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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • Here’s a little story that shows how much society has become dystopian:

    Back in the 90’s, I worked in France for a while. When I was there, a case was brought up against the state that had violated a CNIL rule: some dude was cheating on his taxes by claiming he lived at some address. Tthe French fiscal administration sued him because they obtained a file from the electricity company and another from the water utilty company showing that the consumption of both electricity and water were so low it wasn’t consistent with the dude actually living there.

    The case was thrown out, the dude walked and the state was fined because it had violated a rule that clearly stipulated cross-referencing files for the purpose of extracting secondary information that wasn’t available in each single file was a violation of privacy and civil liberties.

    I shit you not. This used to be a thing.

    Can you imagine this today? All the Big Data sonsabitches cross-reference billions of files ALL THE TIME and nobody bats an eyelid anymore.

    If you’re old enough, you remember sovereign states taking privacy seriously. If you’re not, you don’t. And that’s how Big Data gets away with what they do today because fewer and fewer people remember a time when it was unacceptable.













  • It’s not the only thing that leaks timezone data, and the fix is identical: have the machine pretend you’re in UTC.

    For example: if you enable Resist Fingerprinting (RFP) in Librewolf, it will lie to websites and pretend your timezone is UTC - because of course timezone is one of the factors used to fingerprint you - and all the sites you visit that show you your local time, or depend on your local time for something or other, will show you the wrong time. And that’s how you know it works 🙂





  • practice the shortcuts

    You know, I used to think like that when I first learned Unix shell commands and vi. I shlepped through the learning process because I had to when I was a student. Then after graduation, I joined a Unix company so I was dragged deeper into it screaming and kicking, and I kept picking up more and more commands and shortcuts until they etched themselves deep into my muscle memory. At some point, it all stopped being a chore and it became second nature.

    And it went like that for many other software I’ve used. Decades later, I get the payoff: I’m a fast engineer and the friction between what I want to do and the final result is very low despite working 90% of the time with the keyboard.

    It was a pain to get there and it took a mighty long time, I’ll be honest. but I reap the benefits now.

    If I were you, I’d make the effort for that sort of thing. A couple of months tops: if you don’t like it, you’ll have wasted 2 months of your life. If you do, you’ll have gained skills that will pay for your efforts for the rest of your life many times over.



  • Do you think I’ll like i3?

    No idea. I only have (a little) experience with i3.

    Wnat I do know is that they’ll all require you to configure them, and it’s always a huge PITA to configure a OS or parts thereof, whichever it may be. But I figure even if I spend 2 days doing that, it’s a one-off job, and then I can reuse my favorite config forever. So it’s work worth doing.

    you’re OK with so called bloat anyway

    I don’t mind bloat if it’s worth it. Cinnamon / Gnome for instance is a bit of a pig (less than KDE / Qt for sure, but still) but I like it so… Okay. Conversely, I’ve yet to encounter any Electron app that offers anywhere near the amount of features that would justify the hundreds of megabytes and the amount of CPU Electron requires. Or Snap, Flatpak or Appimage packages for that matter. Those are wasteful for the benefit of the developer, not for yours.



  • That’s what I thought too - and I tried other tiling window managers in the past, only to quickly return to whatever I was used to. But somehow i3 hit the spot, It you’re used to screen or tmux, this thing has the same DNA and you’ll feel right at home. Give it an honest try, you might just like it.

    But I do believe that you kind of have to be halfway there already to “get it”. My halfway-there was being so used to the same concept in the terminal. If you’re never exposed to tiling in any way, shape or form, maybe it’s more of a stretch.