Real talk: so do I. Part of it is just being a computer nerd, part of it is working in IT, part of it has just been curiously testing Linux.

I have had more stability doing this over the course of a year than I had running the monthly Microsoft updates on Windows 10. On the rare occasions something broke (usually my own tinkering and not the update process) simply reinstalling it actually fixed the problem 90%+. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but I was legit surprised and thought I would have slightly more problems with a bleeding edge distro.

As well, it’s great to be able to just update everything with one simple command on the command line rather than having each application install an updater task that sometimes sits down in the system tray doing nothing but nagging you. Or having a program prompt you for an upgrade only to take you to the download page and make you basically reinstall the app over the old version with questionable results every time …

I don’t even know what to say about this mess, but yes: that’s enterprise pricing. It doesn’t need to be that way, but it can be because those are the kind of prices you can charge businesses. And really, just as a pleasant capitalistic side effect of this, is that the lower classes are completely locked off form this technology. It’s not a mystery, it’s not a conspiracy, it’s business. And I hate it.

We were so aggrieved by the lack of communication that we decided to proceed with our incredibly drastic reaction without communicating to anyone …

History from someone who moved to the platform early on:

A lot of the early adopters were the queer and trans community, first to leave Twitter after Musk’s meddling and most sensitive to the changes he was making. (In this context I don’t mean sensitive as in “snowflake”, I mean sensitive as in “aware of inevitable changes and resultant catastrophe” - when someone shits in the pool you don’t wait wait for the water to turn brown). They took the gross out humor and used it as a ward to keep some of the other elements from following over. Now they defend the term as history.

I don’t particularly agree, I understand the basis for it but ugh, it’s still gross. I keep advocating for “bleats” which kind of works as “Bluesky tweet” and leans into us all being sheep; something I find cute and take no offense at because it’s a toothless insult wielded by deeply unserious people. Alternatively, I think we should’ve just straight stolen tweet since the trademark or whatever has been abandoned at this point (???). Failing that, I’ll probably resort to just calling them posts, there’s no point in fighting momentum like this and I imagine it’ll probably settle down onto something else once the platform gets over its first wave of serious growing pains … if it lives that long.

This is the book that introduced me to the Chinese Room thought experiment and is the first thing I began to think of when the recent AI trend started to make a splash.

Peter Watts is great and though it’s not related to the topic at hand, I cannot recommend Starfish enough. Dark, haunting, and psychological. (It’s apparently part of a series but I never carried on)

38/M/US

Home is a very complicated question that’s going to mean a lot of different things to people emotionally, so I try not to get too prescriptive about my own definition. I moved away from my rural upbringing as soon as I could and I never really looked back. It was not a place I enjoyed or felt like I belonged either. I kind of lost my sense of home and I can’t say it’s something I really look for anymore. It feels too permanent for me. To me, home is a treasure that must be hard fought, then protected, and can therefore always be lost. I don’t think I want a home anymore.

What I want is a sense of belonging. That seems a lot easier to manage because it’s built out of the values and interests I’ve made for myself. I bring it with me wherever I go. I’m free to change it or grow as I like. I try to match it to the people and places around me to see if I like them and if it works for me and if I’m happy. I moved from the rural town I grew up in to a larger city in my state. Then I moved several thousands of miles across the country and spent most of my 20’s and 30’s here. During that time I’ve moved to several small towns and suburbs around the larger city. I’m thinking of moving again, this time outside the country. I’m still excited by the prospect, and afraid.

I assume a lot of this is probably just some psychological phenomenon that is inducing a fake/unreal fantasy. I assume even if I could move to some other country I might not feel as joyful like when I was a kid and even if I do, at some point it might not feel special anymore and it might not be like I hoped.

So maybe this is just this classic “the grass seems always greener on the other side” thing and in reality it might not be like that.

I do think these things are at least partly true and it’s perceptive of you to point that out, but it shouldn’t discourage you either. It’s a very human thing to want to try. Just set your expectations, I don’t know that you’ll simply find a new home. You’re going to have to bring some of it with you, you’re going to have to make some of it on your own, and you’re going to have to ask for help along the way.

If you’ve got Logitech, check out Piper (which is really just a GUI wrapper for libratbag). After a lot of searching, this ended up being the solution I went with.

EDIT: pulled up the link but then forgot to paste it, sorry! https://github.com/libratbag/piper

KDE is Windows 98, full of fun customizations, but unpolished in odd ways no matter what you do.

Absolutely perfect. And part of why I’ve grown to love it.

Your initial post and response here describe my position as well.

Simply put, to follow individuals, you have to be where those individuals are. On Lemmy here in looking for topics and discussion, those are much easier to decentralize.

1000% this. Without giving away too much information, I work(ed) for a cloud provider (not one of the big ones, there are a surprising number of smaller ones in the field you’ve probably never heard of before). I quit this week to take a position in local government with some quaint, on-prem setup.

1. We were always understaffed for what we promised. Two guys per shift and if one of us took vacation; oops, lol. No extra coverage, just deal.
2. Everyone was super smart but we didn’t have time to work the tickets. Between crashes, outages, maintenance, and horrendous tickets that took way too much work to dig into, there was just never enough time. If you had a serious problem that took lengthy troubleshooting, good luck!
3. We over-promised on support we could provide, often taking tickets that were outside of infrastructure scope (guest OS shit, you broke your own server, what do you want me to do about it?) and working them anyway to please the customer or forwarding them directly to one of our vendors and chaining their support until they caught wise and often pushed back.
4. AI is going to ruin Support. To be clear, there will always be support and escalation engineers who have to work real problems outside the scope of AI. However without naming names, there’s a big push (it’ll be everyone before too long, mark it) for FREE tier support to only chat with AI bots. If you need to talk to a real human being, you gotta start dishing out that enterprise cash.

Mix all that together and then put the remaining pressure on the human aspect still holding things up and there’s a collapse coming. Once businesses get so big they’re no longer “obligated” to provide support, they’ll start charging you for it. This has always been a thing of course, anyone who’s worked enterprise agreements knows that. But in classic corpo values, they’re closing the gap. Pay more for support, get less in return. They’ll keep turning that dial until something breaks catastrophically, that’s capitalism baby.

Check out https://www.giuspen.net/cherrytree/, lightweight note-taking app with interesting scripting function built in.

Even if that’s not your cup of tea, it has the option to save your notebook to a single sqlite file, so I take that as good enough proof it’ll work for your similar purposes as well.

So it could possibly be construed to “Microsoft’s Dirty Operating System”, yeah?

In response to a perfectly valid question about dumbass plan I just came up with:

“we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it”