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Joined 12 days ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2026

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  • Double posting but…

    FOSS has problems too. Personality clashes can end or severely set back projects (MMDVM vs M17). If something isn’t fun *coughAccessibilitycough* it doesn’t get done. Projects get abandoned as devs loose interest because interest is the only motivator. Documentation usually sucks because the dev is the one doing the documenting and doesn’t understand that the end user doesn’t have their intuitive grasp of the software they themselves wrote. And 99% of the population doesn’t care a whit about code being open because surprise surprise they’re not software developers and won’t know the difference between = and ==. And no they’re not going to take night classes just to patch some program they use.


  • I bought my first Pi in (I think) 2014. It’s one of the things that got me into IT. The low price was an important feature, since I was much less reluctant to experiment and take risks with hardware that cost as much as a family meal. But nearly $400 the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.

    I guess I’m lucky in that I got a pi 5 back when they were selling at MSRP. I have a couple Pi 4’s, two 3’s (one I can’t find anymore sadly), my original Pi 1 model B, an also lost Pi zero W that I successfully soldered the GPIO pin headers to, and a Pi 400 I bought on a whim.

    When people ask me about experimenting with Linux I usually tell them to either emulate it in virtualBox or buy a Raspberry Pi if they want a bare metal experience. It was specifically because the Pi was cheap and thus low risk if something did go wrong.
















  • Then you get the folks coming out of the woodwork going “herp derp it’s really simple, you just have to buy a domain, then set up all these records, then you line up all eleven chaos crystals on the altar of despair and chant the forbidden words, then you…”

    I think saying “It’s really simple” is actually terrible from a pedagogical point of view. It just makes the learner go “Well I guess I’m dumb because I don’t get such a simple concept.” I get people saying this are trying to be reassuring, but it should be remembered that pretty much anything is simple if you do it a million times. I’m sure brain surgery is simple for a brain surgeon, but I’m not a brain surgeon. I think it’s better to say "This is a long process with a lot of moving parts, but let’s take a breath and tackle it one step at a time and we’ll get through it. Sorry not ranting at OP, I just see this attitude all the time in IT and it bugs me.

    I career changed into IT years after college, so I was already an adult when I entered my first trembling keystrokes into a blank terminal window. I vividly remember how intimidating it all felt.



  • Regarding pets, enjoy the time you have together and save the mourning for when they’re six feet under. I was sad about the aging of my dog, but realized that to her, humans are basically immortal constants of love and comfort. Looking at it that way made me feel a bit better.

    Speaking of addictive thought processes, maladaptive daydreaming. I’ve half joked about it over on [email protected], but it really is addictive. Recently I realized it’s not healthy to reject reality and substitute my own. Even if my reality has mechs and this one doesn’t :(