sLLiK

It's a bad look, and I won't make excuses for them, but none of this really surprises me, either. I still like their content, and I already understood most of this to be the case by inference without it being spelled out like this. Their coverage has been good enough, and when I need someone to genuinely go hard on the nuts and bolts of a thing, Gamers Nexus is the better choice.

The laptop sponsorship thing is a perfect example. He straight up says he invested in them, which instantly makes the video revealing their latest model a clear extension of that sponsorship. Did I still keep watching? Hell yeah, because the laptop modularity looks awesome. Should I trust everything in the vid is presented objectively without bias?

...have you been on the Internet before?

Legit. Piracy related to home PC software has been around since the advent of home PCs. Before the concept of LANfests or LAN parties even existed, there were copy parties. I still have vivid memories of 8+ 1541 drives daisy-chained to a single C64. University servers hosting warez... Usenet... there's likely earlier examples I'm not aware of.

Before that, people were hacking phone systems in order to call long distance for free. This ain't nothin new.

Not something I've indulged in for 30+ years, though. I pay for everything, now. Guilty conscience, I suppose. 😁

Only reason I'm holding on to my Windows partition at this point is for rare scenarios like needing to reprogram my VKB stick, which only has a Windows executable. Other than that, I've not fired it up in months. And I'm a pretty rabid gamer.

It's taken a long damn time to get here.

Changing to a different form of transportation, unless it involves teleportation, is just moving the problem somewhere else. It might be all electric, and it might get you there twice as fast, but you're still just leveraging a tactic that moves the goalpost and delays the inevitable.

Ultimately, there is no right answer to this. The greater the population, the greater the problem. If everyone who could work remotely started doing so, and the rest were afforded decentralized centers for the onsite labor they must do, this would be a more manageable problem. But eventually, we'd be back where we started - it'd just be a higher concentration of onsite workers generating all the traffic, and they might have less distance to travel.

Coruscant's traffic problems, or maybe 5th Element's, are what we're destined for.

Syslog (rsyslod) is usually the standard answer for the average sysadmin, but it depends a lot on your needs. A lot of newer loggers output as pure JSON, which offer benefits to readability and more approachable search logic/filters/queries (I'm so tired of regex).

When you start venturing down the road of finding the right way to store and forward the output of logging drivers from Docker containers, as one example, rsyslod starts to feel dated.

The easy answers if you want to throw money at the problem are solutions like Splunk, Datadog, or New Relic. If you don't want to (and most people wouldn't), then alternatives certainly exist, but some of them are just as heavy on system resources. Greylog has relative feature parity with Splunk Enterprise, but consumes just as much compute and storage if not more, and I found it to be a much larger pain in the butt to administer and keep running.

The likeliest answer to this problem is Grafana Loki, just based on what I've read of its capabilities, but I haven't had a chance to circle back and test it out. Someone here who has might be able to weigh in and speak to its strengths/weaknesses.

This has been on my radar for a while, and I keep putting it off. How are you liking it?

Grafana's Loki sounded incredibly useful and performant, with the added benefit of reducing storage requirements significantly under some situations.

And I wouldn't advocate for installation of a daily driver OS on anything less than an m.2, these days. Fair enough. A consideration for the future, then.

The logical fallacy here being that, based on that context alone, you should care because you will have something to hide in the future. Saying you have nothing to hide is always used in the context of one's sense of guilt, or lack thereof, based on past actions. A counterargument would then be to ask why you should be allowed to hide your future wrongs.

For many, the subject has nothing to do with that. It's about not wanting to be monetized without consent. There's also benefits in the form of protection against identity theft or social engineering. For others, the simple right to fundamental personal privacy itself is important - it's about not having all of one's life's details on public display.

Also known as "none of your goddamn business."

As a tangent, because it's now stuck in my head and needs expression - the more thought you give to the problems introduced by technology that blur or step over this line, the more you realize how much harder it's becoming to prevent outcomes where privacy is lost.

Only engaging AI under tightly controlled circumstances is one thing; having it in the background perceiving everything you say and do on your desktop is a very different conversation. No matter what assurances are given that your privacy is protected, almost every situation like it that's arisen since the advent of personal computers has resulted in a loss of control through duplicity, intrusion, sabotage, bad design, or floundering integrity.

It warmed my nerd heart that the first thing I spotted in the mpvpaper repo was an animated Steins Gate background.

If you have two separate physical drives to work with, dual-booting is a great "training wheels" approach to the problem. Then you can take your time with the learning process and hop back into Windows quickly whenever you need a break or the ability to do something quickly that the Linux hasn't been set up for, yet.

That's mostly preference, once you get things all set up and installed. You can't avoid updating forever because you'll eventually need to install something new from the repos, and it's good to have some kind of update cadence for security's sake, but daily is a bit much. Ain't Nobody Got Time For That.

I save that effort for a Saturday once every couple of months, and it usually goes smoothly without incident. I could go longer if I wanted, 2 months feels right to me.

Steam Deck changed the landscape of dev support for anti-cheat significantly. It's still not perfect, but most games relying on EAC work now with minimal issue. You might have to occasionally revalidate installed files or reinstall EAC for the game after a patch and that's about it.

Other anti-cheat solutions are still a crap-shoot and likely won't work. Thankfully, VAC and EAC are the most prevalent.