I like to do my dev work in a virtual machine so that I can keep my host system as clean as possible.

Developers tend to install lots and lots of alpha and beta level libraries, frameworks, SDKs, and just about anything else we can get our grubby little mits on.

That inevetably leads to system destabilization and a death spiral which inexorably degrades into the collapse of civillization as we know it. Well maybe not that bad, but pretty darned bad.

The only true fix is to start anew with a fresh install of the OS. A pain with your host system, a bit less painful with a VM.

For a while I've been using a Windows 11 VM hosted in Hyper-V. Fun fact the Windows 11 installer says it can't run on my desktop hardware. Yet it happily runs in a VM on that same hardware.

The main draw for me sticking with Windows is gaming, I'm not going to lie. The other day I tried to fire up Cyberpunk 2077 and couldn't because of a lack of RAM. Yada, yada, yada, my dev VM had to be shut down.

What Ever Shall I Do?

My first thought was to switch to Linux. See Developing with dotnet on Fedora for more of my thoughts on dotnet and Linux.

Then it hit me. WSL 2 is a Linux VM.

...

2022 was a year of distrust.

Everyone distrusts “the other party”. No one trusts the government or the media.

Crypto was revealed for the scam it so obviously was.

Elon Musk bought Twitter and ravaged it. Or saved it, depending on your political leanings.

Facebook, I mean Meta, Faceplanted with the Metaverse. A name they stole from Neal Stephenson without credit, by the way.

ChatGPT taught us that AI can write extremely convincing gibberish almost instantly.

So what are we to do?

Bring Back Blogging!

One initiative is to bring back blogging and RSS Feed Readers.

It is truly frightening how easily our opinions can be swayed by the algorithms of social media sites that are geared not to inform us or entertain us, but to engage us so we will continue consuming their ads. The more we argue and fight, the more we refuse to stop scrolling and thereby consuming their ads.

So how about we go back to algotrithm free browsing? Back to a time when WE chose who we wanted to hear from and what we wanted to read.

The Bring Back Blogging website is encouraging people to do just that. They are asking for bloggers to commit to publishing three posts in January 2023.

I've submitted both this site, jeffa.tech, and my other site Galactic Beacon.

...