My biggest complaint about lemmy is the lack of content and censorship.

The only meaningful lemmy is dbz0.

If i want to read about cybersec, darknet, drugs etc. Reddit has far more content and far more discussion with less censorship – which is insane because they just about create everything now.

Wireguard (or tailscale) would be best here.

The bureaucracy of a typical ethics review is insane and it neither helps design ethical experiments or set boundaries, it’s just paperwork concerned with font type. there’s more truth to this than we’d like, which is not ok.

I think the parents suggestion was to not use it.

However, it’s a bit like avoiding water on a boat given how pervasive the cancer is.

Most of the MS suite is pretty awful. OG OneNote was a good idea. VSCode is ok, just quite slow. Oh LSP is fantastic, I believe that was developed by MS.

The Office Suite and PowerBI are terrible, by 2025 standards it’s glossy trash.

Every OS just mentioned can be updated, no support needed? Just overlay the next kernel over the last and all these distros provide a pathway for that.

Moreover, Arch, Void, Gentoo etc are rolling, so no loss of support.

I figure a multi-million dollar company could do the equivalent of exactly that.

Yeah I’ve installed heaps of old apps, it depends on dynamic vs static libraries etc but some people still use Emacs 25…

I have lost power whilst updating, can be a nuisance depending in the distro, but snapshots (zfs and btrfs both work well for me) have been life saving.

Mac and windows simply don’t have a lot of quality of life features. Working with them is painful. As self a documenting systems they are fantastic though, however, when I was younger we had things called schools that served to address that gap, these have fallen out of favour in modern times.

For privacy I recommend arkenfox

Python’s usually the better choice anyway tbf. I know piping isn’t as good, but there are so many footguns!

Nushell and Fish can be really convenient too.

I used to adhere to sh for an OpenBSD machine but I switched to python, Rust and Go for, even simple things.

The key is identifying how to use these tools and when.

Local models like Qwen are a good example of how these can be used, privately, to automate a bunch of repetitive non-determistic tasks. However, they can spot out some crap when used mindlessly.

They are great for skett hing out software ideas though, ie try a 20 prompts for 4 versions, get some ideas and then move over to implementation.

I’ve done things like this with python. It’s not too hard and one can use local models.

You can even control the length of the output using pydantic and other checks.

I’ve had good success scraping and annotating links from forums etc. Into bookmarks for research.

Very convenient!

A lot of mathematical languages start from 1: R, Julia, Mathematica (and also Lua and Fish).

I don’t know why, but in, e.g. R, it doesn’t bother me, I get caught by it in Lua all the time.

I suppose it’s a function of how far the array is abstracted from being pointers to an address that makes it easier to mentally switch.

I left a comment before but I thought I’d address the concerns around modal editing. It’s not as hard as it seems, once you wrap your head around hjkl you’ll be fine.

Use Lazyvim to get started and install the vim plugin in vscode. Try it qutebrowser too you won’t look back honestly.

Consider helix too, it works out of the box but the keys are slightly different to Vim which makes it challenging for me.

Neovim, Emacs, Helix and VSCode.

Zed has been fun.

VsCode and Pycharm are just too slow for me. You need a very fast machine with a lot of RAM.

I enjoyed Graphene but I had to go back to stock pixel because it was noticeably slower.

I don’t know why and I don’t know if that is still the case.

Everything worked flawlessly though, very impressive. If ever I buy a new phone I will be using it again. The only limitation, for me, was performance.

However, I try to use my laptop for everything I do, just gym/job and the dreaded occasional phone call.

Half-baked is a bit unkind. Sway is quite performant, stable and lean.