1,740 karma · joined December 10, 2014
You can split hairs however you want, but this created a legacy, and is why Ubuntu is still one of the top recommended distributions for beginners.
I remember instances in my own childhood where my parents would e.g. turn off the wifi router when they were angry at me, and I'd instead figure out how to hack the neighbor's and use that. The dopamine hit from that was crazy, and I didn't even end up using it for much. It was more about showing them I could, and they had no control over me.
I suspect the things you described above might've contributed to the thrill of it. I find it hard to imagine downloading videos in advance being very similar to how the recommendations algorithm keeps you going (I imagine only longform videos would be practical). I can't know how "bad" the situation was, but installing cameras and alarms crosses several boundaries in trust and respect, that I can't imagine being good for a growing child, coming from their own parents...
At the end of the day, you can only help an addict that wants to be helped...
That is to say, being against copyright doesn't mean you want to allow others to abuse it against you.
I'm not saying any of this is particularly bad but it's been very clear fot a while that systemd just wants to be an OS. With immutable systems the "distribution" part of it is reduced to a build system, and everything else can be provided by systemd and flatpak.
https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/sam-altman-dario-amodei-walki...
Though I usually do the individual partitions before the main disk, to make sure fdisk doesn't complain about existing signatures as I start making partitions again. These days many disks and SD cards support "blkdiscard" to just wipe the whole thing (and temporarily gain some performance from clearing internal info), and "wipefs" became a thing to wipe the exact sequences fdisk and mkfs look for.
The "dd" method makes most sense on BIOS systems where you want to make sure to wipe the MBR boot code, and know that nothing is accidentally being preserved when you install your preferred bootloader.
On the other hand, part of the struggle was my fight against the web as a """platform""", with its many privacy and security issues that accumulated as W3C APIs were added like hot cakes and websites exploded in complexity. Firefox provided the control necessary through addons, thanks to its vast community of likeminded people. Nowadays, a lot of the privacy controls have landed in firefox proper, in part thanks to the tor browser upstreaming, if you know where to look.