PXE booting is pretty neat, but it’s a lot to setup for home use.

I did a lab where we configured an immutable distro to boot using an encrypted RAM drive as storage (using TSME). The machine had no storage other than RAM (and NFS mounts). We were trying to harden a machine against coldboot/evil maid attacks. It was a neat project but a bit too clunky for daily driving and also, a RAM drive in this economy?

What I don’t understand is why super critical errors are hidden away in a log instead of being shoved in my face once they happen.

That’s a choice you make when you’re setting up your bootloader, you pass a kernel parameter that tells the kernel what to show on the screen.

https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.html

If you’re using grub, look in /etc/default/grub. There will be a line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“<kernel parameters>” you can set the log level to something (like loglevel=3) and it will write the errors to the console on boot. The higher the number the more information is written to the console.

That was 2 hours-ish that could have been just 5 minutes if the system had actually told me it was having problems with connecting to a drive.

It did, it almost certainly wrote the error into the system log. That’s generally the first thing you should check if you’re having such low-level problems, like a failure to boot.

Going forward some good advice is: Get a USB stick, install Ventoy and put a system rescue image on it: https://www.system-rescue.org/

This way, if you’re ever having issues booting you can boot into a live environment and read the logs.

If you mount your system drive on /sysroot, you can read the system log with

journalctl --root=/sysroot

Add a -b flag to see just the log from the latest boot (and -b -1 from the previous, -b -2 from the one before, etc)

And, surprisingly, it wasn’t DNS

Yeah, probably a .bashrc difference between users.

It could also be ~/.inputrc (or /etc/inputrc if not in the user’s home directory.) https://man.archlinux.org/man/readline.3

A stressful residency

That’s one small step for linux users, a giant leap for nerdkind

Clickbait headline.

"fury and “sneakily” are loaded terms. You can find a furious person on any topic on social media and “sneakily” is nonsense, they were trying to delete a file that Chrome requires and so Chrome fixes the install when it runs.

They even note that you can disable it in settings, though not without making it sound like an unusually hard thing to do: “manually digging through setting”

Clickbait headline, ragebait article. Anything for some advertising dollars.

That’s sometimes hard to do on social media where everything wants to autoplay videos.

It’ll become less impactful over time if you can avoid the topic and don’t mentally dwell on it.

“There is, simply, no way, to ignore privacy. Because a citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s.

You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have to hide anything – including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records.

You’re assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious beliefs, political affiliations and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences.

Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe.

Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor – or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedom that my country was busily dismantling.”

– Edward Snowden

At least 14 times each, maybe.

My bad, social media reflexes are hard to break :)

I was referring to people calling it staged.

Yeah, I understand. I did think it was odd how they were wording their statements, it made me think it was friendly fire as well.

What about this point is nonsense?

When you put ‘could have’ in front of something you can describe any situation that isn’t explicitly ruled out.

Saying something ‘could have’ happened isn’t saying anything useful. It’s like using the phrase ‘some people say’ to state a position. You can find ANY kind of argument said by some people. It’s a weasel phrase. Anything which is possible, that isn’t explicitly ruled out by the evidence, ‘could have’ happened.

As far as your wiki link. reductio involves assuming the contrary of a claim and showing that it leads to absurdity or contradiction, thereby proving the original claim.

I didn’t assume the contrary of their claim nor was I trying to prove their original claim (I agreed that it ‘could have’ happened).

I was taking the same premise (“could have”) and showing that you can extend it to other fantastical scenarios. This is not formal reductio, it is a demonstration of how a weak modal standard (“could have”) licenses absurdities.

I take your point, but I am not wildly speculating. Them witholding evidence in a very specific way is itself evidence as it implies a possibility (that the shotgun was not fired at the ss officer).

Yeah, I understand. I did think it was odd how they were wording their statements, it made me think it was friendly fire as well.

I just think the ‘staged’ conspiracies are just complete nonsense.

There are plenty of unknowns, but to take all of those unknowns and fill in the blanks with the same ‘it was staged’ conspiracy that has appeared after every assassination attempt doesn’t help anyone understand the situation, it only creates a cloud of misinformation so it’s harder to determine what is true or not.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that the individual agents who were on the scene probably has a pretty good idea of what happened just by observing the state of things the moment he was captured.

It’s just that their interpretation, like any crime scene evidence, isn’t made public so we can only speculate.

The less information we have, the wilder the speculations can be and still fit the evidence. When there is new evidence the wild speculations can be updated to take into account the new information because there will always be things that are not clear or that we don’t know and a motivated person could find explanations and ‘just so’ stories that fit those gaps.

This happens constantly with Evolution vs Religion arguments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps Every time we don’t know something, some theist will come along and insert god into that unknown. We didn’t know how eyes evolved so theists said that it must be god that did it, then we learned how eyes evolved.

The trick here is that given incomplete information, which is often the case, anybody can create a story that just so happens to fit. Here, we have a ton of incomplete information so there is fertile ground for people to just make things up.

Trump could have staged it.

Sure.

When you put ‘could have’ in front of something you can describe any situation that isn’t explicitly ruled out. Including absolutely crazy and wildly improbable scenarios that are impossible to disprove.

This guy ‘could have’ been a clone dropped off by aliens a few days before the attack. We haven’t seen anything that rules it out.

This incident ‘could have’ not happened at all. Maybe the devices and social media feeds of you and all of the people you socialize with are being modified as you read them creating the illusion that an event took place while the rest of the world goes on oblivious.

You ‘could have’ not existed until this very moment when you suddenly popped into existence with your brain built in such a way as to have memories of your life that never actually happened.

When you use ‘could have’ you open the door to fantasy scenarios. So yes, it could have been staged… by extradiminsional beings for which Trump is only their 3-diminsional form.

Sure, there was a conspiracy. A bunch of right-wing social media people coordinated the ballroom message: https://slate.com/technology/2026/04/trump-ballroom-ashley-st-clair-maga.html

I was referring to people calling it staged. As in the President knew this was going to happen, planned for it to happen and made it happen.

It’s nonsense, there is zero evidence for this being true.

I mean, as far as a conspiracy, there’s ample evidence that adversarial nations use their intelligence services, bots and hired trolls to push messaging on social media to create conflict and division.

What are these troll farms doing around this situation? They are not simply sitting out and not messaging around this topic… so what message are these kinds of groups pushing?

It does seem pretty suspicious that every single one of these security incidents was followed by a tsunami of ‘it was staged’ posts full of the same bad faith interpretations, misinformation, toxic trolling behavior and vote manipulation. After a few weeks all of the people rabidly pushing these ideas seem to disappear outside of the regular conspiracy places. Kind of like they’ve moved on to another topic en masse.

If you’re a member of this community you’ll recognize how different a tone exists in these kinds of threads than in all of the others related to Privacy. It is almost as if there are people from outside of the community who are going around to the various communities and pushing a specific message.

If you looked at the comment history of the people pushing these messages you’d find that they have few, if any, comments in this community before this topic.

On the other hand, there is ZERO evidence to support the shooter being part of a secret plan to (…what?) get a ballroom built.