Alright, so
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@ajroach42 thanks for all the thoughts in this thread.
If you all are wondering why so many of us in the “tech” world are feeling such existential dread and exhaustion about our profession, passion, and livelihoods, this thread does a good job of touching on most of the topics.
As you may have gathered from some of the posting that Sundog and I have been doing over the last few days, we're kicking the tires on some tech stuff.
Toy production is still ongoing, we're getting ready to order more molds, I met with one of our 3D modelers yesterday about the next models we'll be working up.
You can get Kumiai-Ki, The Mighty Labor Union Mech action figures from @MountainTownToys right now!
But we've solved a bunch of toy production problems, and half solved a couple of others, and a byproduct of that is that we have some extra cycles while we're waiting on parts and tooling to finish solving problems and start making the next batch of toys.
And that means we've been working on some tech stuff.
For me, this mostly means that I've been dusting off old ideas and checking out new projects and checking in on old projects.
I've been writing a lot, about technology, about what I want, about culture, about the ways technology has failed.
Some of these things might eventually become blog posts or a newsletter or a zine.
But mostly, I've been thinking, and trying to fight back in small ways to find or build a new foundation as the forces of capital erode the ground from underneath my feet, technologically speaking.
I have, for decades, considered Debian the bedrock of my computer infrastructure.
The thing that I could trust, because it was run by an organization so obsessed with the ideology of software freedom that it routinely rendered itself significantly more cumbersome as a result.
I was there for the IceWeasel campaign! I thought those principles were central to the project.
I was wrong.
So one of the many things I'm trying to do, as I reorient myself in the computer world without Debian as a foundation to build on, is looking for a new operating system.
The Linux kernel project accepts slop contributions, the debian project accepts slop contributions. Where does that leave me?
Put simply, I'm looking for a daily driver operating system that I can trust to be made by people, and not contain the product of an automated plagiarism machine.
@ajroach42 I'm currently eyeing RedoxOS (strong anti-AI policy), and NetBSD (less strong anti-AI policy1). I've liked microkernels ever since I first played with the HURD, and I like Rust, so RedoxOS is very interesting.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to install it in a VM yet, so that's not an option right now. But something to keep an eye on.
NetBSD on the other hand, works fine so far, and as far as server-side things go, I haven't missed anything yet. Apart from a declarative configuration a'la NixOS, but... that's missing from anything but NixOS & Guix.
NetBSD's policy is that tainted code is banned, except if core gives an OK. They have not done that, and NetBSD has been pretty consistently going their own way, so I have some hope in them not going slop before the bubble bursts (and there'll be no point after). ↩︎
