Dear Linux community,

In these shite times, we need to remember to see the human in all of us. So I address the humans of this community:

1. To the Stallmanites. SCREW CORPORATE YEAHHHHH! Each day humanity grows smarter, no matter how many iPad kids or mass media diatribes there are, so celebrate how far we've fucking come. Look at your oldest machine. You're a million times better. My old Slackware was full of SHIT! FUCK YEAH

2. To the pragmatists. Linux doesn't get in your way. People get in each others' ways all the time. But most importantly, don't get in your own way. If you're feeling like shit -- the human capacity to hope beats everything to a pulp. You know what we do when shit fucks? We submit a fucking pull request. FUCK YEAH

3. To the hobbyists. Life is a bundle of fun so feel every moment. When you're old, and you'll be old as fuck, you'll be like "fuck yeah I lived every moment of my life up to now." So fuck another segfault up. Learn C, and call C the best language. Then learn Rust and call Rust the best language. Make a homelab then call homelab the best language. FUCK YAML HOLY SHIIIIIIIT

Flaming hot wishes,

Your fellow fucking human.

Subjective situations welcome

stuff like the 9mm wadadadang thing or

no reason.

edit: fixed title

Journalist and self-proclaimed Freedom of Information Act nerd Ken Klippenstein claims to have released Mangione's manifesto. He also believes that some news sources are withholding it.

Manifesto (source: Klippenstein)

To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.

The temperature and texture were very easy, balanced. Drinking out of a clear glass added to the fanciness. I am a biased narrator, because I was already mildly thirsty.

edit: title

This book is efficient and answered questions the moment as I imagined asking, but to see its unique coolness -- we could do with some context on its literary genus.

Have you ever seen Kate Gregory's talk: Teach C++ not C?

The idea is, C++ has different habits than C, even if C++ is a "99% superset of C". But beginners can understand C++ just fine without learning C first. It's more ergonomic to learn about std::vector before using raw arrays and pointers, as Gregory puts it.

So, why do we teach vim before neovim, or before a well-regarded distribution like LazyVim? Because vim is "purer", installed everywhere? Because we learned it that way? What if we taught LazyVim/Neovim before raw vim, a la C++ before C? Modern features and ergonomics will keep a beginner listening -- surely you don't disagree.

Anyway, this book is that efficient and direct path to LazyVim. It covers the things that StackOverflow won't be the most useful pedagogues for (e.g. "what are those tab things on top of my window? How do I use the explorer thingamajig on the left -- should I even care about it, anyway?"). Plus, it keeps LazyVim as a first-class learning target, providing its mnemonics and habits alongside the typical vim stuff you'd normally learn with vimtutor.

I like this kind of learning :) good for the on-the-fencers like me

edit: shortened thoughts

If I get 50 up/downvotes then 500 people of all different walks of life read this, since only the distribution's tails vote. If that's 5-10% at each tail, then the 80-90% who thought the post or comment was mild have seen it and have not spoken.

If I leave it in the showerthoughts queue for ten days, then future people will see it too. Maybe they're from a year away!

Idk. Just sonder

The world of Linuxia beckons you! Your annoying guide flexes their gear the moment you spawn

Gentoo USB (Rare):
=> USE flags: Can rebuild itself
   with or without the other
   three attributes
=> March native: Increases attack
   speed by 1% or -1%
=> Slot: Can use two versions of any
   attribute at the same time
=> PGO: The USB memorizes when you
   attack to increase speed, trading
   off for lower speed elsewhen.
   Requires two rebuilds.

Charm of systemd (common):
=> nspawn: Can build with deeper focus
=> Wisdom tax: The wise are less
   likely to feel neutral toward you
   (+2 or -2 charisma)
=> Chant of systemd: By chanting
'systemd-analyze calendar "Fri *-*-13"',
   the caster instantly knows when
   the next Friday the 13th is.

Let's have some fun! Spells, items, and dungeons oh my!

For me, it's a 30fps video about someone doing a Super Mario flash game walkthrough of their own level. It was pretty meticulous, pushed the physics of the game. Lots of F.L.U.D.D. (a funky water spray bottle for plumber self-propelling) and dive tricks.

I was doing some "algorithm surfing" (i.e. VPN+private tab+click enough youtube videos on a topic=temporarily immersed in someone else's rabbit hole). In a patriotism rabbit hole, I found this video about a fearless teenager defending himself and his father against police misconduct with knowledge of Utah law.

Question: how can a layperson possibly know that much about the law to rival a cop's situational power like that?

I'm already familiar with shutting up (I vaguely remember there being a way funnier video but I can't find it)

but I think not shutting up, and instead sheer CYA, was instrumental to that kid and his dad winning the counterlawsuit. And being friendly has turned a speeding ticket into a warning for me (anecdotal evidence)... once...

Apologies if this question is too American. Also please don't hit me with another All Cops Are Benzene or something -- I could use a usable answer ^ .^

When you cryptsetup luksFormat, LUKS2 cryptography defaults to argon2id, a competition-winning gpu-resistant multi-core memory-hard algorithm thingy. Only problem is everyone only supports pbkdf2 instead :3

• GRUB had an argon2id support patch in the works. Buuut it stopped because a version-pinned dependency added argon2id support, and GRUB wants to update lib x to update lib y to update lib z to update said dependency (2 years later... I'm here D: )
• systemd-boot is simple and doesn't support argon2id
• efistub, i.e. making the kernel boot itself (i think?), necessitates secure boot and I'm not sure that's the best way to do this (Ventoy can bypass secure boot with MOKMANAGER funkin' anyway, can't it?)
• Raspberry Pi's bootloader might support argon2id? idk

Not to be deterred, I tried manually patching GRUB (tried with aur on a usb, then with portage) but I don't think these are supported with the latest GRUB. (Attempted with whatever the aur package uses, then Gentoo's grub-2.12-r4, then Gentoo's grub-2.12-r5, then git cloning and checking out older versions manually, then picking the earliest 2.12 archive.org tarball to patch lol. All failed with "couldn't find disk"-esque issues)

Does anyone have this working at or after Nov 2024? And better yet, am I missing something obvious ¯\_(ᵕ—ᴗ—)_/¯

Threat model: Avoiding a twopointfouristan prank, but also just screwing around for fun (◡‿◡✿)

Perhaps dumb questions inbound ;)

I use Arch because I'm strapped for time and my system is always moving.

• 2 minutes to install something? AUR probably has it.

• Ten minutes of free time to look for a software that fits a new need? Try random AUR things (auditing PKGBUILDs is just twenty seconds or so).

• If I need a tiny patch, I'll just add a sed or patch file to the PKGBUILD. (Super easy, you barely learn any syntax cuz it's intuitive shell.)

• make && make install/meson blahblah usually just works.

• Wiki does the thinking for me if I need something special (e.g. hw video acceleration)

Buuuut update surprises can be a pain (e.g. Pipewire explodes Saturday evening) and declarative rollbackable immutability sounds really freakin' AWESOME, so I'm considering NixOS for my new laptop (old one's webcam broke). So I ask:

• How much can I grok in a week?
  • I need to know Nixlang, right? I have a ton of dotfiles and random homemade cpp commands in ~/.local/bin that I use daily
• How quick is it to make a derivation?
  • I make install a lot, do I need to declare that due to non-FHS? Can I boilerplate the whole thing with someone else's make install and ctrl+c ctrl+v? How does genAI fare? (Lemmy hates word guess bots, I know)
• How quick is it to install something new and random?
  • Do I just use nix-shell if I need something asap? Do I need to make a derivation for all my programs? e.g. do I need to declare a Hyprland plugin I'm test-running?
• How long do you research a new package for?
  • On Gentoo I always looked up USE flags (NOO my time); on Arch I just audit the PKGBUILD and test-run it (20 seconds); on Ubuntu I had to find the relevant PPA (2 minutes). What's it like for Nix?
• Can you set up dev environments quickly or do you need to write a ton of configs?
  • I hear python can be annoying. Do C++/Android Studio have header file/etc. issues?
• What maintenance ouchies do you run into? How long to rectify?
• Do I need to finagle on my own to have /boot encrypted?
  • I boot via: unencrypted EFI grub asks for LUKS password -> decrypt /boot, which then has a keyfile -> decrypt and mount btrfs root partition. But lots of guides don't do it this way

Thanks for bearing with me ദ്ദി(｡•̀ヮ<)~✩‧₊

I know, I know, mostly just undergrads care about undergrad prestige (except resumé bots on LinkedIn scanning for "MIT") but I'm curious about the average Lemming, who might lie less often than Redditors and probably isn't a hyper outlier. Though I still expect selection and response bias :3

Let me start with my own wall of anecdotes.

1. An old American embedded systems mentor I once had had had like two master's degrees, but in his words,

Just get a Bachelor's and a good internship. If the company will let you do it on their dime, then get the Master's.

So the college-then-job thing wasn't quite cause-then-effect.

1. Another friend I had said "All of the higher-ups in the chip engineering dept I'm gunning for have a PhD. Wanna contribute meaningfully? Probably gotta have one too" (Somewhere in the entirety of Asia, exacts hidden for privacy). So grad school matters more in that case.

2. My old econ teacher told me that, if you want a job where undergrad is just a stepping stone, then your undergrad "prestige" mostly doesn't matter (e.g. pre-law, pre-med). And saving 50k in undergrad student loans to then dump into matching the S&P is a cheat code at age 18, worth far more than "initial salary". not financial advice lol In this case, the "get your job" isn't even that important.

3. An acquaintance I once had pipelined from Cornell to DeepMind. There, prestige and its opportunities probably/definitely/maybe had an effect.

4. A second acquaintance says his Canadian public school (iirc) only mildly helped him, so he went all-in on making his own networks outside of school to get into AI (Is he a hustler bro or something?). So he dodged the idea of college choice mattering.

5. A Harvard acquaintance I knew says both their dad and granddad agreed that going to Harvard played into getting their positions. (No need to believe me. I forgot what position tho -- finance/big business probably)

6. The managers and manager managers my parents knew often only had community/state school undergrads, sometimes with MBAs.

7. I don't care about CEOs. All outliers anyway.

So what have you empirically found? And where? (inb4 "American elite school obsession bad" and "CS is skill-based, not school-based, thread over" -- heard all of that already)

You can be vague if needed c:

It can be a small skill.

The last thing I learned to do was whistle. Never could whistle my whole life, and tutorials and friends never could help me.

So, for the last month or two, I just sort of made the blow shape then spam-tried different "tongue configurations" so to speak -- whenever I had free time. Monkey-at-a-typewriter type shit. It was more an absentminded thing than a practice investment.

Probably looked dumb as hell making blow noises. Felt dumb too ("what? you can't whistle? just watch"), but I kept at it like a really really low-investment... dare I attract self-help gurus... habit.

Eventually I made a pitch, then I could shift the pitch up a little, then five pitches, then Liebestraum, then the range of a tenth or so. Skadoosh. Still doing it now lol.

(Make of this what you will: If I went the musician route my brain told me to, then I would've gotten bored after 1 minute of major scales. When I was stuck at only having five pitches, I had way more longevity whistle-blowing cartoonish Tom-and-Jerry-running-around chromaticisms than failing the "fa" in "do re mi fa".)

So, Lemmings: What was the last skill you learned? And further, what was the context/way in which you learned it?

I had a teeny pet project using GNU assembly that was going to target two platforms.

Instead of keeping my handwritten worst-practices Makefile I decided to try GNU Autotools for the educated reasons of:

• Text scrolling by looks pretty
• Vague memories of ./configure make make install tarballs

I got hit with mysterious macro errors, recompile with -fPIE errors (didn't need this before?), autotools trying to run gcc on a .o file w/ the same options as an .s file, "no rule for all:", and other things a noob would run into. (I don't need a bugfix, since my handspun Makefile is "working on my machine" with uname -m.) So there's a bit of a learning curve here, inhibited by old documentation and more quietly, genAI being shittier than normal in this department

With this I ask:

Do people still use Autotools for non-legacy stuff? If not, what do people choose for a new project's build system and why?

edit: trimmed an aside

A bookmarklet is a bookmark whose URL is JavaScript code instead of a site. It might be, for example,

javascript:document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = Number(prompt("speed")) || 1; void(0)

// formatted version:
javascript:
document
  .querySelector('video')
  .playbackRate = 
  Number(prompt("speed")) || 1; 
void(0)

so that if you click the bookmark, it sets the speed of the video to whatever you want (e.g. 3.7).

You could also run this directly in the URL bar (in some cases -- I think desktop Chrome does that), or you can simply type alert() into the dev console (desktop Firefox prefers this for security reasons).

Is running my own arbitrary JS like this a thing on mobile? I'm on Android but I'm not sure if Brave disabled it -- I vaguely remember it working once, but it doesn't anymore. No luck on Firefox either. Maybe there's a workaround?