If it works for you, stick with it.

Works is a feature, not a bug.

_ /\ _

If it's changing, you might want to get a brain-scan, immediately.

No, it isn't normal ( not for me, anyhow ), to the guy who said it is normal.

It's not an ear thing, it is an auditory-processing thing, so it's your brain that's doing it.

The question is why it is doing it.

Perhaps it's just fuzzy wiring, as most such cases likely are.

( synaesthesia is a case of weird wiring, and I've got that, but not in the normal way, not senses blurring into each-other, but rather my non-visual cognition being a kind of "blur" to those senses, so they mesh oddly )

But if it begins changing in either intensity or character, get a scan.

( I'm a braindamage survivor, and it takes decades to adapt to braindamage: prevention/avoidance is better than hating one's life for decades, while being bullied by all who reject that it could still validly be a problem, and hold that one ought either force oneself into being an "acceptable" drugged psychiatric-zombie, and not "pretend" to be getting better, or one ought be able to be acceptable-pretence, just like Valid People(TM) are. )

_ /\ _

SO LONG AS IT IS ACTUAL MERITOCRACY,

and not just privilege's gaslighting about it ( via making-certain that the poorest have inferior-nutrition, inferior-air-quality, worse-pollution, inferior-education, inferior-healthcare, etc ),

then yes, I hold it is The Proper Way.

However, it REQUIRES a truly-level playing-field, and not a 2-tiered "level" playing-field.

The Scandinavian system of ONLY public-schooling, so there is only 1 tier of education-quality, is a required component.

Student nutrition needs to be guaranteed.

Healthcare needs to work properly, for all.

Livingwage needs to be for all full-time work, and companies that try to hire only part-time for the real-work, have to have the profit-benefit of such hamstringing-of-many-lives cut from them all, permanently.

Fairness requries careful systematic, & openly-honest enforcement, because the DarkHexad: narcissism/machiavellianism/sociopathy-psychopathy/nihilism/sadism/systemic-dishonesty ALWAYS seeks to enforce abusive-exploitation, and it is underhandedly aggressive, and natural in our human nature.

Not mitigating it == accommodating it.

Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, eh?

_ /\ _

Fish, arthropods, etc, had eggs millions of years before chickens.

_ /\ _

IF by "security" one means bugs have been prevented from living in it, there is one coded in Haskell, it may be named XMonad or something...

( .. digging .. )

Yep:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmonad

from there:

"Due to the small number of lines of code of the Xmonad application, the use of the purely functional programming language Haskell, and recorded use of a rigorous testing procedure it is sometimes used as a baseline application in other research projects. This has included re-implementation of xmonad using the Coq proof assistant,[31] a determination xmonad is an imperative program,[32] and studies of package management relating to the NixOS linux distribution.[33]"

Dig: 2000-ish lines of code.

https://xmonad.org/

https://xmonad.org/documentation.html

I'm an old guy, whose been in Linux, off'n'on since 1997 or 1996, and not a professional.

Keep that in mind.

I now always recommend a pair of NVMe's,

with swap on both,

with root mdadm mirrored RAID1 on both ( I've read that BTRFS "RAID1", when 1 mirror is missing on boot, simply won't permit you to boot, unless you get jiggy with the damn thing, telling it arbitrary stuff, to get it to allow that )

with /home mdadm mirrored RAID1

and use the extra space for whatever.

Use SATA for your backups.

I recommend using the fastest NVMe's you can get, but biggest is more-important.

Samsung .. what are they, EVO drives? go up to 2TB, iirc, and are reasonably cheap ( for people who can afford such things )...

This gives Linux's mdadm RAID1 speed ( it does RAID0 for reads, RAID1 for writes ), AND it gives greater reliability.

I've been stung by incorrect partition space allocation sooo many times, that now I'd stick everything on as few partitions as is sane, but as OpenBSD recommends, some filesystems on separate partitions breaks some attack-methods ( partly by breaking hardlinks ).

The difference that access-speed & bandwidth do, for your OS, and especially swap, is stunning, so if you've got the funds, consider the Samsung PRO NVMe's, instead of their EVO's, but definitely get quality & quick NVMe's, RAID1 'em up, and enjoy.

PS: I always do a prototype-install, now:

whole-device ( except swap, EFI, boot ), 1 partition, install everything I'm likely to want, of that OS, take a look at the filesystem use, for different parts of the root fs-tree, and then begin deciding what partition-sizes to be considering, using a 1.5x or 2x factor for expansion-space... ( different distros with /usr and /opt, especially ).

Then I repartition into the intended structure, & install in...

And, of course, I now expect to have to re-partition 1/2y later, as the things I've later found, & added, alter the ratios...

Obviously, if this weren't just some random guy at home, LLVM would make much more sense, because then partitions could be resized/redistributed on-the-fly.

But for now, for a machine I only-sometimes use, it's good enough.

Maybe this seems useful information?

I hope so...

( :

Spend a half-month considering, deeply, which path you would most-value having taken at the end of your life.

Due to an unconscious psychological-limitation, imagine your funeral at 1.5x your current age ( we apparently have a kind of "horizon" in our ability to understand our meaning beyond that ),

and imagine each significant variant, or compromise, and see how each makes you, in that future-condition/context feel.

Your answer is within you, same as for everyone.

_ /\ _

The problem is the end of civil-rights: WHEN the only internet left is the internet that IS for-profit propaganda, auto-deleting all non-compliant human thought, discussion, intelligence, objectivity, etc,

THEN humanity is just managed "steers" whose lives are being consumed by corporations which graze on us.

Since another dimension of ratchet is the concentration-of-wealth, you can see that working-destitution is being enforced on more & more of humankind, and real wealth being limited to fewer & fewer...

What happens when the working-poor try fighting for a fair share of the economy?

Rigged legislation, rigged "police" ( I used to believe in the police ), anti-education Florida-style for the public, etc...

AI tilts the playing-field, and it does-so for the monied special-interest-groups.

They don't have humanitarianism at heart.

Neither do the politically motivated.

Neither do for-profit-psychopaths ( corporations are psychopaths ).

Living in a Decorator Prison is all humanity can hope for, now: inmates, .. except for the fewer & fewer oligarchs & the financial-class.

'tisn't looking good.

Without Divine Intervention, which is statistically improbable an event, these are The End Times, but not for the reason that the religious claim.

IF you want Steam, THEN please consider every variant in the official Ubuntu family.

Steam-support told me in their system, iirc in early 2023, that they ONLY support the Ubuntu family ( directly ).

As Linus Torvalds noted, it isn't possible to release software that is going to work on all distros.

Even glibc has been broken by one, in that talk of his, and it wasn't a niche distro, either, iirc.

---

Pick which subset you CAN afford to support, and do not add to that subset until you're rolling in money, from your linux-customerbase.

( slight sarcasm on the last line, but business is business: destroying-resources costs, and if there is no benefit, it isn't sane to continue doing it. )

---

Decide which capabilities/functions/apps you NEED, and then don't even consider distros that break your required-set on you.

_ /\ _

Hoomin, if you can, please read Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast & Slow, and also Kegan & Lahey's "Immunity to Change".

Your Kahneman System-1 has decided some of your life for you, and your unconscious-mind is fighting-off-adapting, to protect inertia/deadness, and that costs.

You don't have to accommodate your unconscious-mind doing that: you can change the rules, but it means using the actual leverage of understanding to cause change...

Life happens. Shit happens. Some of us have been set-up to fail. Some of us have set ourselves up to fail.

The fools who pretend that Free Will doesn't exist, don't understand that free will exists in time, and your life-vector IS your determination, not today, or this-minute, but your ongoing determination.

Earn your life: change rules in your own unconscious.

The "rat race" won't do it: it wants to consume your life.

Parents can't do it for one, one has to do it one's self.

Friends can't do it for one, for the same reason.

Give it a shot.

Libraries exist, and maybe they can get the books for you.

https://www.funtoo.org/Welcome

instead of Gentoo.

I haven't read the article, but yes, wars do have time-limits:

Once a war becomes domestically impossible to participate in, Vietnam as 1 proof, then the-course-of-war changes.

Economic-collapse means that Biden's hosed in 2024, and the Republicans are Russian allies, not NATO allies.

Yes wars have time-limits.

Simply wait & see: by the end of 2025, NATO will be gutted, Trump will have been crowned GEOTUS ( a term they already use for him ), and Trump will ( passively, at least ) back Russia.

Sickening, but it looks like that's the fact of the unfolding global/geopolitical near-future.

Go read McMoneagle's book of predictions: it is awefully wrong.

Remote Viewing is a modified kind of dreaming:

Remote Viewers are in dreams, and their ( very primitive brain, it seems ) ESP is patching-in pieces of what it perceives, but .. it is patching those things into a dream, so the result is .. rather groundless, with fragments of truth in it.

I trust the hard photos from NASA & ESA more than I trust McMoneable's dreams..

Yes, the youtube vid of him being interviewed about his helping Japan find sites that archaeology says did have to do with an early royal of theirs ( an Empress? ) is convincing, but I've not fact-checked it.

It may well be spot-on: ancient Japanese history isn't my interest.

https://youtu.be/2PxK6M9GbZE

If he was predicting people living on Mars, the same Mars that sometimes comes up to warm-enough to melt water, but has dry-ice on the ground, in the winters at the poles, and planet-scale dust-storms, and CO2 lasering in its atmosphere, and an atmosphere that is 1/1000th as thick ( from the aviation perspective ) as ours, with nearly-no oxygen loose in it...

I'm sticking with the machines that map & photograph the things.

There is a Powerlaw underlying global temperature, in the interglacial-times:

280-ish parts-per-million CO2 as the baseline...

The 9th-root-of-2 times that, gives you what CO2 level produces 1C global warming.

280*(9th-root-of-2)^2 gives you what ppm CO2 produces 2C global warming.

280*(9th-root-of-2)^3 gives you what ppm CO2 produces 3C global warming.

All the way up to 9C.

All the simulaitons which contradict the measured polar heating, the mega-rivers IN Greenland's ice, etc, are red herrings, and relying on them is incompetent: the evidence has already falsified their predictions.

Here is the paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19798

Notice that even not counting all the other greenhouse-gasses, like methane, sulfur-hexafuoride, etc, we already have guaranteed that the planet must stabilize at more than 5C,

.. not the 1.5C or 2C that the simulations-which-contradict-evidence predict.

This powerlaw is measured, historical fact.

Delusionally ignoring it .. isn't worthy of respect, OR able to create viability for our species.

I don't know that there will be any life left, in the tropics, within 1 century.

400+ cubic-km/year melting, now, iirc, and still accelerating, darkening the albedo of the planet...

: \

Read Paul Fussell's books on the North American Class system:

the difference between Middle-Class & Working-Class is cultural, not income, and it's rather indellible, too.

I'd now have Upper-Middle-Class, Financial-Class, Middle-Class, as distinct groups/cultures.

Middle-class judge you by your job-position.

Working-class judge you by your money.

The cultural-difference is profound.

Try getting an Upper-Middle-Class person to honestly accept you as valid, when you're a homeless person ( despicable/inherently-nonvalid, human-garbage ) and they're addicted to clawing all the Upper-Middle-Class status they can..

That can be quite educating.

Class-identity is as ancient as hierarchy in our society, so at least as old as agriculture, but I'd say it's as old as village-chief, so .. perhaps 0.5 million years, min.

---

Books that I find profounder, importanter, include Kegan & Lahey's "Immunity to Change", on our unconscious-mind's automatic-fighting-off of growing-up, protecting entrenched-dysfunction, and how to correct/dismantle that sabotage.

Halvorson's little, and important, "The 8 Motivational Challenges".

Logan, King, & Fischer-Wright's book condensing their research into something readable for us, "Tribal Leadership", on the 5 cultural-process levels ( they wrongly identify them as "stages", but stages, like Kegan-3, Kegan-4, etc, are irreversible ).

Moneyarchy has been crushing more & more & more lives into level-1 & level-2 culture, and there are consequences of that.

Level-1 is where mass-shootings arise from, and in 2023 the US had over 600 of them.

Level-2 is where conspiracism grows.

Not understanding that book should be considered criminal-negligence, for government-authority, nowadays.

Lanier's "Foreign to Familiar", and then Hofstede's "Exploring Culture" show how the climate, the civilization, the culture, that we are born into, fundamentally-alter our "personality" in predictable ways.

John Truby's "The Anatomy of Genres" and "The Anatomy of Story" should be considred required-reading for anybody who unconsciously uses story to form the story of their own meaning ( which is all of us ).

He's got a couple of mistakes, as many profound books do, his concept of Village is insane, being Wild West Village, instead of the dozens-of-millenia old Tribal Mother Village, and his concept of humor is wrong, too, being based on "the drop", which is a US thing, and not the core of humor, at all. The real core of humor, is being surprised by the improbable. Creative-misinterpretation humor shows this.

Hofstadter's "Godel Escher Bach: and Eternal Golden Braid" is the core competence in all of Western Philosophy. All the Western Philosophers who reject, ignore, or don't-understand, the core points in that book, are not competent in philosophy, period.

These books all outclass many of the books he's recommending.

What are the security-recommendations you have for Linux, Wine, & Proton users,

that we simply wouldn't, or don't commonly, think of, given your abnormal expertise/view?

Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, eh?

_/_

Zillions of other things crowded-it-out from your awareness, is all..

I defy you to count all the things you've had to remember, or think-on, since you created that community, Hoomin..

As one gets older, it happens more: more things-in-the-bin, harder-to-find-a-particular-thing.

Consider, though, that now your community has got other people interested, and it wasn't done through shilling, but through accidental-forgetfulness.

Karma provides lessons, we only have to be honest-enough to earn their essence, you know?

_ /\ _

Possibly due to each discovery being some bacteria that eat exactly 1 chemistry of plastic.

: )

Youtube deletes fact-checking comments.

Youtube deletes comments that link to Nature papers.

_ /\ _

I'm Buddhist, so I'm answering this question from my real-life standpoint:

Authentic Realization of one's Ultimate ( original awareness ) Nature.

What could be more precious?

Given that ALL of one's unconscious-mind's mechanisms exist to block that from happening, to protect unconsciousness's Eternal unbroken dominion, what could be more difficult to earn/obtain?

All the distractions in the world, "helping" one to NOT earn one's deepest profoundest Truth...

All the profits that cease, should one get anywhere in self-realization...

You simply don't need any external resource, for there to be a most-precious-resource, you know?