A friend gave me the 6-CD “power pack” of Mandrake 10 that could install a quite wide range of optional software completely offline. Hooked me too.

deleted by creator

Truly, I scramble six eggs in a go, but six boiled eggs feels like a whole feast somehow.

That does sound like a bit much for my daily driver; I’ll have to check it out in a VM sometime. It warms my heart that a distro community can have such longevity, and I think the simplicity has to be a big part of that.

Isn’t the lack of dependency management a huge pain on Slackware? I think Gentoo is my forever distro, but I’m very curious about Slackware.

The BDFL model, as it’s called, is what allows large projects to continue to have focused vision rather than devolving into design-by-committee. The kernel is actually already well beyond pure BDFL, but my point is having a single point of overall leadership can be a huge boon for the organization of large and complex projects. FOSS philosophy has literally nothing to do with management structure; it’s entirely about the rights of the end user.

BDFL is not without its own risks. WordPress is a good counterexample these days. But, when someone originates a project and sticks around to steer it, it would be silly to reject their proven successful leadership for such a vague reason as you have presented.

When things do go sideways, people are free to fork the project. That is what FOSS is.

Excellent, I’ll try the $8 option

Exposure therapy can be quite powerful. Let yourself feel upset: don’t be ashamed that your emotions lash out. Let yourself feel, then remind yourself how things aren’t as bad as they feel. Feeling and introspecting rather than suppressing in the face of pain is emotional weight lifting.

There will be times when you lack the emotional strength to exercise, and that’s ok too. Everything in life ebbs and flows, and you can slowly make meaningful progress toward deeper happiness by taking advantage of the flows while showing yourself grace for your human imperfections when things ebb.

A major pillar of self improvement it seems we share is letting go of the expectation that everyone will like you. It’s just as likely to be someone else’s problems that lead them to not gel with you as it is to be your own problems. You have just as much a right to be imperfect as they do, but no amount of self-improvement can change other people’s problems. At any given moment, the world simply is as it is and you can only make choices to navigate the future as best as you are able.

Finding controlled ways to put yourself in a bit of emotional peril can be helpful, like creating a throwaway to try and ernestly engage in a new online community. Put that mask out there as your avatar, knowing that you can always discard it when it ceases to be useful.

At a more advanced level you might go try participating in some public in-person activity, knowing you can exit that community at any time and return to your solitude. Even if in the worst case scenario they did come to ‘hate’ you, that ceases to matter once you leave them behind. They’ll forget you long before you forget them.

Let yourself feel the despair of failure, and then let yourself see how those feelings do nothing to stop you from living and growing. In fact, growing is ultimately impossible without failure. Focus on your successes, and let your past failures be signposts of your improvement.

Of course none of this is easy, but this is a journey that spans your whole life whether you want it to or not. Every time you gather the strength to engage thoughtfully with it (as you have here!), you plant seeds that you will someday get to enjoy the fruits of.

Support structures are key; DM me if you’d ever like to engage more directly in a dialog.

Check out The Mighty Boosh sometime if you want to try something Noel-ier that’s still watchable.

You’re absolutely right, you could take any binary that runs under an OS and set up a bootloader to execute it directly without an OS.

The problem is that all programs, even ones in C, rely invisibly and enormously on the OS abstracting away hardware for them. The python interpreter doesn’t know the first thing about how to parse the raw bytes on a hard drive to find the location of the bytes that belong to a given file path. Files and filesystems are ‘fake’ when you get down to it, and the OS creates that fiction so each program doesn’t have to be customized per PC setup.

So, ironically, to be able to truly kernel hack in python like you want would require writing tons of C to replace all OS hooks (like fopen to interact with a file, e.g.) with code that knows how to directly manipulate your hardware (speaking PCIe/NVMe to get to the disk, speaking GPT to find the partition on the disk, speaking ext4 to find the file in the partition, e.g.).

OSes are complex as hell for a reason, and by retrofitting python to run on bare metal like that would require recreating that complexity in the interpreter.

I see your point on altruism, it seems a much larger problem with large-scale anarchism. I think my primary issue with what you’re describing is that I hold a dim view of planned economies. Thanks for explaining.

Star Trek isn’t a realistic model, though. I understand the goal you’re describing, but what’s the motivation that gets enough of the population to play along?

I just can’t see how you aren’t describing feudalism once anarchist communities become large and widespread enough to create resource competition between them. Some people are just always going to accumulate some foothold of power and then it’s all downhill from there.

I want to love anarchism and communism, but I can never escape the fact that they require consistent, universal altruism in a way that just seems utopian to me. It comes across as maybe the ultimate example of perfect-is-the-enemy-of-good.

Wow, who hurt you? Vim is fun, and just because you can make things work without it doesn’t mean it has no practical benefit. It’s nice to have an editor as powerful as an IDE that doesn’t require a graphical environment.

Hundreds of shortcuts is emacs, by the way. A major perk of modal editing and the vi editing language is that you can compose relatively few operations to accomplish many tasks rather than memorizing lots of more complex and specific shortcuts.

It’s hilarious! My favorite Bale performance easily. Willem Dafoe is excellent too. I love the whole over-the-top 80s NYC yuppie caricature.

It’s also a scathing nightmare parable about the raw pursuit of wealth and influence.

A million to one of course.

edit: but still, they come!