It creates both a sense of expectation and suspense. As adults, we have a lot more (and more subtle) ways of doing the same thing, but kids are still figuring out the nuances of these things.

If you have pets or are otherwise cleaning up lots of spills, I recommend getting a handheld one for spot-cleaning.

If you’re doing whole rooms, I recommend renting one, as they work better than most of the consumer ones you can buy. I’ve rented from Home Depot before, many big hardware stores have them.

If you’re on a budget, ask around to friends and family to see if anyone owns one. Getting them a six pack of their favorite beer is cheaper than renting. The performance isn’t as good as commercial ones, but it’s still better than nothing.

I’ve considered looking into some sort of faraday bag to disrupt ones that can’t be easily isolated.

Husband tax.

Those discussions happened and people got tired of having them. It’s a bit like having prostelitizers come to your door–chances are, you know how that discussion is going to go and would rather not waste everyone’s time and energy.

The people who are in denial about what the government could do or has done are not going to be convinced of anything by having a discussion about it–they abandoned reason decades ago.

In the middle of a sentence, scream. Scream like you’re being murdered with a rusty spoon and you don’t like it. When they look at you, scream louder. Run into the woods, don’t stop screaming.

If you walk into someone’s home and it’s full of the latest and greatest tech, that’s a tech enthusiast. If you walk in and the most advanced piece of tech is a printer from 2005, that might be a senior software engineer.

As an engineer, I can understand your sentiment. Unfortunately, it’s a field that attracts a lot of smart and socially awkward people. Those whose heads enjoy engineering challenges often lack self awareness, and it results in either being really awkward or being obnoxious, or both. The “good ones” are less loud, so you don’t hear from them as much.

Marketing is an industry built around manipulating people to buy things they otherwise wouldn’t be interested in buying. There’s no redeeming quality; the entire premise is shitty.

Assemblers can come from the CPU manufacturer, but they can also come from a third party. They’re most often bundled into the compiler, since it’s rare to need to compile without also assembling (many compilers skip the assembly step and convert directly to machine code). There’s actually a third tool involved I didn’t mention, which is a Linker (takes pieces of machine code and combines them together, so you can separate your software into different parts).

Some CPUs are more niche, and the assemblers/compilers for them sometimes are created by the manufacturer. But there are a few “standard” processor architectures that many CPUs follow, and because they’re common between many brands of CPU (and the architectures are published and well known), the compilers are often created by third parties. And there are some compilers (like gcc) that can compile to dozens of different architectures.

As an example, you might have heard terms like x86, x86_64, armv7, or RISC-V – these are all processor “architectures”, which means that any processor that meets a particular architecture can run machine code built for that architecture. Currently, x86/64 architectures are common among desktops and most laptops (Intel and AMD processors), while ARM architectures are common for tablets and phones and some laptops (Snapdragon processors, for example).

It might be helpful to understand the connection between hardware and software better. There are various ways we can create something that a machine can interpret that have evolved over time. We group these into “generations.”

Generation 1: writing machine code directly. Either using things like punch cards, or typing in the 1s and 0s directly (more likely hex code, but close enough). This is difficult and error prone, because it’s hard for us to make sense of it. So we came up with…

Generation 2: human-readable machine instructions (aka assembly). We write code in something that’s easier for us to understand, but it’s still explicit instructions to the processor. Then we use a software tool (an assembler) to convert that to machine code. Assembly is still specific to the processor and requires knowledge of exactly what registers are available and such. And then we thought: what if we could write software in a generic way that could work on any processor? So we came up with…

Generation 3: procedural code. With this, we create a new language that is independent of any processor, which means we’re not giving direct instructions anymore. Instead, we specify a general procedure, and that generic code is passed through a new tool (a compiler) which converts the generic code to processor-specific instructions. When people say “I’m a programmer” they usually mean Gen 3 programming.

There are additional generations, but this should help provide a background as to why a language like C exists and how it relates to the actual hardware.

A statement like while (1) might not seem terribly elegant, but that’s because it probably wasn’t anticipated to be a common use case when the language was created. A normal while loop would likely be converted into something like a jnz (jump if not zero) instruction, checking the result of the argument, but any modern compiler would likely convert while(1) to a simple jmp (jump, no conditions) instruction.

I understand your fascination with the point where software and hardware meet. I did my undergrad in electrical engineering, and there was one class where we used a simulator to take transistors (the simplest eletrical “switches”), build logic gates from the transistors, then build processor components like registers and a math processor from the logic gates, then finally a simple calculator out of those components. Super cool.

As a Canadian who recently moved back to Canada from the US, I’m gonna throw my anecdotal evidence around and say this is horseshit. Even my tax person has said she’s never seen so many returning Canadians in her decades of work.

Information pollution.

Saying “AI pollution” would be like saying “microplastics pollution” – we generally refer to the thing being polluted, not the pollutant.

You might be able to use something like distrobox instead of a full VM. That would at least put it in a container that you could either run from an encrypted partition or something.

Different users would be the “simple” way you’d normally do something like this under Linux. But if your regular users have sudo access, you can’t really lock anything down.

I looked into WiFi 7 a few months ago, doesn’t seem ready for OpenWRT.

I got a Cudy WR3000 and a couple of M3000s, and they’ve been great. The manufacturer provides OpenWRT images to flash, and the coverage is great. And they have PoE access points available as well. Tried with both a wireless and wired backhaul.

0.224, less than a quarter.

Got your attention dinnit

society as we know it is at risk

They say this as if it’s a bad thing.

Oh no, our wonderful society with absurd wealth distribution and normalized pedophile leaders is at risk? Albert, fetch me my pearls that I may clutch them!