Read/write/execute file permissions.
Having them set incorrectly can cause problems, such as creating a file as root then leaving you unable to modify it as user, being unable to execute a script because execute is not set, or being unable to use your SSH keyfile because you left the permissions too open.
It’s more actually like “Why is it, when something doesn’t happen, is it always you three”
Truly, it’s the existential horror that really keeps me going :')
Personally I have had plenty of issues, and find this meme very relatable.
Yep.
And it’s especially difficult to compete with the entrenched giant when that giant actually doesn’t suck while some of the storefronts going up against it absolutely do, both in features and as toxic companies.
I used to be very much into My Little Pony when that whole thing was big, and there was a tremendous amount of very dark fan theorisation and spinoff material.
I think what you say is correct in part, that it can make things less shameful, but I also think there’s a simpler explanation - it’s fun.
It’s exactly because kids shows are so happy and non-threatening that these dark fan theories are so entertaining, because of the stark contrast between the theory and the source material. And so the darker it is, the better.
I mostly don’t think people “believe” the dark theories are true, or in any way actually intended as subtext by the showrunners. People aren’t “reading between the lines” so much as they are purely “making it up” - in ways that were never intended but feel somehow plausible. It’s just a bit of fun.
MLP itself was a strange case, though, and got quite bizarre in the end. As the show went on, the writers and animators became increasingly aware they had unexpectedly developed a huge adult following, and some of the plot points that began purely as fan theories later became canon… but that’s a whole different story…
Sounds like you’ve got quite the esoteric setup, hehe :)
My personal solution isn’t exactly small as I have two identical four-disk NAS servers which operate with one as primary and the other as a read-only mirror of the primary. For off-site I don’t have an automated solution but just backup onto external every so often and leave it with a family member.
A good solution could be as simple as a raspberry pi with an external SSD at a friend or family’s place, and then make that accessible via VPN to your home network.
SSDs at the end of their lifespan do tend to fail more gracefully than HDDs, as even when they become fully worn and unable to take new writes, they will often still allow reads.
But, that depends on the specific type of failure.
I had an SSD fail in the same way as yours, where the controller chip or something along the path there died, and it went from fully working to toast in an instant.
Some drives are more reliable, some drives are less reliable, but the only rule is that any drive can break, at any time, old or new.
Always have backups.
Fair, some good points there :)
I’d argue that tiered licensing wasn’t really enshittified as it was still just a one time thing where you bought a license and got a product. Not enshittified but simply unnecessarily confusing. And they somehow made that even worse with Vista.
In a similar manner I’d suggest online activation isn’t enshittified either, as that’s a pretty reasonable behaviour even for an ethical product as it helps prevent piracy. And a key again is that it’s a one-time thing, not something constantly bothering you or interrupting your experience over and over.
But the rest of your examples definitely count!
Was it?
A lot of people hated XP because of it’s ‘childish’ visual design, but that’s not what enshittification is about.
Enshittificstion is when a service becomes progressively user-hostile by implementing patterns that exploit the user and their data for profit.
I used XP plenty, and I certainly don’t remember it pushing ads in the start menu, or trying to force me to register a Microsoft account, or constantly harassing me to sign up for paid subscriptions.
You may have personally thought it “was shit”, but it certainly wasn’t “enshittified”
I agree, 11 definitely was shitty from the beginning.
With 11 Microsoft are not even attempting to “sell” the operating system anymore, but instead are dragging people to it kicking and screaming, while they desperately try to cling to Windows 10.
Tells you everything you need to know about whether it’s the consumer or Microsoft who are on the winning side of that “upgrade”.
It wasn’t shit from the start though, was it.
Back when Windows 95 was a new thing it blew everything else out of the water. Suddenly there was an operating system that even regular people were paying attention to and getting excited about, and it actually deserved the hype.
Windows was a product at that time, where Microsoft made their money by people purchasing the operating system. And so the incentive was to make a great product that people wanted to buy and use.
This was true all the way through the Windows XP and 7 days, and only with the release of 8 and especially 10 did we start to see things change.
Microsoft - who used to put so much effort into trying to prevent people installing cracked Windows - suddenly didn’t seem to care so much anymore about enforcing that. They’d realised that the true exploitable value was in the online ecosystem and the data, not the product, and that was the turning point for everything.
If lasagna doesn’t have a layer of deliciously browned and bubbling cheese and crispy oven-pan edges, it’s dead to me.
What else are you going to do, though?
If you have some particular and complicated task then sure you’d probably write a program for it in a specific high-level language. But that isn’t what the shell is for.
If you’ve already got a bunch of apps and utilities and want to orchestrate them together to do a task, that’s a good shell use case.
Or if you have a system that needs setup and install tasks doing on it to prepare for running your actual workload, that’s also a task which the shell is ideally suited to.
Shell scripting always has a place, and I can’t see it being made obsolete any time soon.
Sus timing, though it’s certainly just branding.
The whole “My-” prefix for “My Documents” and “My Computer” and all that is something that was around since the 90s, and really served to emphasise the “Personal” in “Personal Computer” at a time when PCs were coming into the home for the first time.
Nowadays that branding is really unnecessary and feels pretty antiquated too, especially in an era where most stuff for most people is online, and the emphasis is more on connected seamless stuff rather than a cute little folder to put your things in.