Is this just like the equivalent of a getter method in C++?

I mean…my connection is so fast it takes like, what, a minute, maybe two to get an ISO? The Internet is my backup device. I can still get copies of Yggdrasil from the early 90s.

If you’re doing it for yourself, fine. If you’re writing for me, don’t waste my time by making me have to decipher your custom scribble that’s never consistent with anyone else’s, unlike normal print.

Fuck serif fonts. The point of writing is to communicate clearly. Not look pretty and fancy-pants IMO.

I hate cursive for the same reason. It’s elitist trash script.

I was, when I was younger. I kind of don’t want to spend the rest of my life I have left tweaking some stupid theme that doesn’t matter in the long run. Whenever I reinstall, I pretty much just use it as is and probably only change the wallpaper and turn the theme to dark mode and that’s it.

I’m at the far end of the desktop tweaking inverted U curve and have achieved nirvana, with the new users at the beginning and you in the middle.

Who is?

My ex wife for one, who would like to play Steam games but is not experienced enough to build and fiddle with a gaming PC, much less Linux, and just wants a box she can just plug in and turn on without calling all the IT folks in her family.

Don’t forget about our nerd bias. Most people here have a different perspective than 95% of normies. Remember how clueless the average person is about the inner workings of modern tech.

One-handed locking my PC as I leave my desk with Windows-L.

If you weren’t checking tech news regularly, shit like this just passes right over your head as a regular Linux user sometimes. I keep forgetting about the EoL thing.

Also having a clean frame of reference, if you have been a user for a long time now, you are definitely able to remember occasionally using a Windows machine and seeing the downhill slide literally happen before your eyes as everyone else is unaware of the growing pile of shit and getting slowly boiled like the frog in the pot.

The last version of Windows I’d consider clean of all this modern horseshit that’s in those OSes now would be Windows 2000. Even XP started pushing the telemetry shit hard and started getting sketchy towards the end.

I see it as anybody too young to remember a world that wasn’t connected 24/7, somebody who in their child/teen years that didn’t make heavy use of the phone attached to the kitchen wall to contact friends. Someone who’s never had to seriously use dialup Internet or an 8/16 bit computer.

This will be the (fifth?) time Microsoft has tried to implement virtual assistants. And they are still exceedingly inefficient at it.

There’s an entire step between trying to figure it out yourself and resorting to an LLM which is probably likely to tell you to shove cheese into the USB ports. Regular web searching. Forum and social media posts. The distro’s wiki itself or other such resources. You know, the stuff the AI originally sucked up, mashed together, mixed around, and spat back out.

There was an idea I read about, sorta along the same crazy track, (might have been Popular Science or something like 25 years ago) where they came up with an idea for a jet that didn’t use traditional control surfaces like ailerons, but rather line the wings and fuselage in thousands of tiny flaps that would all be precisely computer controlled. It would be able to basically mold and shape the airstream around itself to make precise movements.

Learning C: Random asterisks go

This is the most boomer-y comment I’ve read in a while. I remember my parents saying shit like this about me and my NES.

I usually do it when we take over a customer’s access control system and we have half their doors on the new system and half in the old still and are migrating them over. I’m an electronic security tech, this is what I do for a living.

I use it at work to clone a customer’s proximity card when I work in their building so they don’t have to leave me theirs to get around. The one legitimate use I found.

I guess being able to trigger the customer service announcement without having to find a button in a store is nice.

You gotta put the sticker on lest you forget it’s even there, just being an OS and getting out of your way.

This analogy doesn’t really work because there are thousands of different wheels that all spin on an axis but are used for many different things. If the wheel was never reinvented or improved upon we wouldn’t have automatic transmissions, rocket engine turbo pumps, gyroscopes, etc.

Maybe. And I can’t blame it on not having had coffee when I made the comment. Just me being completely oblivious to a joke.

Or literally just look at its binary representation. If the least significant digit is a “1”, it’s odd, if “0”, it’s even. Or you can divide by 2 and check for a remainder.

Your method is just spending time grinding away CPU cycles for no reason.