Look for escape hatches. I run a self-hosted Cloudron server. The software I host on my home server is FOSS via Cloudron, but Cloudron itself is a service that keeps each of the FOSS apps up to date with security upgrades and data migrations when necessary. It's a huge boon to running a self-hosted server.

But when it comes down to it, they could potentially close up somehow (new leadership, get bought out, shut down etc.) They've left an escape hatch though--you can bundle and build your own apps, with a CloudronManifest.json etc. This would allow me to continue to run and update software if I absolutely needed to, without their support.

I do work with LLMs, and I respect your opinion. I suspect if we could meet and chat for an hour, we'd understand each other better.

But despite the bad, I also see a great deal of good that can come from LLMs, and AI in general. I appreciated what Sal Khan (Khan Academy) had to say about the big picture view:

There's folks who take a more pessimistic view of AI, they say this is scary, there's all these dystopian scenarios, we maybe want to slow down, we want to pause. On the other side, there are the more optimistic folks that say, well, we've gone through inflection points before, we've gone through the Industrial Revolution. It was scary, but it all kind of worked out.

And what I'd argue right now is I don't think this is like a flip of a coin or this is something where we'll just have to, like, wait and see which way it turns out. I think everyone here and beyond, we are active participants in this decision. I'm pretty convinced that the first line of reasoning is actually almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, that if we act with fear and if we say, "Hey, we've just got to stop doing this stuff," what's really going to happen is the rule followers might pause, might slow down, but the rule breakers--as Alexander [Wang] mentioned--the totalitarian governments, the criminal organizations, they're only going to accelerate. And that leads to what I am pretty convinced is the dystopian state, which is the good actors have worse AIs than the bad actors.

https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_how_ai_could_save_not_destroy_education?subtitle=en

Recently met with my local pastor to see how we could include kids/teens in community programs that intersect with the church. One of the major hurdles is that kids have new expectations around how to meet up--especially online--and the few touch points during the week are in person only. Trying to find ways to meet people where they're at. It was a good first meeting, although she (the pastor) is not tech savvy, so I expect we'll have a few more conversations before we find a good way forward.

Be Your Own Tech Support

You're not alone in feeling like you bear the weight alone. I mean, with all you're doing, you're basically a church-on-wheels here. And I say that both as a compliment and as a reflection of our situation as a society--we need each other, we need neighbors, community, and we need help sometimes. And many people are feeling the "it's too much to do alone" conclusion. I don't think we were meant to be this way. I've been reading Seth Kaplan's "Fragile Neighborhoods" recently and I feel like my eyes are open to the deep loss in social capital or "collective efficacy" that previous generations had. We're in a period of innovating on new social structures. It's tough. Keep going. Play the long game, make friends and neighbors, and don't forget you're just human too. We need each other.

This is the case for me as well. I tried NixOS this weekend, and even though it has more adoption than Guix, it still does not have 100% coverage of all software I wanted. That said, the packages I did install were pretty up-to-date. I guess NixOS is as close to "critical mass" as we've got when it comes to this type of OS. But if I were a wizard devops type person with more time, I'd probably enjoy Guix more.

Elegant and flexible, thank you!

ChatGPT suggests the following:

1. Run tmux
2. rsync -naP --exclude-from=rsync-homedir-local.txt /home/$USER/ $BACKUPDIR/ | tee /tmp/rsync_output.txt
3. Ctrl+B % # splits screen vertically
4. Ctrl+B right-arrow-key # moves to right split
5. tail -f /tmp/rsync_output.txt | grep denied

Not quite a one-liner, but I can see how tmux is a big help here.

Is it possible to get this to work with OBS studio? I see the author mentions OBS as an "Alternative Project" but it seems ideal to have these pieces work together.

This is really cool in concept, but it is SO SLOW. OMG.

The short answer is "yes, but only as much as it needs to". Flatpak had to make a decision between "do we guarantee the app will work, even with system upgrades" or "do we minimize space" and they chose the former. The minimum necessary dependencies will be installed (and shared) amongst flatpaks.

Have you had the unfortunate experience of a utility or program losing its packaged status? It's happened to me before--for example fslint. I don't think this can happen with flatpak.

The System76 engineers are culturally very aligned with the core values of freedom of choice, customization, etc. They build software with the larger ecosystem in mind, and in fact, I've never seen them build something only for their own hardware (even things that could have been just for their own hardware, like the system76 power management system, has extensibility built in).

That said, they also balance this freedom with a set of "opinionated" good choices that they test and support. If you care a lot about stability, it's easy to go along with the "happy path" and get a solid, up-to-date system delivered frequently. Every time they upgrade new features or kernel, they go through a systematic quality assurance process on multiple machines--including machines not of their own brand. (I've contributed software/PRs to their codebase, and they've always sent it through a code review and QA process).