Very cool! A while ago I found that instead of using fractional scaling, things were smoother for me if I set Gome’s text scaling factor in accessibility settings. I think most GTK UI scales based off that value? It’s pretty helpful for me, even though I’m not actually using Gnome anymore. But if fractional scaling support has gotten better, maybe I’ll switch my approach.

This is what we gotta do - put social stigma on absurd wealth

I’m very glad I switched. One of the little improvements: IIRC last time I checked PaperWM didn’t have bindings to set a window to a specified width. It only had a cycle width option. With Niri I have shortcuts to set a window to ¼, ⅓, ½, ⅔, or ¾ of the screen width.

There are lots of other improvements. One of my favorites is the dynamic screen cast target.

Good question! I think this is distinct from split tunneling, but does a similar thing. But I’m not an expert - I don’t know how precise or broad the definitions are, so I’m not positive the concepts don’t overlap.

From some brief reading it looks like split tunneling is set up by configuring routing to determine which traffic goes through the VPN based on destination IP addresses. OTOH what I’m calling confinement determines VPN use based on which process sends traffic. So with confinement all traffic from select processes, regardless of destination, goes through the VPN.

I think there are differences in how inbound traffic works too. With confinement inbound traffic can only reach confined processes.

This is the BS I came to this thread for!

And as I just recently learned, network namespaces support! Those can be handy if you need a backup job to route through a VPN tunnel, or some such thing.

I can’t think of a good story from personal experience, so I’ll share a wild objection from some guy on the internet from, I think 2007. The story pops into my head from time to time. This guy insisted that it would be impossible to create an entire OS that can run from start to finish without the resources of a major software company. He argued that therefore Linux must actually be a pirated, reskinned version of Windows. https://danielandrade.net/posts/linux-windows-misconceptions-tech-story/

I checked the Wayback machine to try to find more messages from that thread because I think he kept posting and doubling down. But pulling up ancient ZDNet forum posts is slow enough that I gave up.

As a gamer myself I don’t think it’s appropriate to try to deprive someone of a hobby that they genuinely enjoy. As a long-time Linux user I stick to games that work well on Linux, like Overwatch. But unfortunately games aren’t interchangeable - if League is your thing, Dota might not be an acceptable substitute.

Better to argue for dual booting than to try to cut off a friend’s personal relationship with their game.

I’ve heard worrisome speculation about the white house working up to invading Venezuela. Supposedly officials are talking to oil industry executives about investment opportunities after a regime charge, and those conversations sound a lot like conversations that took place before the Iraq invasion.

Edit: Oh damn, the situation has escalated more than I realized https://unac.notowar.net/no-war-on-venezuela-all-out-for-a-week-of-emergency-protests/

Also the Social Security Administration, despite being a huge operation, runs with less than 1% overhead. And they get those checks out month after month. Medicare’s overhead is under 2%, compared to an average of 12% for private insurance, and polls seem to show people are more satisfied with Medicare than with private insurance.

I know the complaint that government is ineffective and inefficient is a classic - but it makes me wonder what programs that refers to? Maybe something in the Defense Department?

Oh, kanata looks great! Good to know!

In the earlier days of Wayland I was not able to reproduce the custom keyboard mappings that I set up with xkb. Xkb worked, but only in windows running under Xwayland. I know the common xkb presets, like changing caps lock to a control key, are reproduced in Wayland implementations. I had really custom mappings that required more general remapping capability.

I fixed my setup by building a keyboard with a microcontroller that I can program with ZMK. It’s a better setup, although it did take more time, effort, and money. The bottom line is I’m enthusiastic about Wayland, even though I had to find another way to reproduce one of my favorite features.

A big part of the problem is that we don’t measure externalities well. Like teachers and artists produce way more value than they’re paid for. Instead we only reward value that can be directly measured by your boss, and that value is compensated at as low a level as the boss can get away with.

I got my kids started on Scratch - I recommend it! Syntax is communicated with puzzle block shapes. Statements have a tab on the bottom, and a matching slot on top; number and string values are pill-shaped; boolean expressions are diamond-shaped. If the pieces fit together, it’s a valid program.

As a NixOS user, any drama that might be going on doesn’t affect my use of the software

I use a chat interface as a research tool when there’s something I don’t know how to do, like write a relationship with custom conditions using sqlalchemy, or I want to clarify my understanding on something. first I do a Kagi search. If I don’t find what I’m looking for on Stack Overflow or library docs in a few minutes then I turn to the AI.

I don’t use autocompletion - I stick with LSP completions.

I do consider environmental damage. There are a few things I do to try to reduce damage:

1. Search first
2. Search my chat history for a question I’ve already asked instead of asking it again.
3. Start a new chat thread for each question that doesn’t follow a question I’ve already asked.

On the third point, my understanding is that when you write a message in an LLM chat all previous messages in the thread are processed by the LLM again so it has context to respond to the new message. (It’s possible some providers are caching that context instead of replaying chat history, but I’m not counting on that.) My thinking is that by starting new threads I’m saving resources that would have been used replaying a long chat history.

I use Claude 4.5.

I ask general questions about how to do things. It’s most helpful with languages and libraries I don’t have a lot of experience with. I usually either check docs to verify what the LLM tells me, or verify by testing. Sometimes I ask for narrowly scoped code reviews, like “does this refactored function behave equivalently to the original” or “how could I rewrite this snippet to do this other thing” (with the relevant functions and types pasted into the chat).

My company also uses Code Rabbit AI for code reviews. It doesn’t replace human reviewers, and my employer doesn’t expect it to. But it is quite helpful, especially with languages and libraries that I don’t have a lot of experience with. But it probably consumes a lot more tokens than my chat thread research does.

I haven’t used Forgejo, but from the docs it looks like it’s actions system is nearly identical to Github’s. And yes, that sounds like a good case for a scheduled workflow

Dammit - now I’m cringing at the thought of datomaceous earth in the USB port!

Ah, space interns! Sounds a bit like Prodigy season 2.

My god what is even the point now?