I’ve been playing with computers and writing code since 1981, so have seen a few things change, and the past couple of years have been alarming from a world new stage, but that’s not so much about tech as global unrest.

It started with the cookie banners… “We value your privacy” == “Of course, it’s worth money to us” The internet has shifted a lot over the past couple of years particularly, and it was inevitable. Just as inevitable is the loss of the small internet (I speak as someone who runs several small websites that get scraped and stolen from constantly), and the attempts of governments to control it. That was all going to happen, and just as inevitable is the impossibility of complete control - it’ll just make life harder for the honest person.

We’ve seen some shitty changes to software too through global business. With hindsight, that was inevitable too - it took a long time for someone to realise just how locked in the likes of vmware’s customers were. How cloud and then AI additions were reasons to charge more for features we don’t like. There’s a lot of fear about global instability for obvious reasons, and that’s hard to shake.

But also… People haven’t changed. For every big name enshittification, there’s people sprouting two more things without such controls. Where we are now - founded largely because of shenanighans at Reddit. You mention Linux - again, most of it free and accessible and those are baked into it. (We’ll skip over Redhat here, I think, perhaps the exception that proves the rule). There’s a lot of free software projects that are born out of love for the free and open community. A place where respect is more common than rudeness.

So I’m certain there’s a balance. Yes, crappy things. But also good things. I’m constantly amazed at new inventions and how tech is genuinely improving life for many people. I grew up in England in the 70s and the quality of life today is better despite what we might think, but it’s also far more complicated, and makes us feel helpless and small. Back then, our world was small, we knew people. A disaster on the other side of the world took days to arrive on our newspapers, and we weren’t made to feel like we should do something about it.

Perception may be playing a big part in your view here, and you sound both burnt out and depressed. Not uncommon with the bombardment of badness in the news that we can do nothing about. Understanding that, and stepping outside of the doom cycle, definitely helps.

Ultimately, you’ve got to do what’s right for you. If tech is a hobby to you, then it’s the same as any other hobby. When it stops being fun, it’s time to find something else that you enjoy instead of, or as well as. Hope you find a better balance.

It doesn’t need the Dockerfile to run.

Thanks for the feedback, always interesting to hear how people might use a tool like this.

I do have email notifications in the roadmap, but to be honest, I’ve struggled to visualise how that might work for two reasons:

1. One of Taskpony’s goals is that it’s as easy to install and run as it could be. Configuring email settings takes a lot of detail (especially when running in docker where you can’t rely on a local smtp). I’ve thought about other tools like ntfy.sh, which I love, but the whole ecosystem of dozens of systems and tools for DM style notifications is too wide to support.

2. I wouldn’t use it like that, I’d use a calendar for distant events, and there’s no plans to support “Task must be done by” style timers, as again, I think the interface would get too complex. I keep Taskpony in a tabbed browser, and also as one of my daily bookmark folders, so it shows up regularly enough to show me.

Out of interest, how would you use notifications, or see how they’d work? Are you thinking of browser notifications? And if so, on what logic might they trigger?

Great that you’re using it!

And yes - sadly koyeb’s demo went down as I posted this link. I’ve quickly thrown up another demo here; https://taskpony.onrender.com/

Indeed, but I love writing in Perl and it still works great. It’s a shame it’s not more widely used.

Clearly the best advice is “Build your PC a year ago”

At a certain level, it is going to be a chore to determine who is or is not slopping up with AI media. Not every asset comes out with six fingers and a half-melted face.

That’s a good point. I think a lot of people are dismissing AI content because there’s this fallacy and desire to believe it’s all “slop”. It’s willfully ignorant to wave it all away like that. Sure, we’ve all seen the stupid stuff, and it’s really annoying, but we absorb the good stuff without even knowing it. Anyone claiming they can reliably spot AI generated images is fooling themselves even at this early stage.

I’d like to know when something is real, especially real art and even pictures of nature, but I don’t think I can.

Has it added repos that are conflicting with your distro’s main ones?

Check /etc/apt/sources.list and all the files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/

Move anything that looks sus to somewhere else and then “apt-get clean” and retry.

I have no idea what you’re doing wrong, but I’ve been using Debian for over twenty years and it’s by far the most stable OS I’ve ever used, particularly the update system. I’m currently maintaining around 50 debian systems and never seen an issue you like you’ve posted, so no, there’s nothing average about what your’e saying.

Sure, I use them, for three good reasons.

1. Cheapest domain registrations around.
2. Cloudflare tunnel for free which allows me to reach my selfhosted stuff despite my ISP running CGNAT.
3. I host several website using Pages for free, so now I don’t care about AI or endless bots hammering my limited bandwidth, or having malicious attacks on my equipment.

Right answer. In fact, the only viable answer.

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Personal view: I’d rather you didn’t. One of the benefits of Lemmy over Reddit is that repost bots are at a minimum.

We must be getting popular.

You waited two hours before demanding a reply? Wow. Funnily enough I don’t live at the keyboard and was away doing interesting real world stuff.

Your other question wasn’t relevant to the subject in my view, so although I wasn’t ignoring you, I will now.

I don’t want Lemmy to be zero censorship.

In every case I’ve known, anywhere claiming “zero censorship” either adopts it sooner or later, or disappears - and in every one of those cases, it was a godawful place to be 100% of the time. IME, those who do say they want this tend to be either edgy teenagers, crackpot conspiracy theorists or psychopaths.

Sure, you can say “well, zero censorship except bots” - well that’s censorship, isn’t it? And given no anti-bot tactic is reliable, you’ll be blocking humans. Or you can say, “zero censorship except CSAM, or extreme pornography, or anti-terrorist” and you’re either applying societal laws or your own morality on others. You can’t use “no censor” and “except” in a sentence without contradiction.

If you want zero censorship, I don’t think Lemmy is for you. I don’t think the fediverse is for you. But if you disagree, then run your own instance and put it on an onion address, please stop trying to rant at us for not sharing your views.

I can understand that view, but I’ve personally experienced things where it absolutely can be this and I respectfully disagree with you. I think what OP describes is more likely to be hardware than the OS.

Firstly - different drive for linux. A dying drive can freeze and take down its host, regardless of OS.

Secondly, linux uses memory very differently to windows, especially in relation to caching the filesystem. Linux might be accessing memory that Windows doesn’t get to.

We also don’t know what loads OP puts on his computer when running windows and linux. Maybe he has windows to game with, or may he uses linux for LLM/compute work and runs it full tilt. Each may do very different things and tax different aspects of the hardware.

It’s simply not safe to assume anything when diagnosing intermittent problems with hardware. The only reliable method is methodical testing and isolation.

Others have already given some good advice, but rather than let it sit and wait to error, use the program “stress”

It’ll work specific components hard which can help locate whether it’s a CPU/Heat problem, or Memory, or disk.

And if it still fails on random things, take a long hard look at your PSU and measure voltages if you can. But if everything else checks out, motherboard could be it. Tiny cracks/dry joints, even inside the pcb layers, can lead to occasional problems that come and go with heat or vibration and are impossible to accurately diagnose beyond swapping it out.

We did experiment with local models. They were okay, if a little slow with the resources we allocated for testing. Ultimately though, we paid for copilot. I’m still a little sceptical that it won’t leak data, despite the assurances, so I do clean anything sensitive before pasting.

As for best models - generally gpt4 or 5 is my go-to, but the others have their uses. I tend to stick with one until it annoys me, then move on. Claude’s pretty good for code help, imo, but there’s not really a huge difference between them.

What’s your experiences?

Sysadmin here, this is my usual flow for various distros

1. as /u/FigMcLargeHuge mentions, recent logfiles in /var/log. Notably /var/log/messages (EL) and syslog (Debian) but anything that’s recent.

2. journalctl - More and more things are moving to binary logging. If you know the process, then journalctl -u processname restricts to just that. also add a -f for tailing it for ongoing logs.

3. dmesg -T - especially at system level, this captures any hardware/low level logs. (-T reports actual times, not just seconds since boot)

4. Once you have some logs that you think are related, but don’t know WTF they actually mean, you have two options. The first is to google likely strings. This is… ineffective much of the time - accidental misinformation and outdated advice is increasingly common. The answer might be there, but it takes time and can be frustrating to weed out the cruft.

The better way, (IMO, and people downvote me for saying this) is to use AI. Get a few lines of logs with the errors, check them for confidential information, and simply paste the suspect lines into chatgpt, gemini, claude, co-pilot, whatever. No need for context, it’ll figure that out. The LLM will, 4 times out of 5, identify the problem very quickly.

Now, once it’s identified that, it will offer to fix it for you. This is where you’ve got to be on your toes as LLMs are really really quick to give bad advice at this level. But that first triage is nearly always worth doing and helps shape your own mind as to what’s going on. AI is still useful for fixing it, but do understand what it’s telling you to do.