I appreciate him trying to drum up excitement for the terminal. A lot of people are afraid of it and I understand why, but you don’t need to know everything about it in order to benefit from it.

I wanted to post some Trackmania replays to Bluesky when they first rolled out video, but they only supported up to 50MB. I dreaded having to open kdenlive, figure out how to work the GUI and then also possibly have to do some terrible math to balance size and quality. Maybe this is easier than I expected, but I found this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/520597/how-to-reduce-the-size-of-a-video-to-a-target-size

ffmpeg_resize () {
    file=$1
    target_size_mb=$2  # target size in MB
    target_size=$(( $target_size_mb * 1000 * 1000 * 8 )) # target size in bits
    length=`ffprobe -v error -show_entries format=duration -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 "$file"`
    length_round_up=$(( ${length%.*} + 1 ))
    total_bitrate=$(( $target_size / $length_round_up ))
    audio_bitrate=$(( 128 * 1000 )) # 128k bit rate
    video_bitrate=$(( $total_bitrate - $audio_bitrate ))
    ffmpeg -i "$file" -b:v $video_bitrate -maxrate:v $video_bitrate -bufsize:v $(( $target_size / 20 )) -b:a $audio_bitrate "${file}-${target_size_mb}mb.mp4"
}

ffmpeg_resize file1.mp4 25 # resize `file1.mp4` to 25 MB
ffmpeg_resize file2.mp4 64 # resize `file2.mp4` to 64 MB

I’m not proficient in bash enough to have written this myself, but even I can glance over this and see it’s just doing some math for me while invoking two programs: ffprobe and ffmpeg. Easy peasy.

I put this in my ~/.bashrc and use it all the time now, it’s almost silly how simple this has made things. I get why nerds get super attached to their profiles now, I’m collecting a bunch of scripts and functions that just make life easier.

Currently I’m working on writing some scripts with ratbagctl (https://github.com/libratbag/libratbag) so when I launch a game through Steam it’ll automatically set my Logitech mouse profile for that game. You know, the thing the Logitech mouse software makes you sign up for an account and connect to the internet for. All of the control, none of the bloat 😝

For those not in the know, “Trusted Computing” is a very specific THING and maybe not what you’d expect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing

TC is controversial as the hardware is not only secured for its owner, but also against its owner, leading opponents of the technology like free software activist Richard Stallman to deride it as “treacherous computing”,[3][4] and certain scholarly articles to use scare quotes when referring to the technology.[5][6]

You can pretty much guess where I land.

a backup of your bitlocker key is in your Microsoft account, and normally nowhere else. It’s pretty easy for Microsoft to lock you out of your ow computer and data completely, if they wanted.

You make a good point, I’m missing the forest for the trees. Why even bother theorizing that BitLocker may be compromised when they’re removing local accounts for consumers and forcing the key to be uploaded to their servers anyway?

Yep! They don’t teach this stuff because consumer level cyber security is in the absolute pits of despair and moreover, they’re trying to do away with what little we have access to. Governments and police agencies like how easy it is to access files.

Personally I don’t bother with full disk encryption (FDE) since I don’t really have anything private on my main computer. Just a bunch of game files, comics, movies, etc. Anything extremely important such as tax documents, personal data, etc. is honestly very small and I keep in a little Proton Drive folder, <1GB total. I think the best approach is to simply educate yourself and be aware of what’s worth protecting and how best to protect that. Just enabling FDE and thinking you’re safe ignores all the other avenues that personal data can be stolen.

My current pet conspiracy theory is that FDE with BitLocker isn’t even worth it on Windows due to the TPM requirement. Why is that a bad thing? Your system probably has fTPM supported by the BIOS, why not just enable that?

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windows-itpro-blog/tpm-2-0-–-a-necessity-for-a-secure-and-future-proof-windows-11/4339066

Integrating with features like Secure Boot and Windows Hello for Business, TPM 2.0 enhances security by ensuring that only verified software is executed and protecting confidential details.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5283799 (I don’t believe we’ll see this EXACT implementation of DRM, I’m just providing an example of TPM being used for DRM and that these ideas have been in consideration since at least 2009).

Now, if I were Microsoft and I wanted to exert an excessive amount of control over your system by making sure you couldn’t run any inauthentic or “pirated” software to bring it more inline with the walled garden Apple approach they’ve been salivating over for the past decade+, you’d first need to ensure you had a good baseline enabled. You know, kind of like the thing you’d do by forcing everyone into an OS upgrade and trashing a lot of old hardware.

It won’t be instantaneous, I don’t know exactly how or what it’s going to look like when they start tightening their grip. Again, this is all speculation, but it’s not hard to connect the dots and their behavior over the past couple years does not give them the benefit of the doubt. Microsoft is no longer a company that can be assumed to be acting in the best interest of the average consumer, they’re not doing this for your security. They want to know that your computer is a “trusted platform”.

EDIT: Further lunatic conspiracy theories: BitLocker is/will be backdoored so Microsoft forcing you into that ecosystem further guarantees they have access to your system. This all stinks to me, like your landlord telling you how you can arrange the furniture in your own apartment.

Arch gets a bad rep, but I think it’s a great first distro for anyone with moderate or above skills. The primary factor is that you have to actually be interested in learning it, not looking for something that “just works”.

I use Arch on my beefy gaming PC and I run updates every day because I’m a dork. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve had better stability doing this than with the monthly patches on Windows. That’s not to say there haven’t been issues, Windows sets a low bar. But here in this year 2025, the “innovation” of paid software is excessive and often not worth the cost of dealing with service subscriptions and whatnot. The software in FOSS land tends to be more conservative in its construction with a focus on doing the thing it’s supposed to and usability. People want their distros to work, it’s not like Arch maintainers are just breaking it all over the place because, “oopsy, gotta stay up to date!”

Anyways, here’s how I prioritize things:

1. pacman: This should be your PRIMARY source. Think of everything in the official Arch repos as part of the OS, just things you haven’t installed on your system yet because you don’t need it. The most care has been put into ensuring all these packages work together and I have the highest confidence that these will be maintained for the greatest duration into the future. One of the big benefits of using pacman is that especially with Arch, you upgrade your entire system at once with pacman -Syu. Conversely on Windows, you have to update all software yourself by either downloading a newer version and running the installer, having the program install a system tray icon to pester you, MAYBE the program implements a self/auto update? Or maybe it prompts you for an update and then just sends you to the website to download the latest version and install it yourself. Kind of a mess, really.
2. yay: If I want a piece of software that’s not part of the main distribution, I’ll turn to the Arch User Repository (AUR). If it helps, just think of this as the unofficial pacman. It downloads the files from the AUR and builds them directly on your system (all using scripts, using yay is as easy as using pacman). The downside is that because the AUR is unofficial, occasionally things can break when something in the official repository updates. It happens from time to time, but you can always check the AUR pages and see that people are on top of things for popular programs. It’s fine to place your trust in the AUR (IMHO) but if you have an absolutely critical app that cannot afford to break, maybe consider a flatpak or appimage instead.
3. flatpaks: again, this is another package manager that behaves much like pacman and yay do. The difference here is that flatpaks are contained. This makes a big difference especially with Arch since the whole system updates at once with Syu. The biggest downside (IMHO) is space, a package that might only take ~15MB from the official repo may instead be >300MB when packaged with all its dependencies in a flatpak. I think this is what the Discover Software Center actually hooks into but I’m not sure since I do all command line. You could, if you wanted, begin uninstalling applications you installed through pacman (obviously not system related ones) and install the flatpaks in their place. For reasons I still don’t understand myself, the OBS that you install through pacman doesn’t have browser sources available, but the one I installed from https://flathub.org/ does. I need the browser sources so I’ve made that decision, I’ll switch back to the official repo one if they ever get that sorted.
4. AppImages: AppImages are entirely self-contained. Download a .AppImage and you can place it almost anywhere on your system and it’ll run, no requirement for further dependencies. It doesn’t install, however it will still create files on the system required for its operation such as anything needed under ~/.config or wherever. To update these, you just need to download the newer file.

I hope that helps a little bit, let me know if you’d like further clarification on any of the points.

It seems like a lot when you’re first learning, but I keep all my notes in Obsidian and once you understand how you’re building the stack of software on your Arch installation I think it’ll click for you. To fully update my system I run:

• pacman -Syu
• yay -Sua
• flatpak update

You can update pacman packages with yay, and you can update flatpaks with Discover (I think) but I do it this way just because I’m meticulous and I like keeping my eye on things. Still, pretty easy I think?

Being kinda serious for a second here, I think this is a byproduct of chasing ever higher production values in service of “realism”. The more they try to spackle over all the cracks, the more the ones they can’t/don’t become obvious to the player. Just like movies, videogames often require a bit of temporary suspension of disbelief.

I’m not gonna write a whole essay about chasing some perfect, mythical balance here, but it’s a design aspect that I feel a lot of developers just don’t consider at all. Maintaining a high level of illusion is extremely difficult and not even always all that worth it. Sometimes it’s just nice to admit you don’t know why that enemy dropped a glowing hamburger that restored 25% health, but those are the rules you’re playing by and you don’t have to question it.

A lot of the advice out there is anecdotal - ask a dozen people, get a dozen answers.

For my part, I installed plain Arch on a custom built system. I use the Nvidia proprietary drivers for my 3080 and I’ve had no issues with drivers or gaming. If you’re talking retro, RetroArch or other assorted emulators have you covered no prob. If you’re talking modern stuff, Elden Ring works online with its Easy Anti-Cheat and I play a ton of Trackmania which chains Uplay launcher (ugh) and have even managed to install mods with Openplanet which is a Windows only mod manager. One time my friend was telling me about an old Windows 3.1 pinball game. I downloaded it from abandonware (https://www.myabandonware.com/game/3-d-ultra-pinball-creep-night-3fh) and just launched the installer with WINE, it even placed a shortcut for it on my app launcher (kinda hated that actually 😅). I feel like that worked more flawlessly than it would have on Windows 11. Most games simply launch with Proton, however sometimes you do get weird issues that may involve trying some different versions of Proton. Dark Souls III for example still gets angry at anything beyond 8.X or whatever.

I think a lot of people look at the troubleshooting you have to do in Linux and dread it as an utter failstate of the system. Not true. In Windows when your system is hosed you’re likely down for a reinstall or patiently waiting for Microsoft to do their part and patch it. On Linux, when something goes wrong you pop the hood and take a look. You don’t HAVE to do it, you GET to do it.

Moral of the story is, your best bet is to try a dual boot if you can and give it a go yourself. I suspect the issues a lot of people are having is because they get too carried away with customizations and system configs. I try to keep most things basic unless I have a really good reason to alter them.

Just used the default for one big partition. I used to do tedious partition configurations, but it always ended up biting me down the road more than helping. This drive is for the OS, games, and working files. I have a 16TB NAS that holds anything worth saving, so if I need to nuke the whole thing and do a reinstall, all I really end up doing is downloading a bunch of Steam games again.

Took them long enough! Nobody but tourists drive down there anyways, if you’re on Pike Place you made a bad decision.

I’m a big Linux advocate these days and my best advice is to set realistic expectations. If your intent is to recreate your Windows experience exactly, you’ll always be left disappointed. There’s simply nothing better than OneNote at what it does, but I migrated my note taking habits over to Obsidian and I’m perfectly happy there now. Turns out I didn’t need 90% of OneNote’s immense functionality.

At the end of the day though, Linux is FOSS: it’s made by people, for people, to solve the computing problems people have. There are a variety of solutions out there. Reexamine your workflows and be open to fitting new solutions to them, there are just SO MANY choices out there for how to handle most problems.

Aside from that, there’s always going to be a small learning curve. People tend to view that as simply a hassle that takes time to overcome and while that’s not entirely wrong, it very much undercuts the real value of learning how to operate and maintain the OS that you most likely use every day, all day. It’s extremely hard to accurately describe the value of investing that time and having an OS that isn’t bloated with corporate nonsense and fighting you to dictate your workflows into their intended patterns so they can agitate you with ads and paid services at every step. There’s a reason we all come out sounding like zealots and while I acknowledge it can feel a little cult-ish, who you gonna trust? Your online nerd community or a corporation who has shown time and time again that they do not value you as an individual user?

Whoa! Raving lunatic garbage.

Attempting to engage with this somewhat sincerely, is “length of tasks AIs can do” a meaningful metric? It’s not one I’ve seen discussed before and seems like an attempt to wildly speculate on moving goalposts when better informed metrics don’t paint the enthusiastic success they want …

But also lol

It’s not entirely clear from the post, but allow me to provide some further context as I received this same pop-up myself.

I had purchased a legit Windows 10 Pro license with my own money for a custom built PC. Was always a trim installation because that’s how I roll. Still got this out of nowhere when I booted back into my Windows partition the other day, was unclear what app or process pushed it. Some update either added a new app responsible for pushing these desktop level ads or enabled a pre-existing notification feature I had previously disabled. Just a typical Win10 toast notification a few moments after logging in. Dismissed it quickly and did not care to investigate, but that’s about as bad as you can really get, IMHO. They’ve slowly been pushing the bounds, but here we are: ads straight to the desktop.

I use Arch on all my systems now. It does great for gaming on both my beefy gaming PC and my little work laptop (within their respective punching weights). I haven’t felt the need to explore CachyOS or any other variants for performance gains and I really do appreciate how bare bones Arch is. Just having the lightweight OS that isn’t doing a darn thing beyond what I’ve asked it to claws back plenty of performance, although I’m speaking more in contrast to Windows than other distros having any sort of bloat.

Still, Arch has been the first distro I really committed to, I’ve been on it for a year and a half now and learning how to build it out taught me a lot about Linux.

Also, I’m just never sure how long some of this offshoot distros will hold on for, you know? Is that unfounded?

Second paragraph?

Tesla is just the latest to see the symbol of bearishness, which occurs when a company’s 50-day moving average crosses and drops below the 200-day average.

As an example,

https://assets.finbold.com/uploads/2024/06/What-is-a-death-cross--1024x631.jpg

The aesthetic is impeccable, but I can’t even begin to see anything from the trailer that makes this stand out as an MP shooter? I was already not interested in the slightest because I’m just not down for any sort of GaaS these days, I want single player experiences, but WTF was that?

They threw in some kinda line about death not being the end … in 2025? Death and rebirth is not a new thing. Go play Deathloop instead, I think it’s tragically underrated and the MP can be totally ignored if you like, although its asymmetric design is also interesting if you want to engage with it.

Right? It’s amazing how easy it is to stand up to people who can’t do anything about it!

As an American close to the tech industry, I’m often jealous of the GDPR. I understand it may not be perfect and often feels restrictive, but I think we’re seeing the results of unfettered “innovation” here in America right now and realizing that most of this “innovation” is not anything any of us ever wanted or needed and not nearly worth the price.

At some point in the past I noticed there is no longer an option to even opt-out of most emails. When purchasing something from a site, they’ll usually get my email as part of the ordering process and while I have searched and searched, most don’t make any indication for opting out. You’ll only notice days later when you’re getting spammed with promotions, sometimes daily.

As well, further restrictions must’ve been loosened because there are companies I’ve dealt with years ago that have begun emailing me promotions. Just the other week I got an email from a company that sounded vaguely familiar but I couldn’t recall. When I searched my inbox, I had bought a custom USB cable from them nearly 6 years ago.

Complete and utter lack of respect for consumer privacy. Disgusting. I hate it here.

“It trivialises what we’re facing,” says epidemiologist Michael Osterholm.

Oh, OK. So it’s worse than “zombie deer disease”. Cool. Cool, cool, cool.

I cannot upvote this enough. “Just migrate to X, it’s every bit as good!” when end users know it’s not is a disingenuous argument and even if they don’t have the technical know-how to explain exactly why they feel this way, they’ll feel the deception. It only reinforces a growing distrust in tech.

The argument has to be made honestly. It’s not quite as good, but almost. Those few things you’ll miss will require an adjustment, but the overall value (a lot of times just literally, it costs less!) will become evident.

I know we’re all Linux nerds here and enthused to get people onboard, but the battle right now we’re facing is one of trust and security and must be grounded in those notions because while great strides have been made in convenience and accessibility, big corps will always be able to bankroll themselves over those points.

As someone who has worked in the tech industry near Seattle, I don’t know how well known it is to the wider populace or people in Europe, but open source is absolutely anathema here. It’s seen as insecure, unstable, and unreliable.

I work in IT so I’ve tangentially worked across a number of sectors supporting their stacks and it’s pervasive within the American culture. There is a major de-prioritization of in-house IT knowledge and sysadmins in favor of enterprise support contracts. When shit hits the fan, it’s less important to have a knowledgeable team and more important to have a foot to stamp down on until the issue is resolved. Often that foot has another foot that stamps down, onward and onward until someone manages to engage the MSP or cloud provider that set the service up initially with their scant documentation.

It’s a nightmare both for tech workers and from a cyber security perspective. A lot of this contains my own personal bias and perspective on the matters, but let me say, I have stared into the void and I can’t stop screaming.

I think one of my favorite examples was using simple salt to trap them within the confines of white lines that they didn’t think they could cross over. I really appreciate the imagery of using salt circles to entrap the robotic demons …