We must establish a new order of monks, who all get up at 6am UTC. We can call them in sync

Nah, because while it would be very easy to implement something like that, it would require specifically doing it. Programmers have 3 reasons for writing code

It’s cool. It’s necessary. I was told to do it in exchange for money

(And the secret fourth reason, it just kinda happened. I was building this related thing and I realized it’d be stupid easy to toss it in…I was in a fugue state and I have no idea what I wrote, but it’s some of my best code ever)

Devs don’t generally care about this kind of thing, and most of the time neither do the business folk. This kind of unnecessary crackdown only comes up when consultants like McKinney, who I’ve recently learned are the reason everything sucks

Glad to hear it…I also found it helpful to know about the “pregnant pause”. It’s when they just look at you silently, waiting for you to continue. It makes you want to keep talking out of awkwardness

It helps me to think of that like an invitation, I’ll think if anything else comes to mind and if I’ve got nothing left to say I’ll just wait it out

Ideas have both quality and value, and they interconnect to make the backbone of interactive experiences

That’s it exactly. The way the ideas interconnect and the way they’re presented to the player is everything. That’s execution, that’s everything - the ideas are just what’s in your head

It’s both. It’s an invitation to bring up anything recent, but you can also treat it like a normal greeting if you’d rather not go there right now.

It’s also open ended enough that you can say “I’m doing well, I’ve been thinking about my childhood a lot lately” and take the session wherever you want organically. It could also just lead into small talk while you get comfortable

Ideas are nothing. Everyone has a million daydreams, the most special and creative idea in the world is worthless if you can’t express it.

Execution is everything. Hell, you don’t even need an idea - you can draw random design elements out of a bag and come up with something great

If there’s any chance they’ve heard about a concept, I’ll ask if they’ve heard of it and take them at their word (without comment either way).

And if they’re kinda nodding impatiently, I’ll wrap up the explanation and move on to the deeper level

At first, people will sometimes be defensive or lie about knowing a topic, but after you establish there’s no judgement either way with you I’ve found people become less hesitant about admitting ignorance and will even want to hear your explanation of something to check their knowledge

I also do the flip side - I pride myself on admitting when I don’t know something, so that might play in too

In our current economic system? Absolutely, declining population is a huge problem.

As far as physics? The world doesn’t care about imaginary human numbers. Production continues to soar through the roof

We made all of this up. At any point, we could say “hey, this is a dumb game that’s making people suffer, let’s figure out something else”

I had the original with the expansion, I used to play Tony hawk online

There was no psn back then though, you just plugged in and were good to go

I take lots of pictures, I just don’t post them anywhere

But the switch isn’t just an underpowered console… It’s a handheld with an HDMI port

“We’re just asking questions!”

Well I just learned the term today, but it seems to have the implication "these are men who could be military. They could be hidden insurgents

Military-aged thing?

This is exactly why HR departments exist. Had OP collected evidence, told management with a paper trail, and they failed to stop it? Or worse, told off OP because they don’t want to deal with it?

The jerk could maybe get charged with a misdemeanor related to harassment or misuse of technology… Maybe the UK has something harsher or more specific, but at the end of the day it’s a bit extreme to put someone in jail or pay OPs wages if they were forced out of work

The company on the other hand? They have a legal obligation to maintain a safe work environment. They also have deeper, easier to access pockets. A lot easier to get a lawyer to pursue that, which is expensive even if they win in the end

If they’re clearly shown to have not taken reasonable action, they’d at least be on the hook for any lost wages or medical costs (not sure what decent therapy runs over there, less than the US I’m sure but I’m guessing not cheap). Even if OP quits or decides not to show up, it could be until they get a new job at similar pay with some extra thrown on top

HR’s job is to cut this off before OP needs to be paid off, or much worse finds a lawyer. They don’t care about the employees, so safest could be to fire the guy - the least they’re going to do is officially reprimand the guy and follow up with OP to make sure it’s not worsening and OP isn’t feeling litigious

Well hey listen, I appreciate it. I would’ve spent who knows how long waffling between distos that I don’t feel drawn to, and even if I came across an atomic flavor, I probably would’ve just assumed it was marketing fluff

Good ideas need advocates, and this is a good idea… It’s a promise of an OS I want, not just running from one I don’t

I’m probably going to look at bazzite first. If I have containers that can run LLMs on my GPU, that checks off everything on my wish list except gaming. I’ll read up on it though, you’ve given me the context I need to care about learning more

I feel like the key is consistency and not confusing the message

This is me, except these are all different levels of small chance I might want to go when the time comes. If it falls through or there’s not a slot for me at that point I won’t be offended because I didn’t commit, and once I commit I follow through

Maybe it’s a source of friction with some people, but I’m not big on planning. It’s just a constant weight around my neck, even if I want to go and know I’ll enjoy it

I’ve got three weddings this year, and the first has been weighing on me since the Xmas before last (it’s at the end of the summer), the second since I heard about the engagement this Xmas and started dreading immediately, and the last is this winter and had me locking up for days. And these are all ones I said yes to immediately, but still every time someone brings them up my heart races

If your friends are actually being honest with you about their feelings, don’t plan around them. Give them a casual heads up, and another one when they need to make a decision and start planning.

If they say “I’ll think about it” when they mean “I want to keep my options open, I might get FOMO if y’all do something without me”, let them scramble to catch up… Draw a clear boundary that sucks less for everyone

If they actually mean it how I do, the relief when it comes down to the last minute to act and someone says “you don’t have to go, it’s totally fine, we’ll hang out when we get back” is so real. It makes me want to meet them halfway, because if I know it’s not a let down to back out on a warmer “ask me in a couple weeks”, the stress goes down.

I get to think about it stress free for a bit and sit with the idea. I get to decide how much I want to go vs how much I don’t want to do the things necessary to go

Ok, when I googled it earlier I saw “containers and roll back to previous version” and I made a note to do more reading

Your write up was good, much clearer than what’s on fedora and Wikipedia. And the fact you pitched immutable OS’s in general first caught my attention… The concept is a no brainer. Decouple the os and the rest of the software, and don’t bother digging into one of a kind conflicts when updating things - just make it rebuildable and create it fresh. You never know when the wrong bit will flip

Nix’s “learn this one thing, configure it once, and you’re done” stuck in my head. And after a different distros, a couple lines installed Nvidia, Nvidia’s docker package and docker

But then I had to configure WiFi and spend half an hour learning why I couldn’t mount an external drive and how to manage it… I still have no regrets, I’ve got a USB that should start converting my friends and family’s old PCs into a self organizing AI/self hosting cluster… Hopefully it works next month lol

But not what I want in a daily driver. I want something that’ll quickly do what I tell it and gracefully handle the fact I have 6 versions of Java and no idea why I need a version from 2018 specifically. And that I’m going to add a repo to install something and instantly forget what I did if it seems like the best path forward at the time

You’ve sold that pretty well - my takeaway was that atomic fedora is very modular and low side effect and also an interchangable foundation I can swap out and roll back easily… At this point, if it can run containers and the drivers I need, it sounds like a great option.

I used to use VMs so every 6-12 months I could start clean with the latest and run setup scripts for my dependencies… It was just easier than debugging some conflict. This sounds even cleaner - I swap out the base at will, and the stuff I’ve built on it should stay intact. Plus it sounds much more testable

So my main concern is will it run on an HP omen - it has zero Linux support and a bunch of concerning driver needs, but it does have a second m2 slot… What’s the worst that can happen? Except apparently some models forget they have fans in Linux and I just know the iGPU-GPU switch will cause some problem with sleeping… But Windows is only going to get worse

Now that you’ve convinced me this might be the best course (I only see less problems than other distros would have), and I’ve talked myself into giving it a go, is there any recommended reading or key concepts I should look into? Any particular flavor(s) you’d point me to first?

Fedora Atomic a chance, it’s an extremely nice family of distros (e.g. Bluefin/ Aurora, Bazzite, etc.)!

Can you elaborate on this? I landed on nix for my PC turned server and haven’t regretted it, but I’ve been hesitant to go all in on my main laptop (I’m wary of my laptop iGPU and GPU switching becoming a config issue, and I’m dreading having to configure my wsl dev environments again…)

Windows is getting blatantly terrible enough I know I’m just putting it off, maybe a cool new technology might help make it sound more fun

How does that help? You can tell any computer it’s Google.com or IP 8.8.8.8. you can tell your device that the other computer is correct, and middle man yourself

Except, we have one key to rule them all, one key to bind them. There’s literally a group of people who split the root key among themselves, and scattered it across the world (when they went home). They get together ever year or two, and on a blessed air-gapped computer, unite the key to sign the top level domains again. Those domains sign intermediate domains, and down the chain they sell and sign domains.

If any of these root domains fall to evil, these brave guardians can speed walk to the nearest airport and establish a new order

(I think we actually just started installing all the root and some trusted intermediate domains on every device directly, so I’m not sure if they still bother, but it’s a better story)

The solution you’re looking for is DNSS, where we encrypt the DNS request too so they can’t see any of the url. Granted, they can still look at you destination and usually put the pieces together, but it’s still a good idea

Ultimately, packets have to get routed, all we can do is do our best to make sure no one can see enough of the picture to matter. There’s more exotic solutions that crank that up to 11, but the trade offs are pretty extreme