IMO, the biggest problem with timezones is that the people who initially created them were fairly short sighted.

That and there have been way too many changes to who lives in what timezone. The one that boggles my mind is that apparently there’s a country in two timezones, not like, split down the middle or anything, but two active timezones across the entire country depending on which culture you’re a part of, or something. It’s wild.

I still don’t know if there’s any difference between GMT and UTC. I couldn’t find one. They both have the same time, same offset (+0), and represent the same time zone area.

I use UTC because I’m in tech, and I can’t stand time formats, so I exclusively use ISO 8601, with a 24 hour clock. Usually in my local time zone, via UTC. We have DST here which I’m not a fan of, but I have to abide by because everyone else does.

My biggest issues with time and timezones is that everyone uses different standards. It drives me nuts when software doesn’t let me set the standard for how the time and date is displayed, and doesn’t follow the system settings. It’s more common in web apps, but it happens a lot. I put in a lot of effort to try to get everything displaying in a standard format then some crudely written website is just mm/dd/yy with 12h clock and no timezone info, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

I’m generally more of a Debian user, when I use Linux at least, so anything red hat based doesn’t even occur to me to recommend. I generally don’t get involved in distro discussions though.

My main interaction with Linux is Ubuntu server, and that’s where my knowledge generally is. I can’t really fix issues in redhat, so if someone is using it, I’m mostly lost on how to fix it.

There’s enough difference in how redhat works compared to Debian distributions that I would need to do a lot of work to understand what’s happening and fix any problems.

I dunno if I’d say any distro of Linux is really beginner friendly.

It takes quite a bit of learning the ins and outs of operating systems before Linux makes sense in any capacity.

If you’re just looking to run a few basic apps like discord/slack/teams/zoom, and run a browser, then sure, just about every distro can do that without trouble, and can be configured to be as “friendly” as Windows, with a few exceptions.

But anybody who wants to do intermediate/advanced stuff with little to no prior Linux knowledge? I’m not sure any distro is much easier than others. Again, with a few exceptions.

The exceptions are distros that are almost intentionally difficult to use, or that require a high level of competency with Linux before you can attempt to use it.

There’s always a learning curve, that learning curve is pretty much always pretty steep.

I’ve been using Linux for dedicated servers for a while and I don’t use Linux as a desktop environment, in no small part because despite having a fairly high level of competency with Linux, I don’t feel like I know enough to make Linux work for me instead of the other way around.

AI in the current state of technology will not and cannot replace understanding the system and writing logical and working code.

GenAI should be used to get a start on whatever you’re doing, but shouldn’t be taken beyond that.

Treat it like a psychopathic boiler plate.

He’d just be an idiot faster.

Got a pretty bad case of food poisoning last month. Didn’t really eat anything for a couple of days.

My SO had it worse. She was throwing up almost everything she ate for over a week. After about 4-5 days, I was like. I’ll drive you to the emergency myself, but I can’t force you to go.

She ended up waiting like three more days after that and calling her primary care physician.

She’s mostly better now but it was the worst I’ve ever seen her.

For better or worse, she did lose a decent amount of weight during that week+ of being sick.

The banks are borderline criminally negligent because they exclusively use SMS for 2FA.

Simply, it is insufficient.

I get that they want the SMS information on file, and that’s understandable, but give people another option at least, Holy hell. It gives my inner IT secops brain an aneurysm.

It’s improvement.

But you can also polish a turd, and that’s also improvement. It’s still a turd. Taking 1990’s tech and overlaying rich text services onto it, is just polish for the same 90’s tech that should have been left behind.

IMO, it’s still worlds away from what you can get with a purely digital instant messaging system.

Also, it seems idiotic to me that nearly all of your communications can go up in smoke by accidentally dropping your phone into a wood chipper, and you’ll be SOL until you replace it because everything is hairpinned through your cellphones SMS capability. Battery dead? Out of your providers service area? Ha ha, get fucked.

Just dumb.

Yeah, those are always on shaky ground with me.

It’s not just control over your actions at that point, it’s control over thoughts, and you can’t really police thoughts.

Plus there’s intrusive thoughts that we can’t really control. Things that just pop into our heads. Stuff we wouldn’t actually ever do, but the thought occurs to you anyways.

At the height of my depression from burnout, my brain was concocting inventive ways to take myself out. These were undesirable and unwanted thoughts. It usually happened when I was driving around, looking for a tree large enough that if I hit it head on fast enough, I’d be certain to perish. I could not stop thinking these things.

I got help and I’ve been in a much better place since then. The ideations have stopped. I recognized something needed to change because I didn’t want to think those things.

However, this is a pretty good example of the intrusive thoughts we cannot control that we probably shouldn’t encourage. My environment caused me to get so stressed and burned out, which led to such a profound depression that I couldn’t stop such things from going through my mind. We all have those intrusive thoughts and policing them is basically impossible. Having any rules to that effect is nonsense, in the same way that we don’t have rules to stop people from being offended.

Utter nonsense.

This is why I assert that the commandments are a good starting point. Not the end goal. There’s some good guidelines in there, but they’re hardly the final ruleset that you should adhere to.

All I’m going to say to this is…

You people still use SMS?

I’ve explicitly told people not to send me text messages. The protocols are old and shit compared to other instant messengers. I’m on Google chat, telegram, signal, discord, slack, teams… Find another app to talk to me with. I generally don’t care which one, but I actively refuse to sign up for or into any Facebook/meta/Zuckerberg properties. If you use something I don’t that isn’t owned by the zuck, I’ll probably sign up so we can keep touch, but for the love of God, not SMS.

Look, SMS was great when phones didn’t have internet on them. It was a quick and easy way to send updates and chat while away from your cable/DSL/dialup (whatever you had at the time). Now that data is the primary use for a mobile phone plan, just use a more robust IM app.

I also have about six or seven phone numbers, which I give out to different groups of people for different reasons, plus a phone number on my mobile which nearly nobody knows. All my other lines (all VoIP lines) ring my cellphone number. Texting from my VoIP line is not fun, but it does work. Multimedia messages generally get lost and RCS is just encouraging the use of something that should have been killed off.

I’m partial to Telegram and signal since they mainly operate by phone numbers, but I can make “voice” and video calls over data rather than having to use my cellphone directly; which allows me to call from my computer, laptop, phone, tablet… Literally any device that can run the program. So if my phone is lost/damaged/stolen/whatever (unavailable for any reason), I can still send messages to you and call if needed.

If everything is tied to your cellphone number, and that number becomes unavailable for any reason, well… Get fucked I guess. Your SIM stops working, your phone dies/breaks/gets stolen, your provider decides to fuck your account up or charge you a fortune for no good reason and cuts you off, your provider has a major malfunction and stops servicing clients in your area… Literally anything goes wrong with the one system you use and all your SMS bullshit goes away. Stop. Using. SMS.

I’ll just leave this here:

https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

I can’t afford to live now, when I’m old and can’t work, I might as well die because I certainly won’t be able to afford to live.

As someone who lives somewhere that’s supposed to be cold for 5+ months of the year, with snow on the ground and everything… Our grass was green last winter, not white because it’s covered in snow.

We had cold snaps but they lasted days, and the majority of the “winter” was spent above freezing. I haven’t seen anything like it in the last 40 years (my entire life), and I expect much the same next year.

Good thing I invested in that snow blower… It makes for some lovely decoration in my garage and does a really good job at collecting dust.

I fucking hope not.

Agreed. I’m less than a decade out from it and I’m a millennial.

I’m hoping to at least make it to 65+.

Though, the prospect of retiring is something I consider to be out of reach, so… I’ll be working until I knock off.

I live in a place with socialized healthcare (Canada), and did a sleep study, which didn’t cost me anything, in January… In about two weeks from now, I sit down with a doctor to review their findings.

The sleep study is very much a non-emergency. I did it because my lady has complained about the noise I make when I sleep, I also frequently get bad sleep for one reason or another.

It’s non-critical, and I’ve spent more than six months waiting for results.

Bluntly, I’d rather wait longer than pay more. I know anything important/life threatening would be completed same-day, and I’ve had that experience too. Though, at the time, I wasn’t really in a life threatening situation.

Like a community about arch?

I guess it’s not really niche at this point.

Btw, I don’t run arch.

I generally consider the (non-theist) Commandments to generally be generally good rules to live by.

I have to say the non-theist rules because several of them are about God and religion… Like, having no other gods before [him], not taking the Lord’s name in vain, the whole idols thing…

If you take all that theist stuff out, you basically get: don’t lie, steal, cheat, or kill, don’t covet others stuff, and respect your mother and father.

Pretty decent rules overall. At the very least, a good starting point.

A big part of the wait times is because of the healthcare coverage IMO.

In the USA, if you have a non-life threatening issue, that is more annoying than an actual problem, it usually gets ignored because nobody wants to go into debt for that… Unless you’re a millionaire or something, I guess.

Meanwhile in countries with socialized healthcare, if you’re even slightly unwell (and even in cases where you’re not unwell) you can get any number of procedures done to rule out any possible illness.

There’s simply no good reason to not get checked out if you feel the need to be checked out.

Well, I’m probably going to try to get my ccnp for kicks. I’ll re-do my CCNA, then do my ccnp. By the time I go for my NA cert I’ll pretty much be ready to go for the np cert.

I’ll build a new resume emphasizing my network stuff, though my resume is already fairly heavily focused on networking as is, and try again.

I’m pretty happy with my job in almost every way, I know most of the things I would need to know to be successful, despite it being a more generalist position, and my co-workers are cool. Management is better than most, and the pay is more than the last two generalist positions I’ve worked, plus it’s work from home, so I’m pretty comfortable where I am for now. The pay, despite being higher than I’ve gotten previously, is a pretty far cry from what I probably deserve, just way too low, under $55k USD (I’m not in the US, but the conversion puts me under 55). From what I’ve seen online, median salary for a systems admin, which is basically what my job mostly entails, is around $73k USD… So I’m around $20k/yr shy.

I know network admins are similar, depending on the complexity/importance of the network they administrate. I’m aware of people in networking that are making more than 100k USD a year; and right now I consider that to be where things start to cap off for networking. I’d be pretty happy with $73k USD.