Right to repair often comes up as a remedy against software monopoly (think appstore/play/android/ios) because it implies being able to override the bootloader and OS.

The one major obstacle to a thriving OSS mobile market is a lack of compatible devices, because iphones and androids are locked down.

If you were actually free to do it you could easily (in a world where this market was allowed to develop) extend the life of an iphone 7 by 5-10 more years, even though apple has decided no longer to support it with software updates.

Your “guy with armor” I took more specifically to be Sauron 🙂 The helmet looks like how the Peter Jacksos Lord of The Rings movies portray him (at least inasmuch as i remember them).

It’s a great sketch though.

That is a great Sam Altman portrait indeed.

Why, sure.

… I’ll see myself out.

que?

Switched from Windows in 2002, did FreeBSD -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu -> Arch. Finally switched to NixOS in 2012 and never looked back.

The builtin isolation meant I never actually got properly acquainted with Docker until I switched jobs and had to use it.

Selfhoster on NixOS here too.

Nix (and operating services on a NixOS machine) is a learning curve, and even though tho project is over 10 years old now the semantic differences between the conventional approach to distro design/software development/ops is still a source of friction. But the project has come a long way and lots of popular software is packaged and hostable and just works (when you are aware of said semantic differences)

But when it works, and it often it does, it’s phenomenal and a very well integrated experience.

The problem in my exparience with using LLMs to assist is that the declarative nature of Nix makes them prone to hallucination: “Certainly, just go services.fooService.enable = true; in your configuraton.nix and you’re off to the races”. OTOH, because nix builds are hermetic and functional they’re pretty safe to include as a verification tool that something like Claude code can use to iterate on a solution.

There are some pretty good examples of selfhosting system configurations one can use as inspiration. I just discovered github.com/firecat53/nixos that is an excellent example of a modular system configuration that manages multiple machines, secrets, and self hosted services.

I pay for BitWarden, not so much because of any feature in their premium offering as that they are critical infrastructure for me and have acted consistently ethically. Also the annual Wikipedia and for a while Mozilla monthly. Way less than what I feel is deserving.

However, I have been working on building a social foss funding site where you set a total recurring donation amount which is then distributed by the Method of Equal Shares accordrding to weights you specify, ether manually or sourced from your os package manager.

Main benefits of that approach is that your budget is fixed, you can spread it over an arbitrary number of recipients, and priority is given to those that are more unique to you.

Would love to hear thoughts if anyone is interested. I hope to maybe test out an alpha version some time in 2026 if time permits.

Thanks for this, solid recommendation!

Let me tell you one thing: You’re doing alright.

Having your kids feel safe enough to be open like that and yourself sticking to listening and being there is probably the best anyone can hope for.

The main economically meaningful aspects of “retirement age” in Denmark AFAIK is that:

• You get entitled to receiving the public, state-paid pension.
• Private pension schemes that vest at this point or later are tax deductible. (you still pay taxes when it’s paid out, but due to the progressive tax code you end up paying less)

By far the most relevant of the two is the latter, as practically everyone is covered by pension schemes included in employment contracts.

As such you can still retire any time you want, but it will be more burdensome for you to it earlier than at the age sanctioned by law.

This.

I just wish we could collectively realize the whole enterprise is epistemologically bankrupt.

It is okay to stop trying to apply reason once you have encountered the first unreconcilable contradiction.

I’d vote to ship as many eggs as the market can bear. With the proviso that each egg comes painted with the face of Donald Trump and an “information” pamphlet…

Is it because a trained AI is used for profit?

Absolutely. But especially because it skews the market dynamic. Copyright doesn’t exist for moral reasons but financial reasons.

Is that a promise?

Being a 3-dimensional being I was only able to make sense of this by imagining what a 3D puzzle piece would look like.

This is of course a lie to make myself sound clever… it was the buttplug analogy that made it all snap into place for me.