I do this too. It's not for everyone. At this point it's easily been positive ROI for me, but that's after about two years now of maintaining my configs through multiple machines and MacOS upgrades.

I would recommend it only if this type of thing naturally interests you. I can't imagine powering through the initial learning curve if it felt like a frustrating chore.

That said, if having (most of) your machine defined declaratively in a git repository sounds exciting/useful/comfy, then I would encourage you to give it a try. You can start small by just configuring a few programs or options and see how you like it.

I wrote more about my experience here where I also link to my configs: https://bryce.is/writing/code/fully-nix-pilled

This is a great list. Even the first line item would be amazing. I'm really feeling this pain presently as I am moving my setup to a new dedicated machine.

Put aside the bit rot that occurs constantly with digital project files in a way it never did with tape, just getting my DAW, plugins, samples, projects working has been a giant pain. I am a big fan of deterministic/reproducible computing environments in general. My primary machine is setup declaratively with Nix. It would be great if something like this existed for my music setup without having to compromise on creative choices.

Most of these plugins are of dubious software quality, but that is not mutually exclusive with their ability to accomplish great sounding results. One of the reasons I bought a dedicated machine for music is that I inherently don't really trust them to be running on the same device as my personal computing. Some of them (Universal Audio Apollo) even require kernel extensions on MacOS.

If anyone is attempting to solve this, I'd like to hear about it.

I agree that "the internet will always be filled with real people: looking for each other". The question is will they be able to successfully find each other, and how can they be sure they have?

This ties in well with the Dark Forest theory of the Internet: that the public Internet becomes dead while humans flee to hidden, invite-only, private spaces.

https://charlottedune.substack.com/p/the-dark-forest-theory-...

Presumably, the value in finding each other will be the key to determining you have found someone real. If you literally can't tell the difference, then what does it matter? But many of us believe that there are important differences, that do matter, and that the dead internet can never truly provide.

If the connection is real, one would think the people would eventually want to meet. We've all seen the stories of people being catfished and how devastating it is for some people. How long is an acceptable amount of time for someone to engage in an online relationship (of any kind, not necessarily romantic), before finding out it's been a chatbot the whole time?

I just met someone, I think last year, who I've known via forums and chat for over 20 years now. I was looking for a place to watch the eclipse and totality was going right through his backyard. Imagine if I drove down there it was just some random address that an AI gave me after 20 years of talking. I'd lose my mind.

Some people's only friends are people they know online, through games or forums. Imagine finding out your only friend in the world isn't even real. That's very dark.

This seems like something the bots should have to disclose upfront. I hate not knowing if I'm talking to a real person or not. Imagine spending hours in an online debate with what is ultimately a chatbot... what a waste. If I want to talk to a chatbot, I'd go to a chatbot. There is a reason we are here in the comments instead of just pasting the link into ChatGPT and going back and forth with it.

it depends if you want real connection. imagine if this reply was a video call. wave emoji

by using the internet or by using a website? if we included digital telephone would the answer be getting their phone number? i wish hosting a website was as easy as hosting a phone call.

Hosting a website might be easier now. Services like netlify make it pretty simple

The author recommends using "Do Not Track", but this has been deprecated for some time. Safari and Firefox have both removed the option completely. Perhaps the author meant GPC?

For all of the security suggestions in this article I was also surprised to see the author recommending ungoogle-chromium, which has a number of security issues. See: https://qua3k.github.io/ungoogled/

The primary issue I take with the article is the chosen tone. I think there are ways that these points could have been made without being overly cynical and negative. I think speaking authoritatively throughout the article has the effect of equating the importance of subjective preferences (like the choice of which terminal emulator to include), with legitimate security concerns (bash shortcomings, migrations, firewall misconfiguration, piping curl | sh to install software).

I wouldn't use Omarchy, but I am glad it exists. It's bringing more people into the desktop Linux ecosystem, which should be positive sum. Omarchy comes off to me as a little hacky and immature, but at this stage that seems.. mostly fine? Perhaps they should be more clear about that in their marketing, but I understand the goals and I admire the enthusiasm from DHH.

I suspect the scope and scale of these operations are at least 1-2 orders of magnitude larger than most people think. I also strongly suspect such operations are not limited only to the governments you listed here. If the public was able to quantify the scope then maybe they would be more outraged.

Part of me hopes that some amount of resources are being invested by someone in our government to analyze and assess this, but maybe that is overly optimistic.

No one wants to look into it because everybody is doing it. After Trump lost to Biden in 2020 there was a chance to analyse mass use of Big Data, targeting and psychometrics to influence the electorate. They didn’t do it because that’s how they won 2020.

Then Musk bought X and turned the game around.

I'm equally confused at just how bad Reddit is at identifying and removing bad actors to the point that I'm convinced it must be an intentional.

I'm not sure if the reason may be as simple as the desire to pump their user numbers for earnings, or if it's something more egregious than that. It's not clear to me how a company owned by the public which relies on advertisers for revenue has been able to carry on for so long being a propaganda farm for foreign agents and marketing bots.

Oh it’s deliberate. It’s been THE online platform for far left radicalization and extremist views for at least a decade now. It’s by far the most intolerant social media platform relative to the mainstream platforms.

It was better before they all left twitter.... twitter was far left radicalization , and reddit was mostly on-topic except /r/politics.

I am in the same boat. I'd prefer something that just works, but I am at the point now that setting something up with TrueNAS seems like it may be worth the effort in the long term.

Also, while I love the convenience of Synology's software, I don't love that it's closed source. Their hardware is also fairly underwhelming for the price tag.

OpenSea is very nearly "entirely on-chain" if I'm understanding your point correctly. It's powered by smart contracts. It's not custodial like Coinbase or Robinhood. Users custody their assets in their own wallets. They trade by submitting transactions directly from their wallet to a smart contract address on-chain which facilitates fulfillment of the trade. The code for these smart contracts is open source and verifiable.

It may not be obvious to more casual observers, but there is a lot of trading volume happening on on-chain exchanges these days (as in easily 10B+ in trading volume per day with most of this coming from futures).

Anyone can generate an NFT, including IP you don't own or existing collections.

Hundreds of wallets might contain a the same monkey picture (or same hash and IPFS link to nitpick).

What matters is that Opensea says you have the "real" one.

Their database is the real list of who owns what, the blockchain is a distraction.

You can see it in their anti-theft systems. NFTs get hidden and blocked from trading after a police report, even if it's still there on the chain.

I would disagree with that characterization. There are dozens of NFT marketplaces which all have access to the same underlying data. An NFT is denoted by its address on chain, which is trivial to find. Similarly anyone can create a website that looks like Google, but the "real" google is the DNS entry at "google.com".

In my experience H1-Bs know that the consequence of losing their job could mean being forced to leave the country. Management knows that too. Obviously this affects the incentives and behavior of both the manager and the employee.

This is also my impression. Containers aren't full-proof. There are ways to escape from them I guess? But surely it's more secure practically than not using them? Your project looks interesting I will take a look.