Friendly reminder that VSCodium exists, and nobody should be using Microslop's spyware version anyway.

The MAGAts are for it because they believe a Trump dictatorship means anybody they like gets to do whatever they want, and anybody they dislike gets thrown in jail without a trial. One by one they'll learn that it's not who they like/dislike that matters, it's who Trump likes/dislikes, and he doesn't like anybody but other autocrats and billionaires (and pedophiles, apparently).

1/3 of the population thinks this is acceptable behavior for a leader. And another 1/3 can’t make up their mind either way. This is why we’re doomed as a country.

I’m not a computer expert or planning to be.

Then don't use Arch. Seriously, where are you guys even finding out about Arch, much less wanting to try it? Whoever told you Arch would be a good fit, don't listen to them on anything Linux-related again. Arch is not for beginners, and it's not for people who don't want to learn the ins and outs of their computer because they're having to dig into the guts to fix it whenever an update breaks something. Arch is a fine distro for people who WANT those things, need bleeding edge hardware support, and don't mind having to fix it whenever it breaks. It doesn't sound like that's at all what you're looking for though.

Exactly. A lot of people seem to think that different = worse, or that not supporting the same software means it supports less software. I couldn't move to Windows right now because there is a ton of stuff I use Linux for that Windows has no alternative, or the alternatives are terrible. It works both ways.

Clawdbot, OpenClaw, etc. are such a ridiculously massive security vulnerability, I can't believe people are actually trying to use them. Unlike traditional systems, where an attacker has to probe your system to try to find an unpatched vulnerability via some barely-known memory overflow issue in the code, with these AI assistants all an attacker needs to do is ask it nicely to hand over everything, and it will.

This is like removing all of the locks on your house and protecting it instead with a golden retriever puppy that falls in love with everyone it meets.

I mean, it shouldn't be, but apparently it is

Context Switching

It's why I hate when middle managers get a hold of my time allocation. "You have 8 hours a day, so you can spend 1 hour each on these 8 different projects and move them all forward together!" Sprinkle 3-4 pointless meetings throughout the day, and then they wonder why nothing gets done.

You can't do that anymore, at least not with a normal Windows installation. All of the tricks of forcing it offline, clicking cancel 10 times and jumping up and down don't work anymore, they've disabled them all, the only way to install Windows 11 now (using the normal Microsoft installer) is by linking it to a Microsoft account.

They continued harvesting data from users after the users explicitly disabled an option to shut that off. And for that, they owe $4 a person. When are we going to starting fining these companies properly? How about a thousand dollars a person for an infraction like this? Maybe a $98 billion fine might get them to start caring.

ANTIFA is not an organization, it's a movement, an idea. Anybody who disapproves of fascism is ANTIFA, by definition, and are therefore now considered terrorists by this administration. This move is so that people can now be arrested, deported, detained, executed for speaking out against this administration. There are STILL people being held in Gitmo without trial because the state considered them terrorists. That's where we're at now with anybody who dares to speak out against Trump or joins a protest against this administration.

Shut off and leave your phone at home, buy a pay-as-you-go to bring with you for emergency contact/coordination

The second worst propaganda outlet in the US suing the worst propaganda outlet in the US because they have a monopoly on propaganda, was not on my 2025 bingo card, but I'll take it.

Reliable appliances already exist. They cost 10x what the cheap stuff costs and very, very few people buy them because “why would I get this washing machine for $5000 when I can get this other one with more features for $500?”.

They'll fall for it again with the Trump phone

Decades ago I ran an "rm -fr *" as root, I thought that I was ~/bin, but I was in /bin. That was a fun lesson.

It's a scam because the prices they're charging right now don't reflect the actual costs. AI companies are trying to get people and companies hooked on it so that once they crank the prices up by 10x to start turning a profit, they'll be able to maintain some semblance of a customer base. If they were charging the real prices a year ago, the AI bubble would have never reached the levels it has, and these companies wouldn't be worth what they are now. It's all propped up on a lie.

I'm sorry to hear that. Our company recently got acquired, and every 4-6 months the new IT team tries to say, "but do you guys really need Linux? What for?". We answer them, in depth, every time, but then it just comes back up a few months later.

I'm scared one of these days they're just going to force the change on us, all productivity will grind to an absolute halt, deliverables will be missed, and eventually they'll backtrack but only after it's too late to recover the programs that got hosed in the process.

So what's going to win with the other police officers in the country? "Back the blue" and support their fellow cop, or racism and back ICE?

It's happening at a lot of companies. Last year our C-suite cancelled some big IR&D projects (where we were designing real products that could actually be built and sold) in order to dump $300k/mo into renting a cloud AI infrastructure that none of the employees want or use.