bear

They have a zero tolerance policy and direct it at the small fish instead of the actual problem, which is governments using it to kill people, companies investing billions into speculation, and nobody stopping them or making them pay for copyright infringement.

What exactly would you like me, specifically, to do about that? I'm open to all suggestions.

It gets logged in the event viewer, yeah. That's how I discovered it, on account of the screens not waking up in time to show the actual bluescreen. The users were only reporting that their computers were deleting all their windows when waking up. From their perspective, all they saw was their computer taking a mildly longer time to wake up from deep sleep and then losing their entire session, but what it was actually doing was hard rebooting.

Headless is fine, the bug was specifically triggered when a computer woke up and detected a monitor exists, but the monitor took some unspecified amount of time too long to wake up. It was also fixed at some point, I'm not sure when, but it went on long enough that we swapped dozens of cables because it specifically only happened on the ones using DisplayPort, not HDMI.

Fun fact about monitors turning on slowly: did you know Windows has a bluescreen code for that?

The WIN32K_POWER_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT bug check has a value of 0x0000019C. This indicates that Win32k did not turn the monitor on in a timely manner.

~ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/bug-check-0x19c--win32k-power-watchdog-timeout

That's right, Windows will panic and throw a bluescreen if your monitors take a little too long to wake up. Had the pleasure of dealing with this suddenly becoming an issue and causing wide bluescreens on wakeup after an update back in mid-2024, on any Surface Dock using DisplayPort with specific Acer monitors.

I feel like NixOS might be the only distro that could realistically handle all these use cases, but I’m a bit scared of the learning curve and the maintenance work it’d take to migrate everything over.

It's a very steep learning curve, but I personally think it is worth it if what you want is to sync up all your various devices to a single common baseline configuration. I sought a single-distro solution for all of my systems for a long time and always ended up fragmenting them eventually because nothing I tried until NixOS was capable of handling such a diverse set of use cases in a way that would satisfy me.

I am similar to you, in that I regularly use a three server cluster, a gaming desktop, a multi-purpose personal laptop, and a work WSL instance on my work laptop. I still have some purpose-built distros where it makes sense; I use Proxmox for the actual server hosts themselves and then run NixOS VMs on them, along with running VMs for Home Assistant OS and TrueNAS (with the drives passed through, of course). All of these things I could do on raw NixOS (even Home Assistant is packaged in Nix, and there is a project to port Proxmox UI and tooling to NixOS) but I like the stability of the dedicated and battle-tested distros for critical infrastructure, especially for stuff whose configuration is very specific to a given task.

With NixOS, each other device has a consistent shared configuration and package set, they all get updated to the exact same versions thanks to flakes so everything works the same and as expected no matter where I am, and it's all declaratively configured and documented in one spot. Spinning up a new system or rebuilding an existing system is as easy as pulling the config and changing a few relevant lines, and from there it effectively assembles itself from scratch to the exact state I want it to be in. There's never any lingering packages or configuration cruft because the system is assembled from scratch every time it updates. Much of my home configuration is also managed, so aliases, environment variables, even vim configs are consistent across the board and set in one location.

The main downside is resource efficiency. Nix is designed to be reproducible and declarative, not fast or lean. It uses much more storage than a typical package manager, and packages are built with wide compatibility in mind so you often are leaving performance on the table from not using newer instruction sets like CachyOS. You can compile your own packages to fix that part, but that obviously takes a lot of spare processing power. I've been considering setting up my server cluster to do automatic building for me, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

It's really easy to change your positions when there were never any principles behind it either way.

This is what I'm so desperate for people to understand: these are empty people. In terms of politics, they don't have beliefs in the way you and I do. They have hollowed out that part of themselves. This is why debate or the introduction of new facts never changes their minds, because it never made up their mind in the first place. Such a change requires your positions to be propped up by genuine belief in what you think is the right thing, where that prop can be knocked over.

These people belong to a team, a clan, a cult, however you want to phrase it. The only thing that matters is that their side is in power and uses that power to act against those who aren't. Any means to that end is valid to them. They'll happily switch to whichever position is most convenient for them without missing a beat. They're only justifying it to you to keep you busy and distracted, they never really believed a word they said. They just chose the words they thought would be most effective to win.

Oh yeah, I should probably expand on the context for that.

Palmer Luckey is an outright fascist (see: thread picture above defending illegal executive military autonomy without the explicitly necessary congressional approval) who currently owns a company called Anduril that specializes in weapons and surveillance. He is also notably a Game Boy enthusiast, and ran a Game Boy modding site way back called ModRetro. He took his blood money and started a new company with the same name that produces a Game Boy clone called the ModRetro Chromatic, which is admittedly quite good quality, and publishes indie games as physical cartridges. I'm including this information just to be fair; unlike Elon Musk, this guy isn't a poser posturing because he thinks it will endear him to the nerd crowd or whatever. He has a legitimate history in the community long before he got big, he knows his stuff, and there's no way ModRetro is profitable, so it's likely a genuine passion project for him and a love letter to the console.

However, any good will or endearment that would otherwise generate is completely wasted because he just recently produced an Anduril-branded Chromatic made from the same material as his attack drones. And ModRetro's main fanbase is almost exclusively comprised of fascist or fascist-adjacent soylent losers who simultaneously claim that this shouldn't be political but also think it's Dang Heckin' Epic that he made a Game Boy out of the same military murder metal as his weapons. They've spent the last year saying we shouldn't judge ModRetro just because it's owned by an arms dealer, and then they go out and defend said owner blurring the lines and making weapons-branded soy toys for grown men. They sometimes leaked into Game Boy enthusiast spaces and get real steamin' angry that everybody else hates them, so for the most part they stay in their echo chamber now.

I personally really hate this guy because he keeps dipping his fascist dick into things I'm really passionate about and causing significant community fracturing over it. First VR, then NixOS, then Game Boys and the indie homebrew scene for it. I basically have to see this guy and the aftermath of his handiwork every day.

Some sources for my claims about the typical fanboys of ModRetro:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModRetroChromatic/comments/1pomrd1/better_look_at_the_anduril_chromatic/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModRetroChromatic/comments/1nyadq9/can_people_stop_pretending/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModRetroChromatic/comments/1oub2eq/buying_a_chromatic_isnt_an_ethical_dilemma/

My main use case is using it to protect my exposed Home Assistant instance in a way that doesn't require a VPN that family can screw up. I can just install the cert into the app for them and it Just Works. I also use it for my own Gotify notifications.

As a more general rule, I apply it to anything I want to expose but can't easily protect using OIDC logins. I used to put more behind it, but I recently opened up my services to friends and family, so I moved to using Authentik as my primary defense for most things. mTLS was great when it was just me, I can easily install the cert into my own browser and all of my Android apps (except Firefox Android...) but friends and family just zone out when I explain why their new phone doesn't connect, so I had to adjust my systems to compensate.

They're either poorly explaining or poorly understanding a well-known link between fascism and the overindulgence in nostalgia for bygone times. But not the nostalgia of "I loved the games I played as a kid" or "I think the industry has gone downhill since then", and instead the more general and politicized "society/everything was better back then, remember what (((they))) took from you". You'll often see nazis posting video edits of late 90s to early 00s home video footage with massively overdone VHS filters of white people smiling and shit. What they don't tell you is that the people making these videos weren't even born then, and that's the central flaw of the nostalgia-fascism pipeline that usually gets left out: it's the strongest on people who weren't actually alive yet. These people have nostalgia for a time that they either weren't around for or were too young to remember, because the actual emotion they're engendering is the feeling that they missed out on the "good times", not that the good times have come and gone.

There can be some overlap with retrogame crowd because that nazi-nostalgia can take many forms, but this is usually from the easily-discernable "games are WOKE now, why can't games be non-political like Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid" types. It doesn't work as well as a vehicle for political engagement because... you didn't miss out. You can just go download the roms right now, easier than ever, and still enjoy it. If you put in a little effort to learn to set up shaders and run-ahead, you can arguably get a better experience than we did back then on the real systems. So this is mostly contained to a subsection of nasally-voiced overweight 30-something nerds who are mad at the world because they can't get a girlfriend. To circle back to the original topic, you can actually find a lot of these people in the modretro subreddit soying out about how epic and based Palmer Luckey is for making the weapons-grade Game Boy that triggers the libs, because upsetting people they hate is the only thing still getting them through the day.

I'm a socialist and I agree with them.

The reality is that not everyone wants to own and maintain their current home, for a variety of reasons. So long as homes are commodified, which they effectively will be for the long-term forseeable future until we live in a true post-scarcity society, renting a home will be a necessary option that a functioning society must provide. Building housing is expensive in terms of labor and resources, and that labor must be compensated somehow, and not everyone will want or be able to front that entire cost. Or maybe they simply don't want to settle down permanently where they are now, or even ever, and therefore homeownership would saddle themselves with unwanted debts and the trouble of selling the home when they do move.

The flaws we see in modern day landlords are largely a function of capitalism. Housing is a necessary resource for survival, but one that we've rendered artificially scarce through social and economic policy inflating the price, and then it gets bought up by the only people who can afford it and rented out to those who can't. There's nothing inherently wrong with, for example, a worker-owned cooperative leasing out housing and providing maintenance services at a fair price for those homes for people who don't want to do it themselves. Ownership alone isn't a job and such rentseeking would be forbidden in a sane and just society, but under a better system there would still be room for such a service that provides genuine value to society.

Looks like grafana to me

I guarantee you the time spent swapping AAs every few days will far outweigh the time you spend using a screw driver to replace this battery at the frequency it requires.

Yeah, but the AAs will still be around in 10 years. Until we standardize internal power cells and legally mandate companies use them, I don't really care how user-serviceable it is, by the time it actually needs a swap most companies are done selling it anyways and just want you to buy the next thing instead. At best you can get a shady third-party knockoff. Valve is slightly better in this regard, but I don't expect them to still sell batteries 10-15 years from now.

I think most people just use "user-serviceable" as a cope and never actually intend to service it, it just makes them feel better to think they can. They just throw it away and get a shiny new thing when it becomes slightly inconvenient.

I’ve been able to order replacement parts directly from them in the past. Would they not sell you a replacement battery? Is the Pro 3 less repairable?

I can get rechargeable AAs in packs of 4 just around the corner from my house and therefore always have a few spares on hand instead of special ordering a unique battery that only works in a single device on the planet and only is available for purchase as long as they allow it. But I guess we can just throw it away in a few years instead and buy whatever new product they want to sell, as long as it comes with a charging cradle of course.