My incredible hatred and rage for not understanding things powers me on the cycle of trying and failing hundreds of times till I figure it out. Then I screw it all up somehow and the cycle begins again.

Handles graphics drivers, printer drivers, looks like a windows without the influence of advertisers, what I consider a consistent theme, and best of all it is mind numbingly boring. Prepare yourself for the heart pounding activity of predictable updates, uncomplicated booting, running familiar applications, doing work, being productive, not even actively thinking about your OS.

I do appreciate them at least sitting around and thinking for a second on what to do. The legal landscape on this is till murky. Steam could have opened themselves up to needing mass refunds or even possible payouts to copyright holders if the AI generation produces copyright content.

It's not even about trust. It's that I am confident I will have no clue who is a real life human being anymore soon. Autogenerated images, video, and text is practically in its infancy but already exists in the uncanny valley of being impossible to determine which is real and which is not. Imagine 5 years from now when perfectly lifelike high res video of practically anything you can imagine can be generated on the fly. Essentially the only thing I will have any certainty on is what I can witness in person. Or, if I have a circle of trust I can choose to believe content published by certain organizations or groups.

It may actually push us away from tech and back to the community, which could be good assuming we survive the transition.

I find great comfort in history personally. Dan Carlin (a favorite podcaster of mine) always says we must grade history on a curve. Sure, to us it looks like everything is falling apart and existence is pointless. But by very real measures things are better than they have ever been. My favorite is violence against children has been normalized as being bad.

Within living memory it has gone from being completely socially acceptable to beat children as being the preferred method of parenting to people getting thrown in jail for that behavior. What does it mean that previous to 100 years ago all of society could have been considered battered children? We are extremely aware of the negative effects of violence against children and for the very first time we are seeing a generation raised in an environment that kind of behavior has carrots and sticks motivating parents to behave properly. Of course all manner of horrid things still happen, but I call it progress that it have become widely condemnable to beat a child with a stick or take them to public hangings. It's a small victory, but it gives me hope for the future. That we may yet still build a better human being capable of taking on the heroic task of fixing this world.

Further, history has shown to me low points that I am glad to have missed. I never knew how ghastly WWI was. I am currently in a warm bed and not in a trench filled with mud, flys, dead body parts, with shells exploding constantly, seconds away from needing to charge out into near certain death. But my great grandfather knew that feeling. He watched as whole generations of young men were gassed to death and blown up uselessly. The numbers who die in war are less now. Still tragic, but less. Again, we must grade on a curve.

Death, despair, and hopelessness may be in 8K live streamed constantly now, but I assure you the analog version was something to behold. Not saying the horror of the past makes living any easier now. It is not to minimize your own pain. I just find hope that others managed to break the back of an unshakable world and hope for a better one while surviving a suffering I have not yet known. I am made of the same stuff. That gives me strength.

Something that produces a wealth of plausible web traffic on my connection and browser that woefully misleads anyone monitoring it as to what I actually am browsing. Rather than hiding my traffic or ensuring some hyper level of encryption I simply want to use maybe an LLM or something to create such a close facimilie to "normal" online traffic that my online fingerprint becomes useless as sub 5% of my traffic is actually real.

Essentially I want privacy through drowning out everything with noise. It seems like the harder the to unwind in the end if done in a clever way. That plus some basic security protections and I will feel fairly secure.

Mint is surprisingly loved and disliked from what I have seen. Having used it since 2007 I am in the category that likes it for what it is. But I am somewhat surprised by the open hostility it gets for simply existing. Main arguments being that it is a dinosaur, uses X11, should not exist because anything not KDE or GNOME is just diluting desktop Linux and is part of the problem. It has no fancy corporate sponsor, it has a small team, and it for sure has warts, but you can claw Linux Mint from my cold dead hard drive because I have distro hopped like an addict and it just checks the boxes for me. It shows up and works, even on newer hardware with a little tweaking here and there, but I can use Nvidia, find network printers without effort, scan, install and update flatpak, backup the system, game, and get actual work done that is not fiddle farting around with esoteric configs all the time. I can post on actual forums with actual users on it and not some discord where someone will just post memes over my questions. I have a strong feeling it will exist for a long while given it's history. And it is mind numbingly borning as an OS. I just sit down and compute, what a concept.

To me it is blocking expression that presents no plausible harm to anyone. Yelling fire in a crowd to start a panic, making a specific threat, and intentionally spreading lies as to defame all strike me as harmful language and should be curtailed somehow. All expression of any kind not plausibly causing harm should be allowed and equal in the market of ideas despite my personal opinion of them which is a bitter pill to swallow when neonazis appear all to common. The is my opinion.

Still waiting for my check for paying for extra heat, road salt, and significantly more road maintenance for living in Minnesota. Oh wait, we only bail out the wealthy who build condos in the likely path of increasingly frequent hurricanes? It's a good thing we contribute more dollars to the feds than we get back, otherwise Floridians might actually need to pay for living where they live like the rest of us.

PS: Not advocating we abandon all who get hit by a disaster, but their has to be a way to balance federal contribution given these "once in a generation freak occurrences" are likely to happen a hell of a lot more. Don't build in high risk areas and expect a handout.

The good news is death is great for the environment.

We used to tar and feather tax collectors over tea. I liked the world where the wealthy had a healthy fear of the rabble. It kept them supporting the public good. Now the poor are the only ones who seem full of fear. Fear of starving, fear of the insanely lopsided justice system, a fear of the earth becoming a baren wasteland to support the insatiable greed of the haves.

Don't let self doubt hold you back. You might run into imposter syndrome, but it turns out all of us feel like fraudulent adults running around doing things we aren't entirely sure we are qualified for. Just pretend you are 💯 able to do it and the rest will work itself out.