I read that as the animal mice, and I was wondering why Meta was hiring mice.

As per usual, the answer is “depends on your threat model”. For a lot of sensitive communications, the centralised design and therefore ability to correlate metadata is a no-go. But if you’re just using it e.g. as a WhatsApp replacement to message your friends, it’s fine. It’s still the most polished and normie-friendly e2ee foss messenger.

Do you have the skills to self-host? If so, you can host any number of cloud storage services: Nextcloud, Immich, Cryptpad. You could even host a Forgejo instance (the software Codeberg runs on) although it’s really not intended for storing the kind of images you’re talking about.

I am guessing, though, that you are probably not a very technical person, and self-hosting might be out of the question for you. In which case unfortunately your options are a fair bit more limited. There are free hosted Nextcloud instances—Disroot hosts one. Or you could go with something like Proton Drive. If you’re open to proprietary options then there’s several very widely used options like Dropbox, Google Drive, Mediafire, etc. But if you’re posting here, you probably don’t want those.

I mean Rust is definitely known for long compilation times but yeah otherwise I am not sure how any of this is Rust-specific. Maybe by “doesn’t do what you tell it to do” they mean the borrow checker and strict compile time checks…?

If you want to learn more then do LFS. I don’t think Gentoo teaches you much more than a manual Arch install. But very few daily drive LFS. It’s hardly practical. Gentoo is daily drivable but if you don’t care about compiling all your own packages then I don’t think it’s for you.

I’d say just do LFS on an old laptop or a VM.

Who said this person was on the “left”? In any case, who cares. I don’t care about winning people over to the “left”. I’m a communist, and history has shown that proletarian revolutions aren’t primarily composed of politically active “leftists”, socialists, etc. Revolutions are made by working class people acting out of self-interest, whether or not they’ve attained a socialist/communist consciousness (and often times, they haven’t).

Yay

I only use flatpak for one Python program because it has a lot of runtime dependencies I don’t want to bother with. I generally wouldn’t use flatpak.

I don’t agree. LLMs are by design probabilistic. Chainsaws aren’t designed to be probabilistic, and any functionality that is probabilistic (aside from philosophical questions about what it is possible to be certain about, YKWIM) is aimed to be minimised. You’re supposed to be able to give the same model the same prompt twice and get two different answers. You’re not meant to be able to use a chainsaw the same way on the same object and have it cut significantly differently. You’re inherently leaving much more to chance by using LLMs to generate code, and creating more work for yourself as you have to review LLM code, which is generally lower quality than human-written code.

Not comparable at all. Power tools work deterministically. A powered chainsaw is not going to have a 0.1% chance of chopping a completely different tree on the other side of the forest. Of course accidents happen; your hand can slip. But a proper comparison would be if you got a computer to look at a large number of powered chainsaws and then generate its own in CAD based on what it’s seen, and then you use that generated power tool. Which, for something as potentially dangerous as a powered chainsaw, you most likely wouldn’t want to do, and would want to have careful human oversight over every part of design.

People have their preferences for UI and UX. I use Aerc because I like modal editing (ie being able to write my emails in vim) and keyboard nav. Using a desktop email client rather than webmail client from a provider gives me that freedom.

Besides, I don’t actually have a webmail client I can use lol. I host my own email and host the IMAP server but I don’t host a web interface.

If you haven’t already, I recommend Watchtower (nickfedor fork—the original is unmaintained) which automatically pulls updates to Docker containers and restarts them. Make sure to track latest, although for security updates, these should be backported to any supported versions so it’s fine to track an older supported version too.

Notesnook notebook with whatever info I need to be able to administrate the system. e.g. what different ports are used for and why the firewall policies are what they are, sometimes write-ups after a troubleshooting session, etc.

The Notesnook instance is self-hosted too, but if the server goes down, the notebook will still be available locally.

I don’t see where I said any of the words you just quoted. Impressive if Rust can suck a dick I don’t have though, I’ll give them that.

You can embed Assembly in Rust. A lot of low-level Rust projects embed Assembly.

A competing Forgejo instance

Thunderbird is a K-9 reskin. They’re the same app. People pick based on what icon and app name they want I guess.

How’s the firmware support/availability? For things like graphics tablets, graphics drivers, etc?

I don’t think OpenBSD has binary compat with Linux but most Linux software should just need a recompile for BSDs—I’m discouraged from porting given that when it’s not a simple recompile I’d have much less idea what to do.

The reasons people use Linux are for qualities other than the ones affected by AI use. AI use has implications for code quality, correctness, and security. But none of those are why people use Linux. People use Linux over BSD or other Unixes because Linux supports the most hardware, has the biggest software ecosystem, and being a monolithic kernel is much easier to get up and running with lots of hardware without needing to install separate drivers. Those qualities still need to be addressed by BSDs or whatever alternatives before people will start migrating from Linux.

I say this as someone who regularly uses and enjoys an OpenBSD machine. I couldn’t use it as my main machine because it just doesn’t have the same software availability and plug-and-use hardware support as Linux. Porting software to a new target is not a trivial task for most users. I package a few things for the AUR and that’s much easier as the software already supports x86_64 Linux; I just have to write a script to install it. I think OpenBSD is a nice OS but I highly doubt Linux users will migrate any time soon. Think about how many people were clinging onto X11 because Wayland didn’t support their super specific workflow. And a migration to an entirely different OS would be worse.

I know about Tailscale. I don’t use it because I want my VPS to be exposed to the internet; some of my services are supposed to be public. And those that aren’t, have their own authentication systems that are adequately secure for their purposes. I just don’t need Tailscale so I’ve not bothered with the setup.

I’ve had my VPS exposed to the internet for a while and never been pwned. No professional experience. Use SSH keys, not password authentication. Use FDE if physical access is in your threat model. Use a firewall to prevent connection on internal-only ports.

Vaultwarden will store your passwords encrypted (obviously) so even if your database does get stolen, the attacker shouldn’t be able to read your passwords without your master password.