Finally. Are they actually hiring decent UX folks this time or are they using the people who designed 1980s VCR programming UIs again?

Offer to help setup the account and show them how to use Mastodon in general.

Also, not necessarily applicable to you but worth keeping in mind: encourage organizations to run Mastodon instances in addition to providing email addresses. If an org is providing email to employees or members for business correspondence they could easily provide Mastodon services as well, this allows members to have public discussions in twitter format without a third party controlling the platform.

Write a couple of your own toy services as practice. Write a one-shot that fires at a particular time during boot, a normal service that would run a daemon and a mount service that fires after its dependencies are loaded (like, say, a bind mount that sets up a directory under /run/foo after the backing filesystem is mounted - I do this to make fast ext4 storage available in some parts of the VFS tree while using a btrfs filesystem for everything else.) You can also write file watcher services that fire after changes to a file or directory, I use one of those to mirror /boot/ to /.boot/ on another filesystem so it’s captured by my system snapshots.

I’d start by reading the docs so you have some ideas about what services can do, then you’ll find uses that you wouldn’t have thought of before.

iPod replacement, dedicated smart home device dashboard, dedicated navigation/entertainment system in the car, dedicated UI for something on your home network or weather info or headlines or whatever website you want to check regularly in one place

This is the big one I want too. I’d love to curate topic based feeds from multiple communities so that other people could subscribe to a single coffee feed instead of 5-8 communities that they had to find themselves. I think this would be particularly useful for new people joining Lemmy, it would save a lot of time if they could just sub to a couple of multi’s and start getting content they’re interested in rather than needing to build their sub list entirely from scratch.

Yeah same. When he started topping my feed despite me blocking him I ejected from his platform and washed my hands of the whole thing.

They’re using the same playbook the FBI used to split leftists and prevent successful rallying around community leaders in the 60s, 70s and 80s. It’s time tested and it works.

When I logged in about six weeks after the ownership change my feed included Elon Musk, Andrew Tate and 2-3 other right wing influencers. I follow none of these people, I have zero interest in what they have to say and I find them reprehensible. I deleted my account and haven’t used the platform since.

The BBC, NPR and the NY Times. NPR in their effort to seem unbiased allows Republicans to frame the discussion of all things political and NPR participates rather than calling out obvious falsehoods or reframing any issue around facts. I bucket them firmly in the neoliberal controlled opposition camp. The NYT has become yet another corporate mouthpiece and the BBC does whatever they do. I never paid much attention to CNN but I engage with them even less now that they’ve switched to FOX’s manufactured outrage “entertainment” model rather than engaging in journalism.

So, uh, all of those? I can’t handle popular Republican “news” sources, they tend to twist facts in the name of this week’s political expediency or simply lie.

Edit: I’d like to say “literally any corporate news source” here too, all of them present a view of the world that reinforces their owners’ worldview and/or lobbies in their interest. All media should be carefully evaluated for a slant that benefits the owner of the publication regardless of their apparent political stance.

Kinda reminds me of classic authors like Heinlein.

Heinlein or Niven are pretty accurate comparisons IMO

I read the entire trilogy a couple of years ago and I’ll say a couple of things about it: the big ideas are great and the plot is interesting but the characters and the actual mechanics of the writing are solidly mediocre at times. I’m not sure if that’s down to the translation between languages (Ken Liu’s two translations are much better than the middle book IMO) or just the style of the novels but it’s definitely a pain point for the series.

Parts of the later books read like bad western SF from the 60s or 70s and some of the later themes are ridiculously reactionary. Like women being incapable of aggressive choices necessary for survival or the decadent feminized men who are incapable of things in general. There’s some large scale human social critique involved later about societal wishful thinking that’s 100% on point but I won’t spoil that for you.

It’s definitely worth reading, pieces of the trilogy are great, but it also goes in decidedly reactionary directions at times as well. It’s sort of like reading Ringworld - lots of neat concepts with some chauvinistic social commentary.

Currently reading Venomous Lumpsucker and enjoying the hell out of it. It’s ~350pgs of snark sniping at our ecological apathy and “market based solutions” to the problem. It’s so on point it hurts sometimes: Imagine if Wall St financialized species extinction so that the invisible hand of the market could solve the problem, but the solutions all end up being fraud and fraud derivatives.

Recently finished James S.A. Corey’s new Captive’s War books The Mercy of Gods and the novella Livesuit. Both good, though Livesuit was the more engaging. Looking forward to more in the series when main events kick off on the human side.

Finally read Blindsight last month after seeing it endlessly recommended over the last few years. It’s good, definitely worth the read, but I enjoyed Freeze-Frame Revolution and the Sunflowers short stories a bit more. I think I’d have been more impressed with Blindsight if I read it back when it was released, I feel like the shocking big idea has diffused into other works over the last decade and a half so it’s not quite as arresting now as it would have been then.

Read Linda Nagata’s Pacific Storm as a palate cleanser between Blindsight and the Captive’s War books. This one was interesting, Nagata writes a good near future thriller and I’ll probably recommend it to family members who are into those sorts of things.

Read the anthology Shine in an afternoon at some point as well - while I appreciate the optimism it feels forced at this point. It was published just over a decade ago now and it feels distinctly out of place in the current timeline.

+1, I used EndeavourOS

I had to set one of these up for my SO a couple of years ago. I dropped EndeavourOS on it, installed btrbk and configured automatic snapshots on a schedule and before package installation/update in case she managed to bork things by pip installing things into system python.

Fedora would probably work well too if you want a lower maintenance burden. I hesitate to suggest Ubuntu or Debian or their derivatives since you’ll probably want to be somewhat current with your Nvidia drivers.

I wrote simple hooks for my package manager to fire system snapshots before I install or update any package. It’s a nice safety belt that I’ve never actually needed to use, but if I do need it it’s there.

I wouldn’t bother with the cdr or dvdr either, they’re likely to be dead too in 30y.

We usually find solutions or workarounds to Nvidia driver issues within a day or two in the Arch community. The absolute worst case handling I’ve had to do was fork the Nvidia dkms package at the prior version (think nvidia-dkms-550) and run that until Nvidia themselves released a fixed version. Still pretty straightforward.

The most helpful advice I can give to anyone running a distro maintained by folks with day jobs is “take system snapshots before updates” - do that and the worst case fix to any update problem like this is still really easy to handle, even if you’re 10 minutes out from a work call and an update just went wrong.

Personally I’d just drop a note on the old user profile pointing at the new one and hope for the best. Portable accounts isn’t a solved problem in the fediverse yet.

CR has been on my retirement radar for a while. It remains to be seen how viable that thought is once global warming and sea level rise really ramp over the next 20-30y.