Exactly. You're not supposed to pacman -Syu without looking. Part of your duty when you choose to install Arch is to take a few minutes every week to keep on top of what's new. Call it basic hygiene.
Yet none of the setup guides really stress this and there's no preferred method to keep up to date on things. Arch really needs a better system for making it obvious when nontrivial updates are about to happen.
Note, I use pacmatic, which pulls the news feeds, but it took me getting bitten a few times before I learned to do this.
When I was an undergrad, I found very early issues of Dr. Dobb's in the medical library of my university, the name of the magazine having fooled the librarians. I remember spending many happy afternoons there reading about 6502 single-board computers and porting Tiny C to various machines.
Interesting. I don't get this at all from his message (that he is depressed and frustrated). I understand that this is painful for an entrepreneur to read, but Notch doesn't seem interested in using his fame to project his vision, or change the world, or any of this big Jobs-y stuff. He doesn't owe it to anyone, and people have no business telling him to do it or else he's a traitor, or grumpy, or a fake.