptop iGPU and GPU switching becoming a config issue, and I’m dreading having to configure my wsl dev environments again…)

Windows is getting blatantly terrible enough I know I’m just putting it off, maybe a cool new technology might help make it sound more fun

Yeah, and programming skills are available to most people. Except some people will take to it like a fish and some will struggle. Also, you have to have already learned it… You don’t learn those skills without the right environment and a predisposition

Making $64k as a salesman is a very achievable goal already, if you have that talent you don’t even have to work hard

He got a job at a call center and hustled for the rest - he basically just worked two $35k jobs… Anyone in reasonable health can do that, you just have to sacrifice everything else (including your health, both mental and physical)

I don’t think I’d pick this guy… Despite failing his goal miserably while working himself to the bone, I haven’t heard him acknowledge this reality

I’d need to hear it…denial is a hell of a drug

If you own a company, that’s not a job. If you are also the CEO and bring in half of the work/sales personally, that’s obviously a job. The same person could be both, we all wear many hats, but even if you choose to call yourself the owner over CEO the CEO part is the job, the owner title is not a job

Collecting rent isn’t a job. Maintenance is a job, and building is certainly a job.

If your dad is still doing maintenance, that’s work. If not, I’d say he’s retired, and renting out homes isn’t the problem here

In this context, landlord means someone whose “career” is just owning a bunch of property. Unless your dad is a developer and “built” a bunch of homes by hiring a bunch of people and taking the profits, he doesn’t deserve to be called a landlord, even if the term has been watered down

He rents out a room/house, after literally building it… That doesn’t define him in the same way, he’s not the problem and he shouldn’t be painted with the same brush

Congrats on the new job!

That’s kinda crazy, because I know literally none of the accounting terms you used… There’s probably terms for both sub-fields, mine might be bookkeeping or something?

I like to tell high schoolers that programming is great because it mixes with everything, very few coding jobs don’t touch on some other field - I guess the same applies to IT.

My least favorite response that I hear when dealing with users is that “I’m not techy” because it demonstrates a willful ignorance of the technology that they use every single day, and an unwillingness to learn that technology.

I used to believe this, but I did some summer IT work for a small business once. I’m going around, updating things, and the accountant is super stressed about me touching her computer…I tell her I’ll be able to roll it back if something goes wrong and the other computers are fine, and she grabs lunch.

Then I see this sticky note on her monitor: windows, excell, file, open file. There’s others, import to peach tree, print invoice - all of her sticky notes are all the buttons you have to press to do something. Super weird, I figured she just never bothered removing them.

Then a while later, I come back and need her to grab something from an Excel file. I give her the flash drive, she opens explorer from the start menu, drags it into her documents, and she picks up the Excel sticky note. At this point I’m feeling anxious - I explain she can just double click on it and it’ll open, but she tells me “no, that’ll just confuse me, I need to do it my way”

This woman, who has been doing accounting for the company for almost 40 years, and doing it on a Windows PC many times a day for decades, has not learned how to open a spreadsheet. It’s not an OCD thing either - she genuinely read off the next step and starts looking around for it and (viscerally uncomfortable now) I tell her “file” is in the top left corner. She thanks me and reads the next step on her sticky note, “open file”, and I’m just sitting there slack jawed. And when done, she made sure to exit out of Excel before relaunching it for the other file.

She’s an outlier for sure… My dad for example can use a computer fine, I found him a guide for an antivirus scan and he ran and uninstalled it no problem, but he’s the type that would get frustrated and go to IT

But this woman, who had been in front of a computer longer than I’d been alive at the time, genuinely did not know how to use a computer. She was perfectly fine in her spreadsheet, arrowing around and processing the numbers faster than I could, but the concept of opening a file was something she was unable to process.

Then I realized the sticky note was new. Year after year, through multiple versions of Windows, she had been copying this sticky note. She unstuck it every time to read it too… How long could that last? A week? Maybe 2? And there was a good dozen of them for all sorts of operations

Bare minimum, she’d written it down 500 times, and she didn’t remember the steps. She’d easily performed the steps well over 10k times, and nothing stuck. She did not remember the file button was in the top left corner.

I started grading technical attitude based on how much people can tolerate before their eyes glaze over. Imagine you’re doing something like cycling Wi-Fi because it stopped working. People that watch silently or check their phone? Average. People who look confused? They could be technical if they bothered to learn. People who ask questions? I start watching how they see technology to recommend a discipline to them.

And then there’s the people who immediately get a thousand yard stare, they go into a trance when presented with a screen. It’s like they were cursed at birth to never understand anything about electronics, specifically. They can be accountants or doctors. It’s not about complexity, they’re not necessarily stupid, it’s like a deity cursed them to rely on computers but to be unable to use them

I just can’t understand how a mind can work like that, but I’ve seen it

Life is an adventure, you’re bound to get more wrong than right, the important part is how you handle those situations. IMO, that’s what defines you. I want to be known as someone who isn’t afraid to ask, isn’t afraid to be wrong, and isn’t afraid to learn something new in order to be helpful.

Hell yeah. That’s one of the pillars of who I am and strive to be - I live to learn and create, and I pride myself on turning on a dime when I realize I’m wrong mid argument

Otherwise, why be here? If you’re not learning and growing, you’re just waiting for death