Notices by Kristian (kly@fosstodon.org)

@evan Related: My dad used to say "if you want something done, give it to someone with a lot to do"....

My retired father has switched to Linux on a couple of computers, but is yearning for some good books on the subject. He's not a novice in computers, having done some programming in at least Assembly and Pascal a lifetime ago, and he's not impressed by the typical "just do this" type of tutorial/guide books.

Does anyone have any recommendations? I'm drawing a blank...

He's using Mint, if that's relevant, but some general litterature is probably just as or more welcome.

So we have "opt in" so you have to explicitly say yes

Then we have "opt out", where you can take steps to say no

Then you have "nag in", the new popular solution where where you're given a choice you probably don't have any good reason to go a long with, but you will be nagged on regular intervals until you either give in, or click accept by accident. And every time you say no, you need to scroll through a vast set of identical-sounding variations of the same question.

@nycki @dalias I strongly disagree on this.

Yes, it might _feel_ easier to "just download something and install it" but it really isn't, because the risks you run are MUCH MUCH higher, and this is even more true for novice users!

And most users don't CARE about the newest or most "talked about" software, they just want a browser and an email client or whatever.

By using a proper distro you can just tell them "you can safely install anything from here". The vetting is already done.

Found this old video of a traditional coder going up against a vibe coder

People: OH MY GOD you can't use wikipedia because ANYONE can just EDIT and write WHATEVER!

The same people 20 years later: Oh I LOVE chatgpt, I can ask it anything and it always has an answer!

@aeva I wish 14 year old me ended up with a less dumb online nick than I did, but at least I did get threatened by Nestles lawyers over it, and this is my favorite vanity domain now https://nesquik.nu/

One of the, by far, best decisions I made last year was to start following cats, dogs and sheep of mastodon tags the moment the result of the us election was in. Sorely needed a feed that was less depressing to cope with.

@scy wait, THREE distros? What's the third supposed to be?

Something I find really depressing is how hard it is for regular people to share files online WITHOUT uploading it through a third party or otherwise USING a third party or some proprietary shit-tech.

I've seriously used netcat for this locally, it should be SO simple, but the entire internet is designed around us being consumers, not peers. A large part of the reason is IPv4 and NAT of course, but also, you know, capitalism.

It's pretty fascinating to see large american corporations with a global presence refer to Dublin as "North Europe" when you live in Norway.

I suppose that's like Americans refering to Texas as part of South America

We need a new term for public, commercial VPNs that doesn't include the word "private".

Ok so I just read that podman can support CPP o "Containerfile.in" and you know... of all the preprocessors to support... why the c pre processor? I don't even know where to begin?

Periodic reminder that any reference to "cyber" without explicit specification means, obviously, cybersex.

No, I don't care about context

One thing I hate about my phone and localization is that I get to pick ONE language. That's it. But I'm fluent in both English and Norwegian.

I don't want American apps in shitty translated Norwegian, I want them in native English. At the same time, I don't want my local bank, gym, metro etc showing me their dubious English translations, I want the native Norwegian.

But I can't choose this. I get everything in one language. And it sucks.