My work laptop is a Dell Precision. It was a “data science” model that came with Ubuntu. Wiped Dell’s modified Ubuntu and put vanilla Ubuntu on it and now running Nixos. Works great. There was a weird period when using triple monitors with their dock had an intermittent issue on boot where resolutions and monitors were not being detected. Cause was Nvidia drivers. It eventually got resolved and it was easy enough to rollback the drivers to one that worked.

1. Install nix.
2. nix profile install nixpkgs#vscodium
3. nix profile upgrade ‘.*’

Won’t auto update but you could add the upgrade command to a login script or something.

Won’t lie, nix has a high learning curve to get the most out of it, but installing a single app is pretty simple.

Most startups I’ve applied to are Linux friendly.

I currently work for a fortune 100 and managed to get a Linux machine purchased as a “lab” machine.

I’m fully in control. IT doesn’t even know it exists. I’m not allowed on the corporate network, but I managed to get some internal corporate access through another department’s lab network (IT sanctioned) that has a VPN with a few routes to things like ticketing, time cards, and our internal wiki. Most of the stuff I need to do my job is in AWS and we are allowed to add home IPs to the security groups.

IT still gives me a MacBook. I use it like once every 6 months.

nixos-unstable is the only thing I will use currently.

I’m running bleeding edge stuff like the latest kernel, Hyprland nightly, my own “shell” built from Gnome components and lots of custom stuff using GJS (Gnome JavaScript).

If you get one, and you are free to do whatever on it, encrypt your drives like your job depends on it. I have a memorized passphrase, pin protected hardware key, and a key in TPM. No biometrics.

As far as other nice things to have:

• VPN: https://www.infradead.org/openconnect/ supports some common enterprise VPNs.
• Communication tools (Teams, WebEx, Zoom, Slack, etc.). I tend to have access to 90% of what I need. My team is thankfully accommodating for the couple features I have issues with. Make sure you test things like Screen Sharing especially in Wayland if you use it.
• VM: If you can get a corporate licensed image to run a corporate licensed version of Office, I recommend it. Office365 for web is missing a few features and often renders differently from native.
• Password Manager and encrypt everything. System is encrypted as previously stated. My home volume (BTRFS) is encrypted with a different key/passphrase. My work’s sensitive files are encrypted yet again using rclone with different keys. I try to minimize attack surfaces by unlocking only what I need when I need it.
• Backups. I use rclone to backup to our corporate OneDrive. Nixos is immutable and I have it setup with impermanence where every reboot is like a fresh install if I didn’t codify it my nixos-config which is tracked in git. I persist a few cache and setting directories in my home directory, but not much. I can restore my setup in like 20 minutes if I ever lost my machine.
• Virtual mic and camera for noise suppression and blurring for communication tools that don’t have it built in.
• Evolution EWS works okay as an Exchange email client. I had to hunt some weird settings like tenant ID to get it to work. I’ve been using Webmail or Outlook in a VM more often though as of late.

I work in software dev as FYI. For the few issues I have, my team has more issues getting stuff working consistently on macOS for our project. I used that as a justification when requesting the laptop: my dev environment should closely match our runtime environment. Most of that is moot now since we use Nix flakes in our repos for local dev envs.

They can modify the DNS packets still. They aren’t encrypted or signed so the authenticity of a response packet cannot be verified. Parental controls from ISP relay on being able to snoop and modify your DNS (and SNI from TLS ClientHello packets).

Don’t Look Up!

I use rclone and the Round Sync Android client.

Supports a ton of back ends, self hosted, and commercial options. You can transparently encrypt with private keys you control.

I personally use B2 Backblaze for storage.

My phone backs up every night and Round Sync pushes them to B2. On my desktop I can mount as a volume. I can also access my storage from my phone going the other direction.

I’ve done the same using SFTP if I don’t want the overhead of persistent file storage.

It does not support indexing or previews for searching or finding say a photo. You can put whatever you want for data. So I have caches, indexes, and thumbnails that work in Linux. I can’t really make use of those on my phone though.

Rclones bisync feature is also a bit dangerous when I tried to use it a year ago. I more than once “deleted” everything. B2 doesn’t delete by default, just hides, so I was able to recover. I now do unidirectional syncs from my machines to different buckets until I’m motivated to investigate a proper 3-way merge solution.

Oh nice! I’ll have to dig into that. Wonder if its an implementation issue across vendors. I was always under the impression that DHCPv6 was the common convention if not static.

Ok. So a device didn’t get a dhcp address? No problem… It creates it’s open IP address and starts talking and try to get out on internet on its own…

Its not that different from a conceptual point of view. Your router is still the gate keeper.

Home router to ISP will usually use DHCPv6 to get a prefix. Sizes vary by ISP but its usually like a /64. This is done with Prefix Delegation.

Client to Home Router will use either SLACC, DHCPv6, or both.

SLACC uses ICMPv6 where the client asks for the prefix (Router Solicitation) and the router advertises the prefix (Router Advertisement) and the client picks an address in it. There is some duplication protection for clients picking the same IP, but its nothing you have to configure. Conceptually its not that different from DHCP Request/Offer. The clients cannot just get to the internet on their own.

SLACC doesn’t support sending stuff like DNS servers. So DHCPv6 may still be used to get that information, but not an assigned IP.

Just DHCPv6 can also be used, but SLACC has the feature of being stateless. No leases or anything.

The only other nuance worth calling out is interfaces will pick a link local address so it can talk to the devices its directly connected to over layer 3 instead of just layer 2. This is no different than configuring 169.254.1.10/31 on one side and 169.254.1.11/31 on the other. These are not routed, its just for two connected devices to send packets to each other. This with Neighbor Discovery fills the role of ARP.

There is a whole bunch more to IPv6, but for a typical home network these analogies pretty much cover what you’d use.

Very happy. My two daily drivers (Desktop and Laptop) are on Ubuntu but user space is managed with Nix.

All other machines are Nixos proper. Only thing keeping me back from moving to Nixos fully is I decided to piecemeal my own DE and I’ve just lacked the time to debug some issues related to gnome-keyring, computer locking, and coding up some system setting widgets.

I don’t know about Nvidia specifically, but I mostly only see RSUs offered to Staff/Principal level engineers or Director and above on the management track. Many times with a multi year vestment period to act as a retention tool. You can make out good at the exiting end of the deal.

IMHO its a shitty practice. There is risk if the C-level pulls some stupid shit tanking the stock. The reward could just as easily be distributed to employees with a profit sharing bonus that eliminates the risk of my options tanking while vesting. Let the employees convert to options if they want to stake on future company performance.

At least in the US, I could have used the value of my options earlier in life to help with student loans, buying a house, medical issues, having kids, etc. I grew up poor. I “pulled myself up from bootstraps” and am doing well now. I still think the whole system is a dumb gimmick.

While I have nothing against an arch recommendation, I wouldn’t rely on my distro when there is tooling to get any version of a library directly from pypi.

Having done some MQTT IoT work in the past, dropping a couple resources:

https://github.com/eclipse/mosquitto - CLI interface and C bindings. I’ve only used the CLI interface. Its a nice way to test communication with a remote broker.

RabbitMQ /w MQTT plugin - Message queue based on AMQP. We ran this as the server in a container. There maybe others options like 0MQ (been a few years so don’t know every option). I had my clients post to a wild card topic so that I could consume a single device or all devices. Consumption is not with MQTT though. We’d use AMQP on that side.

I recommended checking out package managers that will simplify using whatever version of a library you want with project level virtual environments.

I haven’t done heavy python dev since 3.7, so I don’t know the full landscape of options these days, but here are some references to dig into.

https://python-poetry.org/ is the one I started using as the first step up from pip.

It looks like there are some new contenders like hatch, rye, and pdm: https://dev.to/adamghill/python-package-manager-comparison-1g98.

There is also pixi referenced from the comments in that article: https://github.com/prefix-dev/pixi

Typical back tracing algorithm when you don’t know which path to take.

Might work like the book one where there is a known word and unknown word. You only have to guess the known one. The rest of the choices are used as training data for the unknowns.

Yeah seems like it was more capitalist propaganda. Thanks Lemmy for ruining my childhood memory, lol.

There is a Public Assisstence board game from the 80s. We had one when I was younger. I can’t tell if it was a “anti-welfare” game or just making fun of the whole system. I grew up pretty poor, so I always assumed the latter as a kid. Since the welfare track was easier from what I remember, now I’m not so sure, lol.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3393/public-assistance/images

In nineteen ninety eight the undertaker threw mankind off hеll in a cell, and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer’s table.

I’m kind of curious how late gen X and millennials will be at that age in regards to tech.

I work in software dev. I’ve interviewed 2 CS grads who did their whole degree on an iPad while acting as if its an accomplishment.

My engineers also religiously use ChatGPT. It has a tell in that all its code comments start with a capital letter without punctuation. All their merge requests where coding conventions were not followed and “help I’m stuck” non-working code has these comments.

They are super smart and hard workers. They just lack the experience of needing to figure shit out without aide because it didn’t exist.

As long as their isn’t some mass cognitive decline for that generation, I think there might be a dip in general technical knowledge when millennials that had to figure things out check out and all that’s left are those who want to understand the tech they use.