Spend a half-month considering, deeply, which path you would most-value having taken at the end of your life.

Due to an unconscious psychological-limitation, imagine your funeral at 1.5x your current age ( we apparently have a kind of “horizon” in our ability to understand our meaning beyond that ),

and imagine each significant variant, or compromise, and see how each makes you, in that future-condition/context feel.

Your answer is within you, same as for everyone.

_ /\ _

SO LONG AS IT IS ACTUAL MERITOCRACY,

and not just privilege’s gaslighting about it ( via making-certain that the poorest have inferior-nutrition, inferior-air-quality, worse-pollution, inferior-education, inferior-healthcare, etc ),

then yes, I hold it is The Proper Way.

However, it REQUIRES a truly-level playing-field, and not a 2-tiered “level” playing-field.

The Scandinavian system of ONLY public-schooling, so there is only 1 tier of education-quality, is a required component.

Student nutrition needs to be guaranteed.

Healthcare needs to work properly, for all.

Livingwage needs to be for all full-time work, and companies that try to hire only part-time for the real-work, have to have the profit-benefit of such hamstringing-of-many-lives cut from them all, permanently.

Fairness requries careful systematic, & openly-honest enforcement, because the DarkHexad: narcissism/machiavellianism/sociopathy-psychopathy/nihilism/sadism/systemic-dishonesty ALWAYS seeks to enforce abusive-exploitation, and it is underhandedly aggressive, and natural in our human nature.

Not mitigating it == accommodating it.

Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, eh?

_ /\ _

Fish, arthropods, etc, had eggs millions of years before chickens.

_ /\ _

A couple of decades ago, iirc, SANS.org ( IF I’m remembering who it was who did it ) put a fresh-install of MS-Windows on a machine, & connected it to the internet.

It took SEVERAL MINUTES for it to be broken-into, & corrupted, botnetted.

The auto-attacks by botnets are continuous: hitting different ports, trying to break-in, automatically.

I’ve had linux desktops pwned from me.

the internet should be considered something like a mix of toxic & corrosive chemicals: “maybe” your hand will be fine, if you dip it in for a moment & immediately rinse it off ( for 3 hours ), but if you leave you limbs dwelling in the virulent slop, Bad Things™ are going to happen, sooner-or-later.

I used to de-infest Windows machines for my neighbours…

haven’t done it in years: they’ll not pay-for good anti-virus, they’ll not resist installing malware: therefore there is no point.

Let 'em rot.

I’ve got a life to work-on uncrippling, & too-little strength/time left.

“but I don’t need antivirus: i never get infected!!”

then how come I needed to de-infest it for you??

“but I don’t need an immune-system: pathogens are a hoax!!”

get AIDS, then, & don’t use anti-AIDS drugs, & see how “healthy” you are, 2 years in.

Same argument, different context-mapping.

Tarpit was a wonderful-looking invention, for Linux’s netfilter/iptables, years ago: don’t help botnets scan quickly & efficiently to help them find a way to break-in…

Anyways, just random thoughts from an old geek…

EDIT: “when do I need to wear a seatbelt?”

is essentially the same category of question.

_ /\ _

Removed by mod

IF you want Steam, THEN please consider every variant in the official Ubuntu family.

Steam-support told me in their system, iirc in early 2023, that they ONLY support the Ubuntu family ( directly ).

As Linus Torvalds noted, it isn’t possible to release software that is going to work on all distros.

Even glibc has been broken by one, in that talk of his, and it wasn’t a niche distro, either, iirc.

Pick which subset you CAN afford to support, and do not add to that subset until you’re rolling in money, from your linux-customerbase.

( slight sarcasm on the last line, but business is business: destroying-resources costs, and if there is no benefit, it isn’t sane to continue doing it. )

Decide which capabilities/functions/apps you NEED, and then don’t even consider distros that break your required-set on you.

_ /\ _

If it works for you, stick with it.

Works is a feature, not a bug.

_ /\ _

I’m a braindamage survivor.

You need to communicate your values, and why they are your values.

You need to communicate who you are, via the most-significant-moments/events you experienced: the most-significant-for-you meanings, see?

As for you disappearing, the Soul/CellOfGod/ChildOfGod/Continuum ( whatever you want to call it ) that causes the molecules in your body to continue-living ( yes, there is a physics-level cause for the anti-entropy behaviour expressed as living-organisms, and it isn’t there, when those same molecules are doing the disintegrating-corpse thing, obviously )

That cause is unkillable.

It keeps getting caught in conceptions/lives, through endless-stream-of-Universes’s perpetual recycling/churning of ALL energies ( including meaning! ) contained within it.

It isn’t the-individual-life that is the center,

it is the Soul/CellOfGod/ParticleOfBrahman that is.

IT experienced some of ITs growing-up, in/through your-life.

With you, your Soul got a gift, fersure.

My life’s been hell, & I’m glad:

nothing like aversion-therapy to force a Soul/CellOfGod to grow-up, eh?

The Soul that had “me”-personality won’t ever make that mistake, again.

: )

If you’ve still got any ability to read, or to have someone read to you, please have someone get Elisabeth Haich’s “Initiation” into you:

it is likely that only part of the book will be important for you, but that part will likely be IMPORTANT.

The world her Soul 1st inhabited was something like 10,000y ago ( it hasn’t rained much there, since then ).

My Soul’s spent most of its time inhabiting insect-lives, or particularly-stupid-fish-with-bad-eyesight.

It’s been centuries since it had been in a human-category life ( the Catholicism I was pressed into, by mom, got nuked when I discovered those strange-memories were memories of my Soul’s having lived in other kinds of lives.

Not only did it nuke all the Abrahamic religions, but it forced me to accept that ALL lives are lives because they have a Soul underlying them, and there isn’t anything “special” about the life of a human, except for our Potential & our Opportunity, which most take for granted, including me, in my younger days ).

Anyways, you can’t unexist, from Eternity.

You’ll always have-been, see?

The Soul/CellOfGod who had you has YOU in it, indestructibly.

I’m earning removal of me-personality now ( should be days ), so the nervous-system currently having “me” can get that “me” ripped-out & can replace it with a better personality ( it’s a Buddhist technique, apparently nobody remembers it, in the modern version of Buddhism, for some reason ), so you can stack multiple personalities/someones into a single incarnation, to get-through multiple-lives of lessons/growing-up crammed into a single incarnation/life.

It works, but it takes work to force one’s own identity-death, or removal of the instance-of-ego underlying one’s personality…

There are 3 kinds of mind that death-itself has difficulty “gripping” on:

• Wisdom-realizing-that-all-phenomena-are-empty-of-self-inherent-existence

• immeasurable-compassion for all sentiences ( but tempered by wisdom )

• Faithing, which is the simultaneous surrendering-to higher-power, relying-on higher-power, and gratitude-to higher-power.

Faithing on one’s own CellOfGod/Soul is perfectly find/workable.

It has BuddhaNature/GodNature, so all you have to do is orient to that aspect of its nature, and then faithing is powerful/valid, see?

Guru-yoga, is faithing.

“a faith”, ie noun, … isn’t what the original texts said, btw.

Anyways, I hope something in this helps, gives you leverage.

Either way, our Souls will meet again, after “us”, sooner-or-later…

Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, Hoomin!

( :

_ /\ _

China doesn’t want to rock the boat … yet!

WHEN they’ve got the imbalance in-their-favor enough, they will gut & smash India: that is their plan.

Modi’s relying on Russia, China’s economic-vassal-state, for protection against China, hands India to China, strategically.

Make-believe never saved any country’s life, nor will it, in the coming decade.

See it for what it is: now is only a “location in time”, during the slippery-slope ( low steepness, after 1 or 2 more world-process Punctuations, the slope will be STEEP! ) time before global-TANTRUM/POGROM that #ClimatePunctuation, combined with political-tantrum, including “populist” dictatorships, combined with religious-tantrum, combined with food-web collapse, combined with an increasing-fraction-of-humankind becoming refugee…

etc.

The Great Filter’s unfolding, but still in its Yin stage.

China doesn’t want to rock the boat yet.

When opportunity is ripe, however, they are going to.

_ /\ _

Don’t put-up with Israel’s gaslighting.

I used to support Israel.

As an Englishman, whose identity I don’t remember pointed-out, years ago:

IF the Jews of the region have a moral-right to their own homeland, THEN so do the Palestinians.

EITHER BOTH OR NEITHER-DO.

Once someone has proven they are only narcissistic-machiavellian-sociopath/psychopath, through their nihilistic obliteration of other’s lives, and much more, and throught their sadism,

they have ZERO claim on God, on “scripture”, or on “validity” or on Truth.

The old rabbis ( find some interviewed on youtube! ) who call-out Israel & I stand together in contempting their lies.

KNOW gaslighters for what they are, & deal-with-them as such.

Rabies is rabies.

IF the patient can be got sane/healthy, then help 'em do that, but if not…

then don’t let 'em infect you with their rabies.

( & that goes also for Hamas’s terror-strike, too: both sides have crossed the line into worshipping nihilism/mass-murder, while claiming God, sadly )

_ /\ _

Read Hofstede’s “Exploring Culture”, and consider that a person in a high-collectivity culture, which also is a high-power-distance culture, may well answer the survey with what “face” requires them to say, instead of answering with what they, themselves, feel.

If you aren’t correcting for that, you’re doing propaganda, not science.

Different cultures REQUIRE different subjectivities be taken-into-account.

I think it would be more valid to dig into specific dimensions of happiness, & make some of those objective ( cortisol-blood-levels, for measuring stress, e.g. )

WHEN you ask people in individualistic cultures a question, and THEN you ask people in collectivist cultures the SAME question, they are not answering the same question, they are answering the social-pressure question, instead.

It makes complete mincemeat of cross-cultural measuring of “objective” things.

Try reading Lanier’s “Foreign to Familiar” book, & understand just HOW different warm-vs-nordic cultures are, in instinct/reactions,

then it should be more obvious how such surveys are disinformation, not information.

Then it ISNT a

“Global Happiness Index”

, rather it is a

“Global URBAN Happiness Index”,

and such profound mislabeling of things is disinformation, not journalism.

Which, itself, is so systematic & profound, nowadays, that there isn’t much hope for integrity to win, in our world, now, anyways.

and if you consider that “economic barrier to entry” can make any bigger company, who is able to scoop a startup’s code & sell the use of it, can extinguish the startup who created the code …

then, yes, there are definitely situations where protection-against-competitors, some of whom have DEEP pockets, could be an actual requirement, for opensourcing one’s code.

“Coopetition” Bill Gates coined, where you “cooperate” with your competitors, but, being Microsoft, you do it so you can snuff them, soon.

I can definitely see why a company would want to be able to allow limited use of their code, globally, but to legally-prohibit using it to destroy them.

I’ve been told that to start a fight in Francophones, just demand to know whether grapefruit ( pamplemousse, iirc ), is male or female…

: P

The book “The Alphabet Versus The Goddess” by Leonard Shlain, makes the point that women’s-rights simply don’t progress as quickly, in countries which have gendered languages…

So, Anglo cultures pushed women’s-rights, whereas Latin cultures … won’t, don’t, drag their heels, etc…

That book is now a couple ?decades? old?

It’s still true.

Conditioning an entire population’s System-1 ( Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast & Slow”, the System-1 is the default-instinct & the trained-now-automatic-expertise system, it also is the system that is both addiction & prejudice ) into gendering everything, automatically, may well prevent equal-validity from ever having place…

Mind you, I now want to see which Nordic/Scandi languages are gendered, & which Middle-East languages are gendered, to see if that holds in those parts of the world, not just in the Americas…

… digging …

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender

( that isn’t a quick read… may come back to it some day… )

Bingo!

“The grammatical gender of nouns is one of two: a noun may be masculine or it may be feminine, and there is no neutral option. Moreover, masculinity is the default grammatical gender in Arabic and a word does not have to have anything special in order to reflect this. Femininity, on the other hand, is not default and a noun would have to have something special to reflect this gender in Arabic.”

from

https://www.learnarabiconline.com/gender/

So, there is ZERO hope of equal-validity in Arabic culture, because the language programs Arabic people’s System-1 into 2 exclusive validity-categories, with male being inherently more-valid, by established language-habit.

What about Hebrew?

https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-an-increasingly-nonbinary-world-is-gendered-hebrew-willing-to-adapt/

No wonder women can’t get equal-validity in Jewish culture…

( I read a Jewess’s writing ~ Nobody EVERY celebrated the birth of a Jewish girl: only boys are celebrated ~ … which explains the damage in the stereotypical “Jewish mother”, a woman whose validity has been contempted by all in her culture, until the damage is her most defining feature… )

So, it looks like equal-rights/equal-validity for women is … baseless, in some/many cultures…

Interesting, but depressing.

: \

I haven’t read the article, but yes, wars do have time-limits:

Once a war becomes domestically impossible to participate in, Vietnam as 1 proof, then the-course-of-war changes.

Economic-collapse means that Biden’s hosed in 2024, and the Republicans are Russian allies, not NATO allies.

Yes wars have time-limits.

Simply wait & see: by the end of 2025, NATO will be gutted, Trump will have been crowned GEOTUS ( a term they already use for him ), and Trump will ( passively, at least ) back Russia.

Sickening, but it looks like that’s the fact of the unfolding global/geopolitical near-future.

IF by “security” one means bugs have been prevented from living in it, there is one coded in Haskell, it may be named XMonad or something…

( … digging … )

Yep:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmonad

from there:

“Due to the small number of lines of code of the Xmonad application, the use of the purely functional programming language Haskell, and recorded use of a rigorous testing procedure it is sometimes used as a baseline application in other research projects. This has included re-implementation of xmonad using the Coq proof assistant,[31] a determination xmonad is an imperative program,[32] and studies of package management relating to the NixOS linux distribution.[33]”

Dig: 2000-ish lines of code.

https://xmonad.org/

https://xmonad.org/documentation.html

Russia, the invader, is the Good Guys, in the Russia vs Ukraine war??

Disinformation-propaganda.

https://bigthink.com/thinking/fascism-definition-stanley/

People need to understand those 10 points that are characteristic of Fascism.

Comically, Fascism was invented by a Black man, an African, named Marcus Garvey, and Mussolini stole it from him, then Hitler from him, to the best of my knowledge…

The problem is the end of civil-rights: WHEN the only internet left is the internet that IS for-profit propaganda, auto-deleting all non-compliant human thought, discussion, intelligence, objectivity, etc,

THEN humanity is just managed “steers” whose lives are being consumed by corporations which graze on us.

Since another dimension of ratchet is the concentration-of-wealth, you can see that working-destitution is being enforced on more & more of humankind, and real wealth being limited to fewer & fewer…

What happens when the working-poor try fighting for a fair share of the economy?

Rigged legislation, rigged “police” ( I used to believe in the police ), anti-education Florida-style for the public, etc…

AI tilts the playing-field, and it does-so for the monied special-interest-groups.

They don’t have humanitarianism at heart.

Neither do the politically motivated.

Neither do for-profit-psychopaths ( corporations are psychopaths ).

Living in a Decorator Prison is all humanity can hope for, now: inmates, … except for the fewer & fewer oligarchs & the financial-class.

'tisn’t looking good.

Without Divine Intervention, which is statistically improbable an event, these are The End Times, but not for the reason that the religious claim.

What are the security-recommendations you have for Linux, Wine, & Proton users,

that we simply wouldn’t, or don’t commonly, think of, given your abnormal expertise/view?

Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, eh?

_/_

I’m an old guy, whose been in Linux, off’n’on since 1997 or 1996, and not a professional.

Keep that in mind.

I now always recommend a pair of NVMe’s,

with swap on both,

with root mdadm mirrored RAID1 on both ( I’ve read that BTRFS “RAID1”, when 1 mirror is missing on boot, simply won’t permit you to boot, unless you get jiggy with the damn thing, telling it arbitrary stuff, to get it to allow that )

with /home mdadm mirrored RAID1

and use the extra space for whatever.

Use SATA for your backups.

I recommend using the fastest NVMe’s you can get, but biggest is more-important.

Samsung … what are they, EVO drives? go up to 2TB, iirc, and are reasonably cheap ( for people who can afford such things )…

This gives Linux’s mdadm RAID1 speed ( it does RAID0 for reads, RAID1 for writes ), AND it gives greater reliability.

I’ve been stung by incorrect partition space allocation sooo many times, that now I’d stick everything on as few partitions as is sane, but as OpenBSD recommends, some filesystems on separate partitions breaks some attack-methods ( partly by breaking hardlinks ).

The difference that access-speed & bandwidth do, for your OS, and especially swap, is stunning, so if you’ve got the funds, consider the Samsung PRO NVMe’s, instead of their EVO’s, but definitely get quality & quick NVMe’s, RAID1 'em up, and enjoy.

PS: I always do a prototype-install, now:

whole-device ( except swap, EFI, boot ), 1 partition, install everything I’m likely to want, of that OS, take a look at the filesystem use, for different parts of the root fs-tree, and then begin deciding what partition-sizes to be considering, using a 1.5x or 2x factor for expansion-space… ( different distros with /usr and /opt, especially ).

Then I repartition into the intended structure, & install in…

And, of course, I now expect to have to re-partition 1/2y later, as the things I’ve later found, & added, alter the ratios…

Obviously, if this weren’t just some random guy at home, LLVM would make much more sense, because then partitions could be resized/redistributed on-the-fly.

But for now, for a machine I only-sometimes use, it’s good enough.

Maybe this seems useful information?

I hope so…

( :