Crypto is doing kind-of ok. But what about other blockchain apps and startups, or blockchain integrations into every tech imaginable? There were so many popping up, just like there are with AI now. Business models and use-cases that are based solely on the hype of the tech in question, without any consideration about whether it’s actually a good fit for the tech. That is the point, and what it has common with AI and other “buzzwords”.

I’m not sure about other countries, but here in Czech we actually have a mandatory subscription, that’s absolutely bullshit.

So far, the law is that if you own any TV or radio, you have to pay monthly fee for public service broadcasters (national Czech TV). It’s bullshit, the channels are full of ads anyway, and the shows they run and create is insultingly bad. Sure, it is important to have public service broadcasters that are not dependent on the state (because state-owned TV is reeaallly bad idea), but FFS can they just reduce costs and stick to news, instead of doing another stupid series, and stop forcing us to pay for something I don’t care about or use?

You could just not pay the fee, if you state you don’t have a TV capable of receiving it (which I don’t). But now, they are changing the law that everyone who has any kind of internet-capable device has to pay the monthly fee, while also rising prices to something like 6 EUR per month. Fuck that and fuck them.

Looks like I’ll finally get a reason to cut off another website I hate using, but never found the willpower to get rid off.

Good

This is actually a great question, in the context of the Fediverse.

Usually, every social network or forum has in their ELUA that anything you post is theirs, and you can’t do anything about i.e Reddit using your data to train AIs.

Hlwever, here, we’re on private instances of regular people. We can make our own rules, can’t we? If an instance would say that anything you post is copyrighted by the author, i.e by CC, would it be enforcable if someone would decide to scrape (or repost) the content for profit?

I suppose it’s written in a way to sound way worse and alarming than it actually is, due to the upcoming elections. It sounds almost unreal, i mean “EU secret plan to ban any kind of encryption or privacy” can’t be reallistically happening, right?

I know about Chatcontrol, so I wouldn’t be surprised, but this article sounds pretty overblown, to the point of sounding more like a wild conspiracy theory. Does anyone have more resources or info about this, that don’t read like an election ad?

I’m not trying to dismiss or disrespect the author, and I trust that it was written with best intentions, but it’s a really worrying topic about which I’d like to get more information about.

However, thanks for bringing it up, I contacted our local Pirate party about the topic, because they don’t have anything related to crime prevention vs. privacy in their programe. I suppose that I know what the answer would be, but getting a confirmation before I vote for them would definitely be nice.

I’d like to mention one exception, because it took me ages to properly debug.

If your endpoint is serving mirrors for APT, don’t redirect to HTTPS.

APT packages are signed and validated, so there is no need to use TLS. Lot of docker images (such as Kali) do not have root certificates by default, so they can’t use the TLS, because cert validation fails. You also can’t install the certificates, because they install through APT. If your local mirror redirects to https by default, it will break it for people who choose the mirror, which IIRC happens automatically based on what’s closest to you. I think this issue is still there for Czech Kali package mirror, and it took me so long to figure out (because it’s also not an issue for most of the users, since they have different mirrors), so I like mentioning this when talking http/s. It’s an edge case, but one that I find interresting - mostly because it would never occur to me that this can be an issue, when setting up a mirror.

But that was more than a year ago, it may be better now.

Btw, choco (and maybe even winget?) already has a gsudo tool, which implements sudo. It is super handy, and having a native version is definitely better, but before its available, I recommend gsudo.

Some kernel anticheats work too, I had no issues playing Helldivers and Hell Let Loose, both of which use EAC. Developers have to enable Linux support, which AFAIK is just one checkbox, so you still get games that don’t allow it (like EVE Vanguard), but most of them are OK.

League and Valorant is a different story, those don’t work.

We’ve had to work in Pharo for our OOP uni course, and it was one of the worse experiences I’ve had in school. Mind you, it was something like 7 years ago, so the language may very well be a lot better now, but the whole “your IDE is the code” felt cubersome, it was buggy and crashed randomly, and in general I spent more time fighting with the IDE than doing something useful.

It was a bad time, but also a great learning experience. Being forced to work in something that IMO sucks is an useful skill, but I never want to see that language again :D

I’m starting to think that “good code” is simply a myth. They’ve drilled a lot of “best practices” into me during my masters, yet no matter how mich you try, you will eventually end up with something overengineered, or a new feature or a bug that’s really difficult to squeeze into whatever you’ve chosen.

But, ok, that doesn’t proove anything, maybe I’m just a vad programmer.

What made me sceptical however isn’t that I never managed to do it right in any of my projects, but the last two years of experience working on porting games, some of them well-known and larger games, to consoles.

I’ve already seen several codebases, each one with different take on how to make the core game architecture, and each one inevitably had some horrible issues that turned up during bugfixing. Making changes was hard, it was either overengineersled and almost impenetrable, or we had to resort tonugly hacks since there simply wasn’t a way how to do it properly without rewriting a huge chunk.

Right now, my whole prpgramming knowledge about game aechitecture is a list of “this desn’t work in the long run”, and if I were to start a new project, I’d be really at loss about what the fuck should i choose. It’s a hopeless battle, every aproach I’ve seen or tried still ran into problems.

And I think this may be authors problem - ot’s really easy to see that something doesn’t work. " I’d have done it diferently" or “There has to be a better way” is something that you notice very quickly. But I’m certain that watever would he propose, it’d just lead to a different set of problems. And I suspect that’s what may ve happening with his leads not letting him stick his nose into stuff. They have probably seen that before, at it rarely helps.

I had the same issue with gamedev industry, but thankfully Ive very quickly realized that’s how work works, and you usually have a choice - either earn a good living being a code monkey, or find a job in a small company that has passion, but they won’t be able to afford paying you well, or do it in your free time as a hobby. Capitalism and passion doesn’t work together.

So I went to work part-time in cybersecurity, where the money is enough to reasonably sustain me, and use the free time to work on games in my free time. Recently, Ive picked up an amazing second part time job in a small local indie studio that is exactly the kind of environment I was looking for, with passion behind their projects - but they simply can’t afford to pay a competitive wage. But I’m not there for the money, so Ibdon’t mind and am happy to help them. Since there are no investors whose pocket you fill, but the company is owned by a bunch of my friends, I have no issue with being underpaid.

But it’s important to realize this as soon as possible, before trying to make a living with something you’re passionate about will burn you out. A job has one purpose - earn you a living. Companies will exploit every single penny they can out of you, so fuck them, don’t give them anything more than a bare minimum, and keep your energy for your own projects.

And be carefull with trying to earn a living on your own - because whatever you do, no matter how passionate are you, if it’s your only income and your life depends on it, you will eventually have to make compromises to get by. It’s better to keep money separate from whatever you like doing, and just keep your passion pure.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention one important thing - I’m fortunate to not have children, share living costs with a partner, and live in a city with good public transport, so no need for a car, and free healthcare. I suppose that makes it a lot more easier to get by with just a part time.

It helps a lot. Because then, a Linux support won’t be such an afterthought, and you wouldn’t have to deal with stuff like popular games adding anti-cheat that bans Linux users.

Right now, some game developers aren’t even willing to enable EAC Linux support, which is like a one checkbox they need to enable for it to work.

that got me thinking, is there any kind of statistic for average maintainer age for major FOSS projects and libraries? Is the influx of new maintainers still going strong, or should we expect a really huge problem in the next few decades?

Also, what are some good resources if you want to start with maintaining or collaborating on something, if you have zero experience with the dev side of FOSS ecosystem?

I don’t think surface would make for a good work laptop, but I have amazing experience so far with using it for the ocassional traveling, or just as a carry-on.

I just Parsec into my desktop at home, and can comfortably work without having to deal with performance, and Surface is amazing for that.

I also really like the pen support, so I can make notes or draw bascially anywhere.

And I also use it for DJing, where it works pretty well and is compact enough to not be a bother carrying it around.

Ooh, you are right, I can actually file bug reports or try to fix it myself now that I switched to FOSS from Windows. Tbh that didn’t really occur to me, since I was switching only like a month ago. I’ll look into it, so far I suspect that it’s actually covered by one of those troubleshooting cases mentioned in their FAQ, and I’m not really confident enough to start recompiling libraries with additional flags. Especially since I’m on Nobara and don’t want to break anything, AFAIK that OS is pretty customised from the start and figuring out what I can safely touch isn’t something I have the guts for yet.

Unfortunately, NVIDIA. I was buying a new PC half a year ago, and only started even considering to make the switch to Linux few months after that, so I am at a pretty unlucky point where I just had recently spent a lot of money for new-gen PC, but without knowing that I should really go for AMD.

I will make the switch to AMD as soon as it’s justifiable, but I’m too lazy to deal with second-hand resale and it’s hard to justify a new GPU when I still have the current gen, but from wrong manufacturer.

I’ve just had to switch back to X11 from Wayland on Nobara, because I couldn’t get Sunshine to work no matter what I tried, my windows were occasionally flickering black, and my taskbar kept freezing. So I guess I’ll wait a little bit more.

I’ve recently switched to Nobara, and has been unsure whether to go with Wayland or X11. Mostly because I’ve read that Wayland has issues on NVIDIA GPUs and will perform slower, so I went with X11 (On KDE). Is that still the case nowadays, or can I just use Wayland?

I went with Fedora when switching almost a month ago now, and I’ve been having issues with some games not working as expected, and also had trouble getting NVIDIA drivers to work correctly (which I’ve already solved, I hope). (And some applications weren’t working at all, such as Unity)

What would you consider as major advantages of Fedora, in addition to what you mentioned? So far, I usually couldn’t find a Fedora-specific version of the applications I wanted, unlike for other more well-known distributions. I do work as a programmer, which was also why I choose Fedora - I really like their Fedora Toolbox, but I would like to game regurarly on my PC and so far, it seems that Fedora doesn’t really handle it too well. Will I have similar issues on other distros, or will switching to something like Pop!OS be worth the time?

EDIT: Just found out about Nobara, I guess I’ll give that one a try.

How does Mint compares to Fedora? I decided to finally switch almost a month ago, and went with Fedora because it seemed like the best solution for general development, and I really like their Toolbox. However, I’ve been running into some issues mostly regarding gaming and NVIDIA drivers, and in general getting some applications to work on Fedora was more painful than apparently in most of the other systems.

So, should I switch, or will the Wine/Steam/Lutris experience be mostly the same on Mint as it is on Fedora?