Notices by Scott Williams 🐧 (vwbusguy@mastodon.online), page 2

@brouhaha @mattl

To be clear, I still respect Debian to this day. They have some truly incredible community members. Most of my personal raspberry pi stuff still runs some manner of Debian.

@brouhaha @mattl

Fun personal fact: First time I tried to install Linux, I downloaded and burned Fedora *source* isos which didn't work (5 discs, IIRC). I then successfully downloaded and installed DEBIAN (only 1 disc), but got a command line prompt. After testing every DOS/NT command I knew, I never got a GUI, so I went back and burned the proper Fedora Core installer (another 5 discs).

In an alternative reality, I would have been a Debian loyalist.

#Linux #Fedora #Debian

I just realized that as of this summer, I've now been a #Fedora #Linux user for 20 years.

Upworthy: If the total amount of money held by Americans was distributed evenly, how much would you get?
https://www.upworthy.com/economic-equality

Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/21/replit_saastr_vibe_coding_incident/

OH: "No one should have to find out their spouse is a Cold Play fan like that."

Today, I put up 4 shelves. That might not sound like a big deal, but 😩

@mattl @Viss @FritzAdalis That's the address of the guy that keeps logging into my machines!

@mattl How is CP/M not on this list 😭

Is it just me or have spam calls suddenly got way way worse?

Computers have never felt as magical as the first time I experienced Microsoft Encarta.

As a reminder the nominations are still open for #Fedora leadership committee seats. If you have someone you want to nominate, be sure to get it in now as they will be closing soon!

https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/fedora-elections-nominations-period-now-open/

#Linux

Highway to Helvetica

#FictionalCharacterFonts #HashTagGames

I'm just going to say it - for the average #guitar player, #Epiphone is the new #Gibson. The new Gibson is only for touring professional musicians or lawyers who want to hang something in their office. Meanwhile, #PRS has been heading the opposite direction and have never been more affordable, especially since their SE line is so over the top excellent right now.

Crochet? Cooking? Fountain pens? Learning FORTRAN? Writing short stories? Developing your own film pictures? Spotted a rare bird in your area? Beat that SNES game you never got to play as a kid?

I just want to hear something about humanity that isn't work or doomsday era news. Hit me.

Tell me about your current fun/hobby/side project or interest.

This LLM arms race is really burning through a lot of the built up good will with open source communities for the big tech companies. The constant relentless overly aggressive scraping, ignoring robots directives, lack of attribution, disrespecting licenses, drawing support requests away from community outlets, and just producing bad/wrong/misleading advice are all exhausting.

You want to bring back American ingenuity again? Make education and healthcare accessible to everyone. Make "right to repair" codified in the Constitution. Make Net Neutrality the law of the land. A person's chance of surviving and having a roof over their head shouldn't depend on "generational wealth". Once those things happen, American ingenuity will return in full force again. It's not Canada, Mexico, or Europe's fault we're here. It's our own fault. But we can still do better.

Since the 1960s, American manufacturing turned from making things that were expensive but could last a lifetime or longer to prioritizing cheaper and mass production. The "Made in America" marketing was a way to slowly burn some of the good will from the earlier days that valued quality and craftsmanship, but there's fewer and fewer younger people that see American-made as the apex beacon of quality standards, because things really aren't made as well as they used to be.

This isn't news to anyone who has owned old cast iron. Before the 1960's, American cast iron was amazing quality but it wasn't stamped with "Made in USA" until the 1960s when the quality of American goods went down and as the quality of import goods improved. Before then, you didn't have to market it as American to convince people to buy it because the quality and cost/value was compelling on its own merits.