The CEO of the company you work for

Oh ye of little faith

All things that go up must come down. Icarus’ wings will melt from the sun’s heat. The web will crumble under the weight of llm bots. Markets will crash due to llm’s not living up to their hype. Big tech will be broken up. Billionaires and the trillionaire will be taxed to death. Regulators will lose interest. Let’s have hope.

I don’t think it’s possible to reclaim LinkedIn. It’s not exactly a democratic platform and I doubt user outrage will change anything unless their user attrition rate goes through the roof. They can just tweak their algorithms, mute or limit the reach of users to hide discontent from others too. Better to just leave and try to get #fedihired instead.

They did the same shit to me. I refused and pestered them with numerous e-mails demanding them to just delete my account instead of reopening it. Finding a link to their contact form was a nightmare (it’s hidden all the way at the bottom of their privacy policy). I also emailed legal@linkedin.com, dpo@linkedin.com, helpdesk@linkedin.com, support@linkedin.com and a number of other generic addresses just to be sure they would receive something.

I got three LLM sounding replies where they asked me to follow a link to verify my identity with a government issued identity document, but after a couple more e-mails where I wrote that providing Persona or LinkedIn with my identity documents is against my personal security policy, they just caved and reopened my account calling it a “temporary measure to protect my account”. Set a new password, logged in and deleted my account immediately. Good riddance.

And fascism

And billionaires

And senior execs

And consultants

And large language models

Fuck how I detest these times we’re living in

Don’t use it

Acme

Harvard’s CS50 (Introduction to computer science) is available for free on edx.org. It starts with Scratch and goes on to C the second week. Excellent lectures by David Malan and lots of weekly exercises you can do and submit for review that will give you a solid foundation to build on.

There’s also this.

Look, I’m a Slacker. It’s not the Slack way.

I think most people yearn for the past, and always have. People who grew up in communist East Germany (the country) even long for the glory days of the German “Democratic” Republic too. The term Ostalgia (East-algia) was coined for that. I think everyone long for a past that never truly existed and was only rose-colored by the innocence of childhood and early youth. Fewer people die in violent conflicts each year (at least up until the invasion of Ukraine), childhood deaths decline, yet the world seems extremely violent and polarized. I think the world was always violent and polarized, but we didn’t have social media and the internet to broadcast and amplify the violence and our differences.

Not often I meet another herbsluft user in the wild! waves

Good to hear that you’re slack-curious! :D Gentoo is a fantastic distro, so great choice! I run Gentoo on my second computer. I’ve always loved it, but Slackware was my first linux experience, so it has special meaning to me. Maybe try Slackware in a VM? You’ll be compiling a lot from source on Slackware too if you need stuff that’s not included in the base system, but without portage for deps management it’s a lot more cumbersome. You can of course use sboui, slpkg or some other tool that can manage deps, or use flatpaks, appimages, distrobox or whatever to keep your base system clean.

I’d say they are similar, but they have somewhat different philosophies. Slackware maintains a KISS philosophy and comes as a full system. It has its ncurses interface for installation. Some might find that helpful. Arch is purely CLI, so you need to know the commands (or write them down) to set the keyboard layout, set up a network connection, time/date, and so on. You build your Arch system from the ground up, but Pacman handles dependencies for you. Slackware comes as a full or minimal installation (or you can choose individual packages at the risk of breaking dependencies). Slackpkg does not handle dependencies for you. Both will require you to have some sense of what’s going on under the hood. You’ll need to edit config files and be a sysadmin of your own system.