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.

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C++ because I use it for embedded systems, interfaces with and can easily use C code (opening up the ability to use 40+ years of libraries and already written code), and I’m 43 years old and don’t feel like learning an entirely new programming paradigm (I like OOP it makes the most sense to me).

I like being able to drill down and manage all my own resources like memory, etc. when I need to as well. I’ll use raw pointers with higher level abstractions all day depending on what’s convenient.

std::vector<std::vector<bool>> is how I stored the representation of a play field for a Tetris game I made once.

Started messing around with it some time in 2003, on Mandrake Linux when I was 21 years old. Experimented and ran servers with various distros in the years since but it didn’t become my daily driver until about 2014-15, with Debian.

It was enough for yo mom ohhhhhhhh!

j/k

The world is going to be absolutely fucked when the older engineers and techies who built all this modern shit and/or maintain it and still understand it all retire or die off.