Mark

Pretty stressed this morning with a tough day in store, but I got a #wordle in 2, and that has cheered me up!

Wordle 1,777 2/6

⬜⬜⬜🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Member of staff on the 06:50 train from Waterford to Dublin just told someone who was playing a video without earphones to keep the noise down. My day is made already!

“…to young children should be imparted only such kinds of knowledge as will be useful to them without making mechanics of them. And any occupation, art, or science, which makes the body or soul or mind of the freeman less fit for the practice or exercise of excellence, is mechanical; wherefore we call those arts mechanical which tend to deform the body, and likewise all paid employments, for they absorb and degrade the mind.”
Politics, #aristotle

Yep.

#philosophy

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026/05/02/when-i-graduated-only-14-per-cent-of-irish-school-leavers-went-to-college-today-its-70-per-cent/

Definitely feeling this.

“If young people cannot secure jobs commensurate with their level of education, on top of the fact they are probably still living at home and can’t get homes commensurate with their expectations, their ambitions will be dashed, creating resentment.”

*And* can’t survive on “normal job” wages.

I think there’s a reckoning coming. I think my kids will have to struggle more than I did. It’s a sickening situation that seems to have no solution.

“The time we have to spend each day is elastic: it is stretched by the passions we feel; it is shrunk by those we inspire; and all of it is filled by habit.”
In The Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, In Search of Lost Time Vol. 2
#proust

“For many necessaries of life have to be supplied before we can have leisure. Therefore a city must be temperate and brave, and able to endure: for truly, as the proverb says, There is no leisure for slaves, and those who cannot face danger like men are the slaves of any invader.
Courage and endurance are required for business and philosophy for leisure, temperance and justice for both, and more especially in times of peace and leisure”
Politics, #aristotle
#philosophy

“Long before going to see La Berma, however, I had learned that whatever I longed for would be mine only at the end of a painful pursuit, and that this supreme goal could be achieved only on condition that I sacrifice to it the pleasure I had hoped to find in it.”
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, In Search of Lost Time.
#proust

Rings true!

These kind of tactics are deeply evil.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/16/israel-escalates-attacks-on-medics-in-lebanon-with-deadly-quadruple-tap

“the [Spartans], while they alone were assiduous in their […] drill, were superior to others, but now they are beaten […] in war […]. For their ancient superiority did not depend on their mode of training their youth, but only on the circumstance that they trained them when their only rivals did not. Hence we may infer that what is noble, not what is brutal, should have the first place; no wolf or other wild animal will face a really noble danger; such dangers are for the brave man.”
#Aristotle

@luftvaffel@oslo.town @gnome@floss.social I moved away too, for the following reasons:

1. Package management system that includes the core OS, meaning that upgrading vim can break the printer/monitor/wireless/etc.
2. Package management system that includes UI apps, meaning apps cannot be standalone and tested properly against a reference OS configuration.

Both of these mitigate against an OS that “just works”.

I have heard some things about flat pack? Etc. Is Linux finally grown up on the desktop?