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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’m now running quadlets on Garuda (my gaming/devbox), and Fedora. The impetus for this was needing to host service in an unprivileged way at work on RHEL9, so I got paid to do some learning with my own services.

    My laptop is running Bazzite, but no services there. I’ll move the server to silverblue or another image based distro when I finish extracting the rest of my misadventures to containers.


  • I’m definitely interested in your experience and why you came to those conclusions because I’m not sure I can agree on the primary points.

    But I have to give you the note. Root is also user space (if privileged). I’ve barely ever done anything actually in kernel space, so I guess it’s easy for me to screw that up.








  • Yeah, I can still smell the place in my memory. Proustian.

    I mostly worked on the “highway” line. 12 inch diameter by 10ft lengths, with drilled holes, wrapped with a fiberglass filter and packed in a bag. It was a 2 person task that has probably been more automated now. Those Vantage cigarettes man, they were really gross (and cheap) and he never took a step without one in his mouth. Lit one from the other, burning 2 at once, etc. You know, I’m probably the same age he was now.

    The fun part was watching the 4ft diameter double-wall line go at the same time. That shit failed about 50% of the time so we were always cutting it up on the giant bandsaw to feed into the industrial grinder.

    Ah, and that reminds me of working the coil lines. Giant bails of 3, 4, 6in. When we’d get bad runs, we’d splice them out, then feed the sometimes 50+ foot length into the grinder and run the fuck away because the other end would whip around. Workplace safety and all.

    Can’t believe my parents thought that was a good way to spend my summers. I’m sure they thought it would pay for college like their summer jobs did. All for about $3/hr over minimum wage. At least I got overtime too. Lifers like Dale (or was it Dan) had worked themselves up to a bit over triple minimum wage, or $16/hr. Lol, what benefits? This was a Christian Reformed (Calvinist) run business.


  • In highschool, I did 12/5 noon-midnight for 2 summers at a corrugated plastic pipe factory.

    It was grueling and hot and soul-crushingly monotonous. Have you ever listened to commercial top 40 radio for 12 hours next to >200F(100C) equipment? If I never hear Sting’s Desert Rose again, it will still be too soon. Or smell Dale’s chain-smoked vantage cigarettes (3.5 packs a shift, we made sure the fan was always in his direction).

    The output was steady, so it was also punishing to human events like hunger or toilet breaks.

    I can’t imagine doing it 6 days. As it was, I never saw friends, barely held a relationship, etc.




  • That’s certainly part of the motivation (see the 4th paragraph).

    Yes, image based. No, not Bazzite specifically, but silverblue (and kinoite) under the fedora banner directly.

    But that’s not really the point of the article. In order for those to go mainstream, flatpak and especially flathub have a lot of maturing to do first, and the author lays out a pretty good roadmap with thorough explanations.




  • If that’s the assertion you think I made, we’re not speaking the same language. Of course we’re rightly upset. But this article should have been more than mere ragebait.

    I’m taking issue with the article itself and that it doesn’t reach the right conclusion (or really any conclusion). With the notion that it’s ok at all for the government to be in a position where the whim of a shitbird, wannabe dictator toward a private person needs to be tempered against their business interests.

    In a way, Trump is right (for the wrong reasons of course) that these contracts should be reviewed. It’s utterly unacceptable to be backed into a “too big to fail” corner with a single company, especially when it comes to national security.

    I’m disappointed that an article from Mother Jones didn’t rail against this obvious and glaring issue with plutocracy/oligarchy: what the hell happens when the the next bromance dies and there aren’t any sanity checks left? Instead, because it’s missing, the article effectively further entrenches the notion that privatization of every aspect of government is right and good.


  • But it’s the review itself, that it happened at all, that should cause considerable alarm, even if it involves an unsympathetic character such as Elon Musk.

    Why should it cause alarm? It’s just more of the same trashing of whatever catches their eye at a given moment as everything else has been.

    Because it’s revenge? Like Trump hasn’t done a hundred things like cancelling federal contracts for projects out of spite already?

    No, we’re well past this pearl clutching already.

    If anything, this should be a wakeup call to Americans about the dangers of being too reliant on private companies for public needs.