Finally got my crap together. Career taking off, got rid of my toxic relationships, adopted several cats, getting into really good shape.

I work in IT, many of the managers are pushing it. Nothing draconian, there are a few true believers, but the general vibe is like everybody is trying to push it because they feel like they’ll be judged if they don’t push it.

Two of my coworkers are true believers in the slop, one of them is constantly saying he’s been, “consulting with ChatGPT” like it’s an oracle or something. Ironically, he’s the least productive member of the team. It takes him days to do stuff that takes us a few hours.

That’s rough, I’m sorry too, it never gets easier. 💔 stay strong, the important thing is that they feel safe and loved 💙

Let me share my personal story. Trigger warning for anybody reading this, there’s a lot of details.

My spouse and I had a beloved cat who was amazing. Rescued her as a kitten, the runt of her litter. She was born sickly and got worse for a while, we thought she wouldn’t make it for several weeks.

But we nursed her back to health and she started to thrive. She never got big, even fully grown, she was 6.5 lbs. Most people thought she was still a kitten, but she had 60 lbs of attitude lol.

She was a wonderful cat, full of life, playful, fierce, super smart, my spouse and I were totally in love with her.

Then one day, she stopped eating and started acting really lethargic. We went through all the typical potential causes. Tooth pain, upset stomach, constipation, UTI, etc.

Took her to the vet several times. After almost 2 weeks of us barely able to get her to eat more than a few bites of her usual favorite treats per day, we had them scan her for potential blockages or other stomach issues.

Vet came back with the results, it was cancer, her entire abdomen was filled with large tumors. 100% terminal, the vet said that there was no way to remove it all without killing her from the internal trauma because the cancer had spread so far and was completely surrounding many of her organs.

We were absolutely devastated. She was only about 3 and a half years old. The vet said it was just bad luck, it was rare to see this kind of cancer in a young otherwise healthy cat, but it did sometimes happen.

Even still, we asked about chemotherapy, (yes they do that for pets sometimes). The vet said that at best, it would only give us 1-3 more months if we were lucky, and she would be drugged up so much that she would basically be in a state of dillusion the whole time. Plus it would have cost between $4,000- and $8,000. Which was far beyond anything we could afford.

My spouse and I went home, cried our eyes out for the next 2 days, and talked about end of life care. Our primary vet had given us a pamphlet about in-home euthanasia. They come to your home, you can lay down and cuddle with your pet, play music or talk to them. The vet administers a shot, and after about 10-15 minutes, they fall asleep and then…they’re gone.

We chose that option and it was as positive of an experience as it can be, when doing something so sad.

We laid down on both sides of her, placed her on her favorite blanket, and just gently pet her, kissed her, and quietly told her what a brave girl she was and how much we loved her. Our vet was super calm and respectful. After she administered the shot, she let us be with her, and checked her pulse every 5 minutes or so. After the third time, she quietly told us, “Alright, she’s passed. Take all the time you need. When you’re ready, I’ll take her back with me.”

The vet handled the cremation and a week or two later my spouse and I got our cat’s ashes delivered to us in a little urn, with a clipping of her hair and a little paw print in clay. There was a hand-written note from the vet with her condolences, signed by a bunch of the vet techs, it was very sweet.

It’s a brutally hard choice to make, but I think it’s the right one. Our cat was in so much pain, she was malnourished, exhausted, dehydrated, she had lost all the joy that a healthy life provided her. Looking into her eyes and seeing her in so much pain, that’s what convinced me and my spouse to do it. I think it would have been selfish for us to keep her alive in that state waiting for her to die “naturally” or forcing a massive cocktail of drugs into her just so we could get a few more days or weeks with her.

I don’t condemn people for putting it off, I get it, it was one of the hardest decicions I’ve had to make as an adult. I wept like a baby before and after it for many days. If you haven’t seen it before, I can’t describe it. But there is a certain “look” an animal gets when it’s near the end. They know, they are smart, they have a soul of some kind I think, they can sense it. As somebody who is an animal lover and has had pets all my life, you learn what it looks like. It’s a look of pain and pleading, a look that says, “I’m in pain, and I’m tired, it’s time for me to go.”

Some people say that pets can’t tell you if they want to be done, but I think they can, it’s that look in their eyes of desperation, and when you’re my age and you’ve had to say goodbye to numerous pets over the years, you learn what it looks like.

~/Repos (For all the github and other code repositories I work in)

~/Scripts (All my random Bash scripts, sometimes for testing out stuff)

~/Junk (Mostly used for testing programs or small project components that aren’t mature enough to have their own repo)

One reason: It’s not FOSS, and because of that, it’s not protected from the Capitalist profit motive that’s always pushing the creators/owners towards enshitification.

The same forces act upon FOSS too, but the difference is that FOSS has structural immunity built into it. If the software enshitifies, it can be forked and maintained by a community that values software freedom.

We’ve seen it happen time and again. Terraform, CentOS, RHEL, The Xen Hypervisor, etc. When companies try to take freedom away from FOSS, they fail, because their users and maintainers are empowered by FOSS licenses (especially restrictive ones like the GPL) and can fight back.

With proprietary software, the users are powerless, only the owners have control.

Don’t trust promises, good intentions, or corporate slogans. Trust free software and the open ecosystems they thrive in.

PS, Jellyfin is amazing ❤️

Tailscale, Netbird, or Pangolin. Foss overlay networks have completely eliminated traditional VPN setups for my self-hosting needs.

The only thing missing is full fishnet tights with a girdle for Gentoo.

Left wing (actual OG) Libertarianism is great. Right wing Libertarianism is basically a bunch of antisocial/intellectually lazy people who think the ideal society is one where everybody has a few acres of land with a little shack that they built themselves where they subsist on potatoes, carrots, and chicken eggs and stockpile gold and silver to trade with another libertarian twice a year.

Not necessarily morons, although many are, just sociopaths. They are so rich and powerful and removed from normal society, they don’t have to care.

They don’t have to work hard, they don’t have to think critically, they don’t have to compromise, they don’t have to worry.

It’s like the monarchs and aristocracy of old, so far removed from society, most things we consider virtues are considered insulting to them.

Remember when Bill Gates “worked” for a few hours at a Dairy Queen scooping ice cream? It’s a demonstration of elitism, they can choose to play working class for an afternoon, like an outfit they try on.

Oh how quaint, the little workers going about their day scooping ice cream and making fries! Mummy, I want to try to be an ice cream worker today!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuxPIPKMjXI

We are rapidly depleting our healthy soil due mainly to destructive factory farming techniques used across the world.

Just one inch of healthy soil takes centuries to form from the slow breakdown of organic matter by a whole host of micro-ecosystems.

The desertification of massive swaths of our planet continues largely unabated.

“Yes, I’m sure I typed my password correctly.”

Working in IT, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that and how many times it’s been wrong.

I just tested this on my dual monitor setup, Nobara Linux, KDE Plasma version 6.5.2 running Wayland and it worked no problem.

Set my main monitor to 150% scaling and left my side one to 100%.

Now on my setup, both monitors are 1080p, although my side one is oriented vertically, so Idk if it would act different if I had one at a completely different resolution.

Edit -

I just tested it on one of my laptops running Linux Mint Debian edition 7, (Debian 13 Trixie under the hood) with the Cinnamon desktop environment running X11 and it worked perfectly also. 4K TV set as the primary monitor scaled at 150%, the laptop’s screen as the secondary, 1080p at 100% scaling, applied the settings and it was completely fine.

Pay for your FOSS! I’ve paid far more for my FOSS than for any proprietary software.

If you believe in subscriptions, then subscribe only to FOSS software like Bitwarden, Tailscale/Netbird, etc.

Find your favorite FOSS projects on Open Collective and support them there.

And above all else, treat FOSS devs and maintainers with the utmost respect! They are the unsung heros who are building the only alternatives to the corpo-dystopian hellscape of proprietary, enshitified, slop software.

Send a message to a dev today, just saying thank you to them for everything, and asking if you can send them a tip if possible.

Folks, let’s treat each other lovingly please, FOSS has freed us, give back what you can, and never take it for granted.

To all the devs, maintainers, tinkerers, supporters, FOSS educators, and helpful community members across the FOSS world, thank you so much, and much love. ♥️

“Hacking” is essentially effective and insightful tinkering. All great hackers in history have been insatiability curious about how things work.

They poke and prod and test and experiment, and every now and then, they find something interesting. Unexpected behavior, hidden code, useful bugs, etc.

Exploiting software vulnerabilities is only a small segment of hacking. Figuring out how to hook up a Raspberry Pi to your thermostat to control it remotely is hacking. Splicing a custom microcontroller into your old keyboard to give it all sorts of extra functions is hacking. Flashing a custom BIOS onto your GPU to unlock special overclocking features is hacking.

If you want to be great at “hacking” including software exploits, you need to understand computers at a deep level. You need to study electronics, logic, low level programming like Assembly and C, networking, circuits, operating systems and kernels, compilers, parsers, abstraction layers, encryption, and more.

The more concepts you learn and understand, the more interesting insights you will get from poking around, and the better you’ll get at using and developing tools to do even more advanced and interesting things.

There is no fast track, you have to take it slow and steady. Know what a computer is. Not the physical object, the abstract concept of a computer, a Von Neumann architecture, a Turing machine, what it means to be Turing complete, what is “code” and how does a static collection of tiny gates run it? The more stuff you skip, the worse you’ll be. But if all you want is the aesthetic of a “hacker” then just install Kali Linux, open the terminal and run tmux with a few panes, start btop, cmatrix, and neofetch in them. Put on a hoodie. Dim your lights and hunch over the keyboard for maximum effect.

I’m alright with this as long as the controller is easy to repair, which Valve has been pretty good about with the Steam Deck.

If swapping batteries is a fast 5-10 minute process I have to do every 5 or so years, and the batteries are widely available and reasonably priced, that’s a win in my book.

You ain’t getting one then lol.

Get ready to pay $200-$300 more than that.

Get ready to be horribly dissapointed…