I liked working from home at first, but after so long it becomes harder and harder to leave your work at “work” when your workplace is also your home

That sounds like a “you” problem. I just hit the shutdown button on my laptop at 17:00 and close the lid, and boom I’ve left work and magically instantaneously transported to my home.

the flexibility to work from home on weekends

Work … on … weekends?

I think your problem is that you’re a workaholic.

Our brains are not wired to do such a dramatic difference in mental activity in the same location.

Sounds made up bro.

It’s bad enough having to hear my colleagues in teams meetings, I don’t see why I have to smell them too.

It’s even more confusing because in my native language (Dutch), we have those words too ( gnoe and gnoom ), and we do pronounce the g.

Of course, no Dutch speaker would ever miss the opportunity to pronounce a g :)

Meanwhile, me, a non-native English speaker:

I am still thoroughly confused whether I should call it KDE or Plasma or Plasma Desktop. Like, what is the difference?

Don’t worry Ralph, I got you.

þ

I have to ask… what the hell is that thing?

That is a self-inflicted wound caused by how Wayland was designed, particularly the part where they offloaded so much responsibility onto the different compositors.

In many cases there’s no extra wear

You can’t change physics. More HP = more torque = more wear on the whole drive train. Also more boost = more stress on the turbo = it will fail sooner.

Also, back then, cars with the higher specced variant of the “same” engine almost always had mechanical upgrades compared to the lower specced engine: usually bigger brakes, a stronger clutch, and various other drive train components.

So while in many cases you could chip your car without much immediate harm, you were definitely cutting into various safety margins determined by automotive engineers who know much better than you and me.

Guys this content was by boomers for boomers

Tom’s Hardware sold out looong ago, sold in 2007 to some faceless consortium. The original “Tom”, Thomas Pabst, who is GenX and not a boomer btw, has had nothing to do with the site since.

The editor of this article looks to be a millennial btw.

DNS does nothing for youtube.

I think the problem stems from how LLMs are marketed to, and perceived by the public. They are not marketed as: this is a specific application of this-or-that AI or ML technology. They are marketed as “WE HAVE AI NOW!”, and the general public who is not familiar with AI/ML technologies equates this to AGI, because that’s what they know from the movies. The promotional imagery that some of these companies put out, with humanoid robots that look like they came straight out of Ex Machina doesn’t help either.

And sure enough, upon first contact, an LLM looks like a duck and quacks like a duck … so people assume it is a duck, but they don’t realize that it’s a cardboard model of a duck with a taperecorder inside that plays back quacking sounds.

LLMs are decent with coding tasks if you know what you’re doing

Only if the thing you are trying to do is commonly used and well documented, but in that case you could just read the documentation instead and learn a thing yourself, right?

The other day I tried to get some instructions on how to do something specific in a rather obscure and rather opaquely documented cli tool that I need for work. I couldn’t quite make sense of the documentation, and I found the program’s behavior a bit erratic, so that’s why I turned to AI. It cheerfully and confidently told me (I’m paraphrasing): oh to do “this specific thing” you have to use the --something-specific switch, and then it gave some command line examples using that switch that looked like they made complete sense.

So I thought: oh, did I overlook that switch? Could it be that easy? So I looked in the documentation and sure enough… the AI had been bullshitting me and that switch didn’t exist.

Then there was the time when I asked it to generate an ARM template (again, poorly documented bullshit) to create some service in Azure with some specific parameters. It gave me something that looked like an ARM template, but sure as hell wasn’t a valid one. This one wasn’t completely useless though, at least I was able to cross reference with an existing template and with some trial-and-error, I was able to copy over some of the elements that I needed.

That’s another option, but it’s a bit more cumbersome having to cherrypick which exact backports you need for your specific hardware. Also, if you then for some reason don’t upgrade to the next stable release when it comes out, backports get abandoned after 1 year instead of the customary 3 years for the rest of the oldstable release.

From my experience, running trixie/testing the past year or so on a minipc with hardware that was a bit too recent for bookworm, I can say that the cadence of security patches has been about the same between bookworm and testing.

And let’s be honest, on a desktop system your main attack surface is going to be the software you go online with, i.e. the browser. So if you make sure that is kept up to date (flatpak, vendor repo, …) that already goes a long way.

the ctrl-super-alt is completely different

It’s not “completely different” … and that’s the problem. Completely different I can handle. I can manage knowing vim keybindings, readline keybindings and standard windows keybindings at the same time. What I can’t handle is: having to use command + C on one Mac and control + C on Windows to copy, but then in some cases you do use “control” on both OS-es, and sometimes control and alt are switched … It’s because they are similar but different that it’s such a mess trying to get proficient in both at the same time.

Eh. Windows has its share of annoyances, but once I have set it up to my liking my desktop workflow is very similar to my KDE setup, and WSL + Windows Terminal gives me a functional Linux shell environment.

And at least on Windows I don’t have to deal with cmd/control/alt switcharoo messing up my muscle memory.

The correct way with a new computer with recent hardware is to install Debian Testing to get a recent kernel, firmware and mesa and stuff, but put the code name of the next release into your apt config instead of “testing”. So then when the next version is released, you can just stay on that, now stable, version.

Trixie just got released today though, so for the time being you can probably get away with using that.

every service will get your ID or photo

To be fair, that’s not how it will work. The site and the identity verifier will be two different things, the verifier only attests that you are not underage and the site doesn’t get your identity.

Still harmful though, because you can be sure that there will be scamsites redirecting people to fake but real looking verifiers for blackmail and identity theft purposes.

I for one will never put my ID or photo into any age verifier ever.

I think there are going to be a whole lot of phishing and blackmail scams in the future, preying on the stupid computer illiterate masses putting in their personal information into fake “age verifiers” to access porn or other adult content.