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Factorio is amazing.

I think your reply would have been more useful if you’d given some pointers about how, instead of just “do it right”.

It’s fine, but not going to be the cheapest.

Cheap to buy: Any old PC desktop, really. Most will run linux and windows fine, depending on what you want. Anywhere from free to £100. If you have an old desktop or laptop already, use that to start with.

Cheap to run: Any mini PC. I run a Lenovo ThinkCentre M53 for low power duties. Cost £40 and runs silently at 10watts, idle. (I have a secondary, much beefier server for other stuff that runs at around 100w which lives in the garage)

But plenty of people do run mac minis as home servers, often on Linux. They’re fine - just do your homework on the CPU ability, how much ram you can add, and whether you’re okay with external disks if you can’t fit enough inside.

Find your thing.

For me that’s been different things as I’ve gone through life. Currently in my 50s and enjoying riding a motorbike at weekends. When I’d ridden all the local roads so many times it was starting to get boring, I added another layer and am now riding my bike to every Village in my county. It’s going to take a while, but has given another layer of interest and purpose. Many people won’t understand why it’s interesting to me, and that’s fine, they don’t have to. Finding what works for you is half the challenge.

BTW, if you’ve got depression, then finding happiness without resolving that is really, really difficult. Been there and absolutely everything felt bleak and pointless. Fixing that is the first step.

Ringworld.

Are headphones a possibility in your workplace?

Thanks, that’s some good thoughts. I do already do that, contribute to FOSS, write fiction and I’ve taught some stuff to younger folk at work so it’s not entirely wasted. If I can achive net zero on whatever cosmic scoreboard is in place, I figure that’s okay.

Mixed, but mostly okay.

Pros: The world is massively overpopulated already. Our genes aren’t particularly noteworthy. I’m not very optimistic about the future. People’s happiness generally seems a lot less than it was when I was younger and I don’t see that changing.

Cons: Not being able to pass anything on - my knowledge and experience, ironically much of which was gained through having time that would have been unavailable if I had had kids. As we both get older, our own care is concerning. Doing physical things around our smallholding is getting harder and a pair of young hands would be nice.

I don’t begrudge other people having kids. We tried once but lost it and that kind of took the excitement out of it for us. Before we knew it, it was too late anyway.

The UK has seen a stratospheric drop too. Banned from all non-private indoor spaces, taxed through the roof. At least in the South, it’s rare to see or even smell someone smoking now, even on TV. Although in some cities it’s just as likely to smell cannabis as tobacco.

I don’t think you’re “exporting it” though - it’s not an American initiative. This was a pretty universal shift of “why the fuck do we do this stupid shit?”

India has the BRO too.

Watching a guy called Joe Ryan on Youtube at the mo, who’s riding a motorbike around the Himalayas. The BRO are building roads there at an incredible rate in the most impossible landscape. I’m genuinely amazed at the scale and adaptability of them and how much they’re doing right now.

This is literally changing the lives of those who live in the area, although I do wonder how much this will trigger tourism and change everything as it has elsewhere. But still, those guys can build roads.

Much of the UK’s regular government stuff is online and very simple too - their website is actually very good. It doesn’t integrate everything though. The health service is particularly fragmented and communication is often by post and not that good.

Actually - a lot of closed source programs are still vulnerable to the supply chain attacks you mention where a bad actor has got access to their codebase. This has happened and been reported on, plus I’m sure, plenty of occasions where it was hushed up for reputational reasons. And - much commercial software still uses FOSS dependencies, so is also vulnerable to the same situation you describe for that. Worst of both worlds.

I don’t think either system is inherantly better than the other in terms of computer security. Each has different and overlapping vulnerabilities.

If you’re like me, then some time in your thirties. I didn’t brush from early teens through until then - I had several abcesses and needed seven teeth removed, including my top fronts. Turns out I had undiagnosed autism, depression and low self image. Now I do brush, and it’s just a case of forcing myself to adapt to a routine. Even keeping some flouride mouthwash handy for a quick swill every now and then helps a bit. Hope you find your way.

Agree. If you were 100% capitalist and everything you did was about money, then maybe. But most of us balance that for the benefit of our mental health and, well, not being a dick.

All my interests are hobbies, some of them even too expensive for me to do lol they’re nothing you can monetize.

Work is for making money, hobbies are for spending money. I think a lot of people mix that up and lose their enjoyment; money changes your perspective on why you’re doing something.

China is somehow still okay?

China is too important a supplier to the West. Sanctions against them would lead to retaliatory sanctions against the West from China which would be economically devastating.

Obviously they are just as dangerous and as actively involved is espionage as the other world players, but they hold too many cards to risk escalation. The West is also too important to their economy to escalate beyond war games. At least - we all hope so.

Why do you think Linus is not being truthful?

How is that weakness different to installing closed source software?

Hasn’t changed my view much. I already knew Linux was a company that has a legal presence in the US and so would be subject to their laws. The only real surprise is that it’s taken so long to action this particular set of sanctions.

I do think the announcement was poorly handled - it should have been explained either before or immediately afterwards to cut back on the conjecture. The git notice only said that these contributors’ names had been removed from the credits, not that they’d been stopped from contributing completely. Any company, including Linux, that does something they know is going to be contentious like this should bloody well get ahead of that curve and put the facts out.

The world is at war. It’s not a bloody world war as we’ve seen before, but it is nation against nation by other means. FOSS is used so widely it is absolutely a target and nobody can be so idealistic that they cannot see the conflict, nor not know that it’s constantly being attacked. Where you live does matter. I wish that wasn’t the case - I truly do, but it’s naive in the extreme to pretend otherwise.