That’s great.

Please beware that DNS over TLS is transport protection; the dns server itself of course still sees and knows everything.

How exactly does Free, non-open-source software prevent that?

True! There’s even some of the first lessons for some languages on youtube, in their old, CD form.

Do note though, they updated some courses in the past couple of years to be more “modern” in the language used and taught.

Thanks for reading my rant lol :D

Yeah, it’s really nice to get up and running with a language you know nothing about yet. It’s probably not really helpful though if you already know it a small to moderate amount.

While I’m paying for their subscription, I do need to point out that, should you be inclined to sail the high seas, bounty is easily found; after all, it’s really just some audiobooks.

Github, Lemmy, my blog.

Thanks! :) Yes, definitely not dropping it :)

Pimsleur is actually a rather “old” program, originally devised just as a kind of audiobook, but now they also do have an app. It’s 30min/day and basically only teaches you to speak. They do not make any claims about getting you to a point where you are fluent, can read, write, reason about grammar, or anything the like; but they do, very very quickly, get you to actually talk and to understand other people talking.

I initially started learning with them, 20 days before a vacation to a notoriously non-English-speaking country, and it was actually great to, at that early point, already be able to get across what you needed to say and to understand what was being communicated to you in 95% of situations, AND not be hampered by the usual shyness to speak in a foreign language, because I was already so used to actually speaking out loud in it.

I’ve since added a more traditional grammar/vocab curriculum, but continued Pimsleur precisely because I’d be lacking speaking exercise otherwise. So, yeah, no, I’ll probably continue on with it.

What I actually dislike about it is

1. they do not teach you any systematic grammar (which is OK!), but then also think that therefore, you cannot pick up on patterns. The consequence of this is that ~90 lessons in, if a new verb is introduced as vocabulary, then I can be certain that the vocab section for that lesson will contain that verb, that verb as a question, that verb in the past tense, and that verb negated, even if those forms are 100% regular. Which would not be a problem, EXCEPT they put a stupid 10-vocab-cards-per-lesson limit upon themselves, so now whenever a new, actually difficult form or concept is introduced, it is never in the vocab and I have no way of revisiting things I did not understand. (The same, btw, is true for numbers. Literally every number from 1 to 100, and basically every multiple of 100 up to 10.000 is in the vocab at some point, despite it being crystal clear how to form numbers once you have seen 1-20, 100, and 200. Yesterday - again, 90 lessons in!! - my vocab included the word for “twelve”.)
2. their “spaced repetition” is a joke, because a) its “spaces” are way, way too big and b) obviously do not adapt to your skill/gaps.

So, yeah: really nice to get talking quickly and to help with pronunciation and getting used to speaking; really bad for everything else.

Meh… Lacking motivation this week. Also starting to feel like Pimsleur is a bit pointless.

Piefuckers

Pffft. You just aren’t a Nix enjoyer yet.

I’m just going to leave this here: Wigner’s friend.

In Timelike Infinity, there’s a group following that logic through to its conclusion, committing a bit of terrorism on the galactic scale to make Ultimate Observer-senpai notice them from the end of time and the universe.

Batshit insane, 10/10, one of Baxter’s tamer plotlines.

No problem. If you do decide to give NixOS a try, feel free to ask about anything should things be unclear :)

Yeah… I heard that too, about half a year after I got really into nix.

To be honest, I try to keep away from community drama as much as possible, so I am not entirely up to date here. I think (and I might be wrong, if someone reading this knows better, correct me!) there’s three main points of contention:

• Queer, PoC, and other “minority” users experienced harassment on (semi-)official channels (Github, Discord, Forums): That fucking sucks. I’m queer myself and lucky enough to not have experienced any of that in my time with Nix, but if I had not decided on Nix yet and learned about this before getting invested, it might have given me enough pause to not put any time into this. In all honesty however, that’s sadly a problem with many, many OSS projects.
• Governance and Funding: I do not know much about the governance, afaik there was a bit of drama about the inventor of Nix acting like a (benevolent?) dictator for life, but those issues should have been resolved with a new governance model. The really big, inciting incident of a lot of community drama with Nix through was a bit over a year ago, when the committee in question decided to let Anduril fund a NixCon, against the explicit and loud protests of the community. That sucked. Hard. While obviously all kind of shit companies use all sorts of great OSS projects, inviting Anduril to sponsor your official conference is… not really understandable.
• Conflicts of Interest: the aforementioned inventor of Nix owns a company heavily invested in the nix ecosystem. A bit reminiscent of the way that, say, Google holds Chromium by the balls, though to a much less severe extent. Miraculously, features that are “extremely unstable” in nix (but wanted by the community for a long time) suddenly get released in closed source to enterprise customers… However, the open source project is separate from, and not beholden to the whims of, said company.

My position on all three points is this: They are not great; but a) they do not threaten the ecosystem, which is mature and independent of this drama, and not reliant on one or a couple of central, potentially problematic, people; and b) there are community projects that actively and effectively do distance themselves from all of these points (namely: Lix) and which are drop-in replacements for the core nix language and compiler, meaning if the upstream project actively did something to really piss you of, you could move with very little work to something independent of Nix.

I hope this will not become necessary, because Nix is genuinely magic. Once you get the hang of it, nothing on your computer is particularly difficult anymore. You also get the best-in-class package management (and it’s easy! Once you have configured your own system to your liking, you already know everything you need to package your own software and contribute to nixpkgs!), being “bleeding edge” yet at the same time incredibly stable (seriously, I have switched all of my servers and VMs to Nix and I have not had one single incident once, including after updating machines after forgetting about them for 1.5+ years).

Anyways. Sorry for the wall of text lol.

As someone else has said: NixOS. You said in a comment that you use Arch because of the AUR. Good news, nixpkgs is larger and fresher than the AUR, without needing to tap into any kind of third-party/unofficial repo.

The unstable branch is essentially a rolling release (and very stable despite its name). I am happily gaming on it with Steam. During installation, you can just choose to not install a desktop. (However, due to how nix works, it’s trivial to rip out the entire DE at any point, should you so choose.)

But it is a learning curve for sure. Steep, but not very long.

Was gonna say. Nix matches all of OPs boxes.

Fühl ich, Bruder.

This is about as useful as the assholes going “It’s not Pedophilia, it’s Hebephilia!”.

Baby steps: I wish it was mandated that any software receiving even a penny in public funding must be open source down to the last byte.

You are probably half-joking, but… yeah.

I fucking hate this timeline. Actually, scratch that, that is way to placid and abstract.

I hate the assholes in charge. Fuck all of them. Luigi did nothing wrong.

My blood glucose monitor is not on the play store. So one dy next year I’ll wake up and no longer be able to get that data…?