Thank you, was wondering what happened there.

Youtube tip everyone needs to now: remove the si query parameter, it’s not necessary and used for tracking

From

https://youtu.be/LKCVKw9CzFo?si=06X6O91R9pX_8UbX

Into

https://youtu.be/LKCVKw9CzFo

https://youtu.be/LKCVKw9CzFo

people’s configs on github?

They’re making a new browser engine from scratch in an open way, absolutely amazing!

I do have several questions:

Why would they use BSD instead of GPL? If you care about open-source so much, why would you make it possible for a company to run away with your fancy new engine?

Why are they creating a new browser, when even firefox has to struggle to keep some semblance of market share? I get that not every project needs to aim to be “the biggest”, and that even a smaller project (in terms of users), can be fun. It’s just that writing a browser engine that can handle the modern web seems like an almost Sisyphean task; which makes me wonder what their motivation(?) is.

Why the FLOSS are they using closed-source proprietary discord as their main communication channel?

Exactly

To quote the post more specifically:

Even as our species destroys its only home, we assume that the solutions to climate change must lie in technology, without stopping to examine the role that this very attitude has played in the crisis.

This is so deeply ingrained in our social consciousness that, when there is a new impressive technology, we assume that it must be here to solve one of our big problems. As the AI hype quickens the pace of our ecological devastation, we’re so dazzled by the technology that there is actual debate in supposedly serious publications as to whether AI is going to save us from climate change, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary.

If you don’t want spellchecking, then no. You can just change the keyboard layout.

If you do want spellchecking then yes, you will need to install some kind of language pack.

I’m not sure how libreoffice does it, but Firefox has different language packs for translating the UI and for spellchecking.

Are the extra dialects taking up too much space for you?

You’re welcome!

I’m sorry that I don’t have any advice for a specific laptop, but it seems others are helping with that already.

More memory and cores will help you with compiling and running your code.

Have you even read my comment?

It’s probably best to limit yourself to a used laptop.

Reading and writing code is nothing more than reading and writing text, and for that you don’t need a fancy gpu or screen.

What I would recommend you look for in a laptop is

• an SSD instead of an HDD
• more cpu cores (at least 4 cores)
• more memory (RAM) (at least 8GB, preferably 16GB+)

More memory and cores will help you with compiling and running your code.

And make sure you take regular backups! You never know when your disk will fail.

Also make sure to check linux compatibility before you buy. Laptops used to be a pain (10+ years ago), and it’s gotten a lot better, but it’s not always perfect. Just search for “[brand] [model] linux” or try to find the model on the archlinux wiki.

nice make -j $(nproc)

Exactly, ansible is basically imperative, where write the steps declaratively.

Whereas nixos is more like a compiler that compiles to a working linux install.

If I added the software myprogram and a config file at /etc/myprogram.conf, that’s pretty easy in both. But if I needed to to then remove those it gets different .

With nixos it’s at easy as removing the two lines that add the program and the config file; after the next “compile”, the file is gone and myprogram is no longer available in the PATH.

With ansible you need to change the relevant step to use apt remove instead of apt install and to change the config file step in a step that removes the file.

Don’t get me wrong, ansible is still better than writing a lot of bash scripts, especially if you don’t have people with a lot of shell experience.

But tools like nixos and guix are on a whole other level.

Exactly, if we do a back of the napkin calculation:

Bitcoin

Users

There are 200 million bitcoin wallets, let’s be generous and say those are all owned by unique individuals.

Total energy consumption

Bitcoin used about 114 TWh in 2021[1]

Bitcoin currently uses about 150 TWh annually

Energy consumption per user

150 TWh / year 
————————— = 0,75 TWh / user / year
200 million users

Banking system

Users

There are over 8 billion people on the planet today, let’s assume 4 billion of them have access to the global banking system.

Total energy consumption

The global banking system used an estimated 264 TWh in 2021[1]

If we assume the same consumption increase rate for banking, that’s about 348 TWh/year currently.

Energy consumption per user

348 TWh / year 
————————— = 0,087 TWh / user / year
4.000 million users

With these numbers, bitcoin uses almost 10x the energy per user annually.

There are of course a myriad of things one can argue over whether it makes a fair comparison, none of which I feel like arguing, since this is just a really simple estimate with a lot of assumptions.

1: I used the numbers in this article uncritically, if you have better numbers you can run your own calculations.

That seems more sensible.

But they still can track some of the things you do (same with any untrusted wifi network):

• all data of http traffic (i.e. non-https)
• ip addresses you connect to
• hostnames you connect to (if SNI is not working correctly)

The best thing is to use a different device, period.

Since the company is lord and master over the device, in theory, they can see anything you’re doing.
Maybe not decrypting wireguard traffic in practice, but still see that you’re doing non-official things on the device that are probably not allowed. They might think you’re a whistleblower or a corporate spy or something.

I have no idea where you work, but if they install a CA they’re probably have some kind of monitoring to see what programs are installed/running.

If the company CA is all you’re worried about, running a browser that uses its own CA list should be enough.

Maybe your drive(s) fail and you want to reinstall. Then you already have a setup with all your software and config files installed. Just reinstall NixOS and re-apply your configuration (or build your own Install ISO ).
And if you ever get a new laptop/desktop/VM/VPS you can do the same.

Don’t forget to take backups, regardless of your setup tho.

The reproducibility also leads to some surprise features, like being able to wipe your entire system on every boot. Since NixOS always puts the necessary files in the correct place, this is perfectly fine. If you then add some mechanism to persist specific data across reboots (a separate partition, or the Impermanence module), you will remove all kinda of randomly accumulated files on every boot.

This means I have very small backups, because I have three kinds of data: stuff that is wiped on every boot, stuff that is persisted but not backed up (/nix/store, all kinds of caches) and stuff that is persisted and backed up (documents, repositories, media).

None of my OS’s files are in the backups, which makes of them a lot smaller than my previous arch install.

I’ve had a similar issue with a purple wash with HDR content; my TV wasn’t displaying it correctly but it was fine on my phone.

Unless you are transcoding a particular video, the server has nothing to do with it since it’s just sending the raw video stream.

On your PC the client probably uses the OS’s capabilities for decoding, so that depends on the hardware you have and the codecs that are installed. I can’t really help with that, but there’s gotta be more information out there.

Things to check:

• does this happen on all clients for the same video(s)? (Browsers/computers/phones/tvs)
• does this happen for all videos on the affected client(s)?

What color is the color wash?

Sounds like the video is using some kind of encoding that the client isn’t handling correctly.

That movie is WarGames (1983)

There’s several pages on the arch wiki that should help:

Security - Screen lockers

Session Lock, specifically the xorg/wayland triggers and units sections

This sounds like a very specific question, what problem are you really trying to solve?

Logout before suspend/hibernate, or something else?