z3rOR0ne

I’ll push back a bit on this, though I generally agree with you. I’ve only worked for a small startup as my career in tech is still in its infancy, but in previous roles I’ve had in other industries, this cult like aspect of corporatism pervades to varying degrees.

That said, when I first started socializing and networking with those involved in the tech sector, I noticed that there definitely is a subsection of the tech industry predominated by those who, in my view, took the concept of "There’s God In The Machine” thing way too far.

This subsection seems to be mainly populated by those who have only a passing understanding of the tech itself and don’t actually write the code or architect the software. This subsection also seems to be populated by those who can code and do architect the software, but appear to me to have a selfish and shortsighted mindset reminiscent of stock traders and crypto bros, communities for which I personally have a particular disdain.

This obsession and claim that tech can do anything from save the world to destroy the planet is very dangerous as it is a perceived pseudo reality that many people, both with power and not, seem to be desperately trying to make real (mainly fueld by a fear of the future and a desire to have some semblence of control over it through power mongering and vacuuming up influence in the present).

And this problem of progress for its own sake with some ambiguous “tech will save us” mindset is only recently exacerbated by the claim that these chatbots are AI (IMHO making a mockery of the term, intelligence).

Additionally, among this subsection, there seems to be an almost ravenous push for AGI, which, whether a boon or blight on future generations of humanity, they tend to argue is an inevitable outcome because technological and economic progress can never be nor should be slowed or halted.

I have definitely encountered this sort of “progress at all cost” mindset in other industries, but never have I seen it so vehemently defended among a not insignificant subsection of an entire economic sector (tech). And I’d imagine it is particularly pronounced in the major FAANG companies.

If you follow Ed Zitron’s other work, his recent articles and podcast episodes highlight a sort of “Villain of The Week” format, and so I don’t think it’s lost on him that this problem is not solely the purview of Microsoft, but rather is an indicator of a larger societal problem.

Indeed the issue Zitron is highlighting here is simply the newest incarnation of the strange cultish mantle that the Tech Industry can and has taken on in recent memory. The topic of Tech Work as Religion/Cult is thoroughly explored in the 2022 book, Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley, by Carolyn Chen.

I recently got fitgirl’s Cyberpunk 2077 repack working on Artix Linux with Lutris by following this guide:

It doesn’t take into account you also need to use GEProton as well (for Cyberpunk at least), but its easy enough to install GEProton via ProtonUp, and then just configuring the game to use GEProton in the settings via lutris.

I got mangohud working as well, that was relatively simple.

I also noticed that I needed to install and setup dxvk as an overlay for Vulkan.

Yeah, it was a lot of setup and you need plenty of hard drive space as both the repack and the installed game are huge (have double the space available listed on the repack site).

I have the game on Steam, but wanted to know how to do this, and it was not as bad as I thought it would be.

Well, they produced Oxenfree 2 which was a welcome sequel that I enjoyed. But other than that, I didn’t really hear about anything else from them.

To be fair. I get where they’re coming from. Some people simply don’t want to take the time to learn the Linux command line nor learn how to utilize the tool, balena etcher.

That said, if one says “Is there a way to simply install a Linux OS”, I usually assume said person has at least a passing familiarity with burning an ISO as that is the bare minimum knowledge for starting the Linux installation process.

Hence my assumption that they were familiar with said tools when they asked the question.

I meant a workstation OS. Or any Linux OS that’s not locked to a corporate account and probably filled with spyware.

Yes, though I have not tried to utilize this:

https://github.com/Quill-OS/quill

I don’t even understand the first sentence of these instructions. “Mount the device” followed by a bunch of seemingly random letters and characters. Mount it on what? What do I do with these?

These instructions require a very basic understanding of the Linux command line and file system. As does installing a Linux OS without a GUI helper.

The Kobo EReader is already a Linux machine.

As far as bypassing the sign up, here are my quick notes on how to do so step by step.

1. Buy a Kobo EReader.

2. Hack the EReader so you don’t have to sign up with Walmart.

3. Install Calibre on your PC.

4. Install Kobo Driver Extension for Calibre.

5. Use a VPN (I prefer Mullvad), and go to your favorite Book piracy website for epubs.

6. Download epub books.

7. Connect Kobo device to your PC via USB.

8. Use Calibre to upload epub books to Kobo.

9. Disconnect Kobo from PC.

10. Profit.

Librewolf and Duckduckgo Lite.

Yes DDG Bangs are a great fast way of getting around the web. Works really well with LibRedirect. Here’s a Full List of DDG Bangs.

IIRC, other Cloud providers like Digital Ocean and Linode provide S3 storage solutions that have a flat fee for a certain GB amount of storage.

Oh yeah, here’s Some More News on that.

We need you Lina Khan. We need you, but stronger, faster, better. Let’s fucking go.

Just use firejail to sandbox it and find out.

I’ll second this request. I prefer to get software through FDroid when possible. I use Stealth in combo with Libreddit currently, but this has a nice UI.

Can you recommend me more than a few hardcore leftist content creators exclusively releasing content on Odyssee?

Xenogears for the PS1 had one of the best combat systems I’ve ever played. Tied with Star Ocean 2 for the PS1. There’s a remake which I think they overhauled the combat system, so I’m not sure if it still is as good as the first edition, but the customizability was amazing.

After that Grandia was fun, but I played it far less than the aforementioned, so have less to say. Chrono Trigger was very good for what it was, and IMHO was only matched by FF6 in that category (heavy turn based combat systems). Chrono Cross is an honorable mention in that category as well.

Lastly, very recently the Sea of Stars game had a very good combat system.

Ultimately these games have great stories, and that’s all I really cared about, but the combat systems could either make or break the monotonous grind to get to the plot points, so they had to be at least decent to make the games playable.

I highly recommend any of these games. Chrono Trigger in particular is highly regarded as possibly the greatest JRPG of all time, and personally I’d put Xenogears at 2nd place, with Star Ocean 2 at 3rd. But I might just be nostalgic.

Tell that to Linus Torvalds.

Just use ddg bangs if you use Duckduckgo and you can search reddit directly.

!reddit search term

It still picks up latest posts related to reddit, it just searches reddit directly instead of searching Bing’s results. It’s that simple.

Lol. Emphasis on the H in IMHO. I meant no offense, it’s a valid point.

I have about 25 or so shell scripts I use somewhat regularly and well over 300 aliases. I actually specifically don’t wrap package manager related scripts for no reason in particular, but many often do.

My rule for an alias is if the amount of custom flags gets lengthy, and I use it often, yeah it gets an alias. Here’s an example of using yt-dlp:

alias ytdl='yt-dlp --sponsorblock-remove all --write-auto-sub -f "bestvideo\*+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best" -f mp4'

For shell scripts, my rule goes that it should probably have multiple features related around a single idea, that way you can use getopts to create custom flags. For example, I have a script that wraps very basic, but commonly used, git commands, chaining the classic add, commit -m, and push behind a series of read prompts, it has -h flags for help -l for a minimal log output, -i to initialize a new repository (even using github api token to remotely create the repo if you want to use github), and -r to revert back changes to a specified commit.

Generally speaking aliases will get you what you need most of the time in a pinch, but shell scripting is more powerful, versatile, but potentially more time consuming.

Others have rightly pointed out that these abstractions can sometimes negatively impact muscle memory, but IMHO this only really applies if you work as devops or sysadmin, where you are often responsible for running many different Linux servers, but usually this isn’t an issue if you have access to the internet and can see your saved aliases and/or scripts (but yeah, instant recall of native commands trumps notes every time).

Additionally, another mentioned using git to keep track of your aliases, which I totally agree with. Whatever you do, back up your aliases and shell scripts, ideally with a git repo of some kind. This not only allows you to take your new scripts/aliases with you wherever you go, but also reference them later in case it’s not possible to use them on not your machine.

Hope this helps. Bash can be crazy powerful if you take the time to learn it, and aliases are a great entry point to recognizing that potential. Here’s one of my favorites that combines mkdir with cd:

alias mkcd='{ IFS= read -r d && mkdir "$d" && cd "$d"; } <<<' 

Good luck, and have fun.