I definitely understand; but it’s good that you are angry, because that means you are human.

Youtube tip everyone needs to now: remove the si query parameter, it’s not necessary and used for tracking

From

https://youtu.be/LKCVKw9CzFo?si=06X6O91R9pX_8UbX

Into

https://youtu.be/LKCVKw9CzFo

https://youtu.be/LKCVKw9CzFo

The best thing is to use a different device, period.

Since the company is lord and master over the device, in theory, they can see anything you’re doing.
Maybe not decrypting wireguard traffic in practice, but still see that you’re doing non-official things on the device that are probably not allowed. They might think you’re a whistleblower or a corporate spy or something.

I have no idea where you work, but if they install a CA they’re probably have some kind of monitoring to see what programs are installed/running.

If the company CA is all you’re worried about, running a browser that uses its own CA list should be enough.

And those 8 really rich guys definitely work less than 5 days a week already

Wow, who would have thought?

It seems the AI hype is shrinking (or at least slowing down), since people are more and more critical of it: intellectual property, workers rights, power consumption, climate impacts, usefulness and more.

If you want more reading, I recommend these:

I can’t recommend Ed Zitron’s blog enough: Where’s your Ed at

He did an interview with Adam Conover a month ago, which was also really interesting.

The other blog I highly recommend is The Luddite, e.g. Why is there an AI hype?

Well yes, assuming that:

1. you trust the hardware manufacturer
2. you can install your own keys (i.e. not locked by vendor)
3. you secure your bios with a secure password
4. you disable usb / network boot

With this you can make your laptop very tamper resistant. It will be basically impossible to tamper with the bootloader while the laptop is off. (e.g install keylogger to get disk-encryption password).

What they can do, is wipe the bios, which will remove your custom keys and will not boot your computer with secure boot enabled.

Something like a supply-side attack is still possible however. (e.g. tricking you into installing a malicious bootloader while the PC is booted)

Always use security in multiple layers, and to think about what you are securing yourself from.

Also, this recent classic: I will fucking piledrive you if you mention AI again was really illuminating.

In the last few years, Valve (company behind the popular Steam PC games store) has made huuuge efforts in making most games work well on Linux, because the Steam Deck console that they sell runs on Linux, and the compatibility layer they made is called Proton.

To check what games work well on Linux you should look in the ProtonDB.

If there are games that only work on Windows, you could do dual booting.

This cat co-authored a paper

Irish Unification of 2024, let’s gooooo

Hier ist ein alternatives Bild

Defend Trans Kids!

It’s probably best to limit yourself to a used laptop.

Reading and writing code is nothing more than reading and writing text, and for that you don’t need a fancy gpu or screen.

What I would recommend you look for in a laptop is

• an SSD instead of an HDD
• more cpu cores (at least 4 cores)
• more memory (RAM) (at least 8GB, preferably 16GB+)

More memory and cores will help you with compiling and running your code.

And make sure you take regular backups! You never know when your disk will fail.

Also make sure to check linux compatibility before you buy. Laptops used to be a pain (10+ years ago), and it’s gotten a lot better, but it’s not always perfect. Just search for “[brand] [model] linux” or try to find the model on the archlinux wiki.

I will also never buy a spaceship /j

That movie is WarGames (1983)

And don’t just fork it on GitHub, if the original repo gets deleted, any forks might too.

Also do a git clone locally, or set up a mirror on another host.

The feedback from the Inkscape project is a great read.

Excerpt:

Over time, I have notice that the contributions from volunteers in the USA have waned, while those from the EU have increased dramatically.

Mandatory Bourdain Quote

Hold on, not all my money goes to healthcare in my for-profit healthcare system??