#unix-like

[12neonlit-stage]

I go by no pronouns but not as in my name, more so like my pronouns are an undefined variable in shell coding

[sl33py-g4m3r]

ramble about FreeBSD and Unix~~

how out of my depth would I be trying to install FreeBSD?

would it even boot on my machine?

am I smart enough to go through the install for the system itself as well as get the GUI that I want?

I think you have to go through the command line for quite a bit of time before you get a GUI up and running....

I started off being really interested in BSD/Unix in high school, and tried to fiddle around with a BSD live disc thing in a book (that I don't remember the name of) and then only fiddled around with Linux.

I've been watching videos on youtube of people expressing how stable FreeBSD's modern release is~~

I want to use it on my own hardware; but that's a problem with it I believe, is that it works on sort of limited amount of hardware, as opposed to Linux, that you could even run on a toaster...

Is it really that much harder to deal with than Linux?

Of course I've only dealt with a few distros~~ the rundown of distros I've messed around with are;

Ubuntu (not anymore tho)

Debian (current os being Linux Mint Debian 6)

OpenSUSE briefly (tried to get my sibling to use it on their laptop, with them knowing next to nothing about Linux, sorry...)

Fedora back in high school, I ran it on a laptop for a while. I miss GNOME....

Mageia (I dual booted it on a computer running windows 7, also in or right after high school, so a long time ago)

attempted GhostBSD but it wouldn't boot after install from the live CD (also many years ago at this point)

I like to hop around and (hopefully now I have, yeah right...) I can't make up my mind which I actually want to use permanently.

Linux Mint Debian edition is really good so far tho~~!!

Current PC is an ASUS ROG Stryx (spelling?) that I bought on impulse many years ago~~ Was running windows 10, fixed the issue and now use the OS stated above~~

or maybe I should maybe ditch Mint and run straight Debian... Thought of that too. and it might have an easier time installing and actually booting than FreeBSD on this machine...

but then BSD and by extension unix is meant to be used on older hardware and to be efficient both in execution of things, and space.

"do one thing and do it well" iirc was a bit of the unix philosophy...

yeah, no I HATE technology /heavy sarcasm/

[novadragondotspace]

The Grid should have run on Arch Linux with an auto-updating script and not an outdated version with Encom OS

[karo-fox]

I did something! It's conky with Antares theme and some tweaking.

[horsescary]

sure, thats porn i guess.

[mountmortar]

annoying to me that macOS by default hides the root directory from the user in finder. like i get that it's because most users never actually have to do anything with the root directory but come on man (<-complaining for no reason. it took like 0.02 seconds to pull up and pin the root directory to the sidebar in finder)

[onsomekindofstartrek]

I’m trying to tell whether that’s a *NIX workstation or a really really tricked out PC (back then you pretty much had to have a graphics card per monitor btw). I’m leaning PC if only because that looks like an IBM keyboard and I don’t think most non-PC workstations at the time could take PS/2, or properly use a PC-layout keyboard.

(At first I thought the controls for the CAD program in the smaller monitor were windows solitaire!)

The Complete Home Office, Alvin Rosenbaum, 1995

the dream of the 90s

[hopefulkittenconnoisseur]

[orcelito]

Ok I got to actually looking at my classes for next semester. Reorganized things a little bit into clear categories. See the thing is, the 3 classes I thought I was gonna choose 2 from? None of them are being taught anymore lol. It's just that my enrollment term is so old, it's showing the old requirements. So I'm choosing 3 classes from the general list of classes, which makes me glad I picked out so many potential ones to choose from!!! So the 3 categories I've sorted these classes into are:

Quality assurance: "six sigma data quality" is the 1st choice, "quality engineering in IT" is 2nd choice

General theory: "policy, regulation, and globalization in IT" is 1st choice, "advanced systems development methodologies" is 2nd choice

Coding/computers: "applied machine learning" is 1st choice, "UNIX administration" is 2nd choice, "front end web coding" is 3rd choice

(Putting commentary under a cut bc it got a lil long)

'Cause how my school does scheduled now, we submit a list of requests & they compile them all and then figure out what classes work best for everyone. And u wanna include multiple options for each class slot in case the first doesn't work out for some reason. So that's why I have 7 choices, despite only needing 3.

As for the actual sections. I wanna make sure that my semester is as well-rounded as possible. I wanna get at least Some kind of coding in, to make sure I get some more practice before leaving. I have applied machine learning listed first for it bc I really know very little about how machine learning works, & with the way the IT field has gone, it's a little inevitable that I'll be working with it some. Best to learn about it now so I know what I'm doing later. But if I can't take that for some reason, I have the UNIX administration which would honestly kind of suck to take, but it'd be useful. And then front end web coding is less generally useful, but could still be a good skill to have.

The policy, regulation, & globalization in IT is one that I think would be very good for me to take. More of a theory class than a tech class, & it's focusing on learning about technology's effects on the world in economic, social, cultural, and ethical dynamics. I already have taken an ethics of IT sort of course so I've got some context for that, but I still think it'd be important to learn more about globalization. If for whatever reason it's not available tho, then another systems development class could be useful.

& then the data quality thing. Six sigma put at priority here bc it's smth ppl always talk about but I just don't know that much about it, outside of how it's supposed to help improve things. By taking this course, I'd also get a certificate in SS, which could only help in job searching I think. Then quality engineering in IT after that, which I don't know that much about but it seemed about in line with the goal of Data Quality stuff.

[iwantmycookiesback]

if 'dos' in glados stands for disk operating system could i technically run her on my computer

[daemonhxckergrrl]

i mean probably yes, but aside from NUCs and other slimmer-than-a-ps4 desktops (usually intended for kiosk/media centre/low-power office station use), the only modern desktops i've seen out in the wild have been standard ATX mid-towers.

bc most people (people like me notwithstanding) are on phones/tablets and maybe have a laptop if they need something more capable.

once when i was ten, so seventeen years ago, i was on one of the neopets forums that was in 2006 frequented mostly by edgy teenagers with pete wentz urls who wanted to get around the ban on romance and gay talk to discuss mcr members making out. and it was well past midnight and i was secretly on an extremely clunky laptop the size of a modern desktop, sitting on my top bunk in the tiny room i shared with my sister. and i do not remember the forum topic at all but at some point one of the participants politely asked me, "hey, how old are you, anyway? twelve?" and when i honestly replied "ten," he responded:

"WOAH. Kid, you'd better get off the boards. Wandering the Neoboards at 2 AM is like walking nekkid through the Bronx with your wallet dangling from your nipplz."

and this frightened me so much i slammed the computer shut and went to bed immediately. seventeen years later i still remember this message word for word. including the filter-avoidance misspellings. i need everyone to know about this formative childhood memory. bronx wallet nipplz guy if you're out there hmu and tell me what ur deal was

[puppetmastery]

its kinda funny to watch my sense of self develop in real time via robots

[abbiistabbii]

I don't think people realize how absolutely wild Linux is.

Here we have an Operating system that now has 100 different varieties, all of them with their own little features and markets that are also so customizable that you can literally choose what desktop environment you want. Alongside that it is the OS of choice for Supercomputers, most Web servers, and even tiny little toy computers that hackers and gadget makers use. It is the Operating System running on most of the world's smartphones. That's right. Android is a version of Linux.

It can run on literally anything up to and including a potato, and as of now desktop Linux Distros like Ubuntu and Mint are so easily to use and user friendly that technological novices can use them. This Operating system has had App stores since the 90s.

Oh, and what's more, this operating system was fuckin' built by volunteers and users alongside businesses and universities because they needed an all purpose operating system so they built one themselves and released it for free. If you know how to, you can add to this.

Oh, and it's founder wasn't some corporate hotshot. It's an introverted Swedish-speaking Finn who, while he was a student, started making his own Operating system after playing around with someone else's OS. He was going to call it Freax but the guy he got server space from named the folder of his project "Linux" (Linus Unix) and the name stuck. He operates this project from his Home office which is painted in a colour used in asylums. Man's so fucking introverted he developed the world's biggest code repo, Git, so he didn't have to deal with drama and email.

Steam adopted it meaning a LOT of games now natively run in Linux and what cannot be run natively can be adapted to run. It's now the OS used on their consoles (Steam Deck) and to this, a lot of people have found games run better on Linux than on Windows. More computers run Steam on Linux than MacOS.

On top of that the Arctic World Archive (basically the Svalbard Seed bank, but for Data) have this OS saved in their databanks so if the world ends the survivors are going to be using it.

On top of this? It's Free! No "Freemium" bullshit, no "pay to unlock" shit, no licenses, no tracking or data harvesting. If you have an old laptop that still works and a 16GB USB drive, you can go get it and install it and have a functioning computer because it uses less fucking resources than Windows. Got a shit PC? Linux Mint XFCE or Xubuntu is lightweight af. This shit is stopping eWaste.

What's more, it doesn't even scrimp on style. KDE, XFCE, Gnome, Cinnamon, all look pretty and are functional and there's even a load of people who try make their installs look pretty AF as a hobby called "ricing" with a subreddit (/r/unixporn) dedicated to it.

Linux is fucking wild.

[ohmygoditssans]

@stonesandpeaches @a-r-k @persimmonbuds

no but the thing is, when the hero falls in love with the villain she is falling in love with the darkest parts of herself. she is owning her shadow and the owning makes her stronger. it is not about whether a ship is toxic or romanticising abuse because it’s not about two individuals. the struggle is not one between two people, just like the love is not between two people. when the hero falls in love with the villain she is loving herself. when she loves herself she is stronger, better, able to transform darkness instead of running from it. at the moment of loving, a person changes. the loved changes. and the love of the villain changes the hero. it’s all about this, don’t you see?

[lizardsfromspace]

The foreshadowing in the first act of Jurassic Park is nuts, considering it's an adaption of a story everyone watching it knew.

Most famously, this is a movie that foreshadows the entire plot with a seatbelt, with Grant having two "female" connectors but managing to tie them together anyway, or the fact that the plot is kicked off by Hammond treating a liability tour conducted bc dinosaurs ate someone as a exciting grand opening, but like

"Dr. Wu is introduced writing lab data down in pencil, and erasing it." Sure

"In the DNA lab some of the dinosaur's names are misspelled." Huh (and likely intentional, since it's two misspellings of two popular dinosaurs shown in close-up)

"When Hammond is pouring champagne for Grant and Sattler, he accidentally grabs much cheaper glasses without noticing, and we can see the right glasses sitting in the background" What?

I think this ties into the "UNIX system" scene too. Set aside that that was a real, if obscure, file manager program, everyone mocking how it was an example of Hollywood "not getting computers" is wrong on those grounds too. "Yeah, it looks cool, but it wouldn't be very efficient or functional". Yeah, and that's why it makes perfect sense for John Hammond to have it on the computers at Jurassic Park. After all, a boring, functional folder doesn't scream "spared no expense". It's not an great example of the filmmakers not getting computers, it's a great example of a character not getting computers

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Who Broke the Internet? Part III

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. After that, it's LONDON (Jul 1) and MANCHESTER (Jul 2).

Episode 3 of "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" (my new CBC podcast about enshittification) just dropped. It's called "In God We Antitrust," and it's great:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16147052-in-god-we-antitrust

The thesis of this four-part series is pretty straightforward: the enshittification of the internet was the result of an enshittogenic policy environment. Platforms always had the technical means to scam us and abuse us. Tech founders and investors always included a cohort of scumbags who would trade our happiness and wellbeing for their profits. What changed was the consequences of giving in to those impulses. When Google took off, its founders' mantra was "competition is just a click away." If someone built a better search engine, users could delete their google.com bookmarks, just like they did to their altavista.com bookmarks when Google showed up.

Policymakers – not technologists or VCs – changed the environment so that this wasn't true anymore:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

In last week's episode, we told the story of Bruce Lehman, the Clinton administration's Copyright Czar, who swindled the US government into passing a law that made it illegal to mod, hack, reverse-engineer or otherwise improve on an existing technology:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/13/ctrl-ctrl-ctrl/#free-dmitry

This neutralized a powerful anti-enshittificatory force: interoperability. All digital tech is born interoperable, because of the intrinsic characteristics of computers, their flexibility. This means that tech is inherently enshittification-resistant. When a company enshittifies its products or services, its beleaguered users and suppliers don't have to wait for a regulator to punish it. They don't have to wait for a competitor to challenge it.

Interoperable tools – ad-blockers, privacy blockers, alternative clients, mods, plugins, firmware patches and other hacks – offer immediate, profound relief from enshittification. Every ten foot pile of shit that a tech company drops into your life can be met with an eleven foot ladder of disenshittifying, interoperable technology.

That's why Lehman's successful attack on tinkering was so devastating. Before Lehman, tech had achieved a kind of pro-user equilibrium: every time a company made its products worse, they had to confront a thousand guerrilla technologists who unilaterally unfucked things: third party printer ink, file-format compatibility, protocol compatibility, all the way up to Unix, a massive operating system that was painstakingly re-created, piece by piece, in free software.

Lehman offered would-be enshittifiers a way to shift this equilibrium to full enshittification: just stick a digital lock on your product. It didn't even matter if the lock worked – under Lehman's anticircumvention law, tampering with a lock, even talking about weaknesses in a lock, became a literal felony, punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500K fine. Lehman's law was an offer no tech boss would refuse, and enshittification ate the world.

But Lehman's not the only policymaker who was warned about the consequences of his terrible plans, who ignored the warnings, and who disclaims any responsibility for the shitty world that followed. Long before Lehman's assault on tech policy, another group of lawyers and economists laid waste to competition policy.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a group of Chicago School economists conceived of an absurd new way to interpret competition law, which they called "the consumer welfare standard." Under this standard, the job of competition policy was to encourage monopolies to form, on the grounds that monopolies were "efficient" and would lower prices for "consumers."

The chief proponent of this standard was Robert Bork, a virulent racist whose most significant claim to fame was that he was the only government lawyer willing to help Richard Nixon illegally fire officials who wouldn't turn a blind eye to his crimes. Bork's long record of unethical behavior and scorching bigotry came back to bite him in the ass when Ronald Reagan tried to seat him on the Supreme Court, during a confirmation hearing that Bork screwed up so badly that even today, we use "borked" as a synonym for anything that is utterly fucked.

But Bork's real legacy was as a pro-monopoly propagandist, whose work helped shift how judges, government enforcers, and economists viewed antitrust law. Bork approached the text of America's antitrust laws, like the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act, with the same techniques as a Qanon follower addressing a Q "drop," applying gnostic techniques to find in these laws mystical coded language that – he asserted – meant that Congress had intended for America's anti-monopoly laws to actually support monopolies.

In episode three, we explore Bork's legacy, and how it led to what Tom Eastman calls the internet of "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four." We got great interviews and old tape for this one, including Michael Wiesel, a Canadian soap-maker who created a bestselling line of nontoxic lip-balm kits for kids, only to have Amazon shaft him by underselling him with his own product.

But the most interesting interview was with Lina Khan, the generational talent who became the youngest-ever FTC chair under Joe Biden, and launched an all-out assault on American monopolies and their vile depredations:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

Khan's extraordinary rise to power starts with a law review paper she wrote in her third year at Yale, "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," which became the first viral law review article in history:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

"Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" was a stinging rebuke to Bork and his theories, using Amazon's documented behavior to show that after Amazon used its monopoly power to lower prices and drive rivals out of the market, it subsequently raised prices. And, contrary to Bork's theories, those new, high prices didn't conjure up new rivals who would enter the market with lower prices again, eager to steal Amazon's customers away. Instead, Amazon's demonstrated willingness to cross-subsidize divisions gigantic losses to destroy any competitor with below-cost pricing created a "kill zone" of businesses adjacent to the giant's core enterprise that no one dared enter:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-biden-can-clean-up-obamas-big

The clarity of Khan's writing, combined with her careful research and devastating conclusions dragged a vast crowd of people who'd never paid much attention to antitrust – including me! – into the fray. No wonder that four years later, she was appointed to serve as the head of the FTC, making her the most powerful consumer rights regulator in the world.

We live in an age of monopolies, with cartels dominating every part of our lives, acting as "autocrats of trade" and "kings over the necessaries of life," the corporate dictators that Senator John Sherman warned about when he was stumping for the 1890 Sherman Act, America's first antitrust law:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

Bork and his co-religionists created this age. They're the reason we live in world where we have to get our "necessaries of life" from a cartel, a duopoly or a monopoly. It's not because the great forces of history transformed the economy – it's because of these dickheads:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

This episode of "Understood: Who Borked the Internet?" draws a straight line from those economists and their ideas to the world we live in today. It sets up the final episode, next week's "Kick 'Em in the Dongle," which charts a course for us to escape from the hellscape created by Bork, Lehman, and their toadies and trolls.

You can get "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" in any podcast app, even the seriously enshittified ones (which, let's be real here, is most of them). Here's a direct link to the RSS:

https://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/nakedemperor.xml

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/19/khan-thought/#they-were-warned