My parents never noticed. It’s only younger generations who are heavily invested in the branding.

Actual usage is much the same.

Wireguard (or tailscale) would be best here.

Oh yeah sure it’s not the ethics thats actually the problem. I think everybody agrees on the need for a strict ethical framework.

But most of the research institutions that I have been involved with have cared very little about the actual ethical constraints of research (such as data privacy or survey questions that could be triggering) But every single time they will pull you up on the font being too aggressive, whatever that means.

I can’t speak for regions other than my own however.

The bureaucracy of a typical ethics review is insane and it neither helps design ethical experiments or set boundaries, it’s just paperwork concerned with font type. there’s more truth to this than we’d like, which is not ok.

I think the parents suggestion was to not use it.

However, it’s a bit like avoiding water on a boat given how pervasive the cancer is.

Most of the MS suite is pretty awful. OG OneNote was a good idea. VSCode is ok, just quite slow. Oh LSP is fantastic, I believe that was developed by MS.

The Office Suite and PowerBI are terrible, by 2025 standards it’s glossy trash.

Yep. mid size business is the best place to be for engineers. You get your pick Of the lot all without HR 🙃

Every OS just mentioned can be updated, no support needed? Just overlay the next kernel over the last and all these distros provide a pathway for that.

Moreover, Arch, Void, Gentoo etc are rolling, so no loss of support.

I figure a multi-million dollar company could do the equivalent of exactly that.

That’s a fair point. But it also depends on the application as well.

To use the example from earlier, good luck getting Emacs 25 to run on Windows 11.

…but maybe another perspective is that it works really well with Windows because they prioritise backwards compatibility at the expense of development time and they can do that because they’re a large company and as a large company the community gets a very little say in the way that their operating system works.

Linux is your operating system. It’s community driven and community developed and one of the expenses of that is that users are going to need a higher degree of technical capacity. The trade-off is that you get more privacy, and more say.

However, I believe that it’s achievable for most users.

I mean this sincerely, how can I help? I’m not an expert but i did teach this to university students and I’m a big advocate of privacy. What would you like to see?

Yeah I’ve installed heaps of old apps, it depends on dynamic vs static libraries etc but some people still use Emacs 25…

I have lost power whilst updating, can be a nuisance depending in the distro, but snapshots (zfs and btrfs both work well for me) have been life saving.

Mac and windows simply don’t have a lot of quality of life features. Working with them is painful. As self a documenting systems they are fantastic though, however, when I was younger we had things called schools that served to address that gap, these have fallen out of favour in modern times.

Python’s usually the better choice anyway tbf. I know piping isn’t as good, but there are so many footguns!

Nushell and Fish can be really convenient too.

I used to adhere to sh for an OpenBSD machine but I switched to python, Rust and Go for, even simple things.

Ratchet and Clank 3 is missing.

The key is identifying how to use these tools and when.

Local models like Qwen are a good example of how these can be used, privately, to automate a bunch of repetitive non-determistic tasks. However, they can spot out some crap when used mindlessly.

They are great for skett hing out software ideas though, ie try a 20 prompts for 4 versions, get some ideas and then move over to implementation.

See also Mull, No 120hz though.

Also, I don’t think one can export bookmarks from Android Firefox either.

Some js is a bit slower. I typically use chrome for self hosted apps, jupyter etc.

I think wasm performance is actually better in Firefox though.

I see we have the same managers. Were you also advised that public facing databases were better than an API in a VPC and that 1 password shared among colleagues is easier than managing credentials?

Don’t worry, I found a new gig starting in a few weeks (out of the pot into pan )

I’ve done things like this with python. It’s not too hard and one can use local models.

You can even control the length of the output using pydantic and other checks.

I’ve had good success scraping and annotating links from forums etc. Into bookmarks for research.

Very convenient!

Set up wireguard in a docker container and then forward the port to wireguard, the default container on docker hub is fairly straightforward and you can always ask me for help if you need :).

However, If you are using ipv4, you need to make sure that you’re not behind a CG-NAT (If you think you might be, call your ISP and tell them you have security cameras that need to get out or something like that).

You could also try tailscale which is built using wireguard with nat-busting features and a bit easier to configure (I dont personally use it as wireguard is sufficient for me).

After that Caddy + DNSMasq will simply allow you to map different URLs to IP addresses

• dnsmasq
  • will let you map, E.g. my_computer -> 192.168.1.64
• Caddy (Or nginx, but caddy is simpler)
  • will let you map to ports so e.g.:
    • with DNS (DNSMasq as above)
      • http://dokuwiki.my_computer -> http://my_computer:8080
    • Without DNS
      • http://dokuwiki.192.168.1.64 -> http://192.168.1.64:8080/

Caddy and DNSmasq are superfluous, if you’ve got a good memory or bookmarks, you don’t really need them.

VPN back into home is a lot more important. You definitely do not want to be forwarding ports to services you are running, because if you don’t know what you’re doing this could pose a network security risk.

Use the VPN as the entry point, as it’s secure. I also recommend running the VPN in a docker / podman container on an old laptop dedicated just to that, simply to keep it as isolated as you can.

Down the line you could also look into VLan If your router supports that.

I personally would not bother with SSL If you’re just going to be providing access to trusted users who already have access to your home network.

If you are looking to host things, just pay for a digital droplet for $7 a month, It’s much simpler, You still get to configure everything but you don’t expose your network to a security risk.

If you’re just going to VPN in to your home network, I’ve found caddy to be the simplest.

It’s fairly well documented and the up to date packages are very convenient.

It can also be pretty confusing installing debian and having to find how to install packages that aren’t out of date.

Imo take a few hours to power through the wiki installation guide and it’s really not too bad + you’re equipped to fix issues as they arise. It’s not Gentoo. When Ubuntu breaks for a new user, it’s a nightmare too.

So I think I disagree, it’s been easier to use than Fedora, Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, Elementary in my experience. I use Gentoo too but that is indeed simple in the challenging sense.

Arch is a nice middle ground between Ubuntu and Gentoo.

Plus, with EndeavourOS users can have their cake and eat it too.