I loved the slow pace, even by Severance standards, accentuating the vibe of an isolated and abandoned company town. Felt almost like Koyaanisqatsi with all the scenic shots.

🙅 Write a script or shell alias for important or frequent tasks
👍 Pray it’s in my ctrl-r history the next time I need it

I feel this in my soul. With a side of “modern memory-safe languages are great” vs “the consistency and efficiency of shared libraries is what makes distributions great even if they’re written in C”.

I will mention that I have JS disabled by default and your website shows up as a completely blank white page. You’re certainly not obliged to cater to weirdos like me, but you may be interested to know that there are some people who browse the web this way for speed, privacy or security reasons. Most websites I visit this way are fine because they are server-side rendered.

If you are feeling ambitious and want to go “serverless”, try out DecSync and a compatible android app for contact sync. This represents all your contacts as files on disk in a way that avoids conflicts, and you can use SyncThing to keep your devices in sync 100% peer to peer. Unfortunately on your desktop you’ll probably have to use something like radicale on localhost and the plugin to convert it into CardDAV for your regular email client to understand.

Continued not to show me anything AI-related

People like me keep buying more F-91Ws when the old ones break or get lost

What’s the deal with the Google ad that shows a legit URL but takes users to another? That seems like the biggest issue here and the article just rolls past it like that’s totally normal.

Well damn. Thanks.

Is this a joke? I’m not clever enough to get it.

It’s convenient until you want to upgrade the distro.

Hmm wasn’t there some kerfuffle recently about how the kernel was going to start self-issuing CVEs en masse? Is this the result of that plan?

Well this 100% illegal art makes me happy so good job

If you can write correct C++ you’ll be able to write Rust code that compiles first time. Don’t stress, you’re learning the good stuff.

IrfanView, now that’s the good stuff

I probably wouldn’t bother. I can think of two scenarios you might get spied on.

1. Through your browser you’ve granted a website access to your webcam (Zoom etc.) and left a tab open. Maybe it could activate it when you weren’t expecting?
2. Someone has used a vulnerability to take control of your computer to the degree it can access your webcam directly. Desktop linux software doesn’t usually have meaningful isolation between software running as the same user, so at this point they can grab all your data, passwords, take screenshots, etc. and the webcam is just the cherry on top.

I expect most people don’t do (1) very often, let alone for sketchy websites, so IMO it doesn’t make much difference either way.

Smart fridges are one thing but there are many innocent folk relying on internet services to do normal and important things involving sensitive data - talk to family and friends, access healthcare, attend work, do their banking, school and childcare enrolments, even insurance. Should these things be replaced by rooms full of filing cabinets? Maybe, I dunno, that’s a big call. Short of substantial collapse that renders the internet unavailable, these sort of things will continue to be online and ordinary people deserve all the security they can get. If you’re working in cybersecurity to help people like this, then that is totally ethical in my view.

If you’re lucky maybe you can land a role with some direct permacomputing aspects - reduce hardware requirements, simplification of systems, maintaining old hardware to maximise lifespan. But just avoiding roles where you or your organisation is encouraging people to view more ads or buy more stuff would be a good start.

The web can’t be discarded by individuals

I agree, as a practical matter it’s another heavyweight tech system that we can’t opt out of. Striving to keep client requirements low so that we can get maximum use out of older hardware is great.

Is your comment is driven by wasteful web design or are you saying that even a lean web service design is still inherently excessive?

The latter. The web relies on a continuous path of connectivity between the client and the server to function at all. In practice it also requires cooperation on a global scale to make this useful to everybody, whether that’s DNS, CAs for TLS, BGP, undersea fibre optic cables or the big services that “everybody” relies on like AWS and GitHub.

When somebody says a word like permanetworking, to me that’s an invitation to think small. If you want to create something local, networking offers a lot more possibilities for action than, say, semiconductor manufacturing. Bluetooth chat, neighbourhood WiFi with local servers, long distance email via sneakernet, distributing useful data packages like maps, books and encyclopedic data so that they’re stored close to the people who need them. There’s so much we can do without climate-controlled datacenters.

I’ll join the handful of commenters shilling for kagi which has domain blocking and ranking as a first-class feature. It really is wonderful if you have the cash, and hopefully it will put pressure on the advertising-funded search engines to add these kinds of features.

I’m looking at the word “permanetworking” and my first thought is we could be a lot more ambitious. The web is such a complex and brittle way to access information it feels like a world away from perma-anything. Still, avoiding wasteful use of bandwidth is always a good thing so I won’t prattle any further.

This is one scenario I proposed when we were last having this discussion: https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2023/07/07/if-i-was-meta-and-wanted-to-make-fedi-implode.html