I’m a single dude who sells custom electronics with open source software on them. I sell maybe two PCBs a month. It just about covers my hobby, I’m not even living off of it. I can’t afford commercial licenses. There has to be tiers.
In return, I’ve made every schematic, gerber file, and bill of material to my stuff freely available.
And when it’s really unusable as a desktop anymore, it can become a headless PiHole server. There’s always a use. Back in 2005 I was using an old Pentium MMX laptop with a broken screen as a Wifi access point/router. I even bought a two-way 2.4Ghz amplifier to hang off the laptop’s PCMCIA wifi card to boost it throughout the apartment.
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I’m a C/C++ dude but I heard it being called the “Karen compiler”. It doesn’t look that scary based on samples I’ve seen, but there’s way more to it I am assuming.
I learned how a kernel actually loads a program and switches between them by using timer interrupts and interrupt vectors that point to specific locations in memory to resume execution from. Not specifically Linux related, but I’m trying to learn more computer science, and it just clicked for me two weeks ago. I’ve been programming microcontrollers for ten years, but those are monolithic programs, and while I knew what interrupts were and have used them, I never understood how an OS actually runs multiple things while staying in control. Now I do. About time I understood a core concept of these machines that have been here all 42 years of my life.
It’s one of those “aha!” moments like when I realized classes and structs are just data types like any other in C++ when I was starting off programming and can be used like them. OOP became fun after that.
They’ve been doing this for decades. The Mac boot sound has been hard coded since Macs were a thing.
SGI used to do this with their Irix workstations.
It’s more like QBasic dialect, but it’s still actively maintained. It can generate binaries and everything for modern machines.
10 PRINT “FARTS” 20 GOTO 10
Thank you for your service, Marine.
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I get that. I was just saying why it might tick some people off. My idea of a good OS is one that you don’t even notice while using it. It just sits in the background doing its thing and you don’t have to think about whether you’re using KDE, Gnome, or whatever, because it never makes itself known and you just happily use your programs.
Some people just don’t like their OS being used for that purpose and want it to be just a tool that shuts up and does exactly as it’s told and no more. I can see that point of view. Our computers aren’t free billboards. It’s like when car dealers stick their own custom logo on the cars they sell to people.
From one of the comments:
Security settings, for them to have any power at all to block malware, have to be default on and unable to be bypassed by the end user (because the end user will bypass them if they get in the way of whatever task/job they have to do right now).
Emphasis mine.
Are people that cucked now that they’re like “yes, please daddy, lock me out of my own machine”?
I’ve set Raspberry Pis to auto-reboot themselves at night if they are being used for headless network services that need to be available 24/7, just to clear out memory leaks or other things that may have gotten locked up. Not sure if that’s duct tape or just a standard practice. They aren’t the most stable things sometimes. They’re known for power supply and SD card issues.
Yes but millions were also providing that data for free until Reddit decided it was all theirs to control and monetize. Don’t blame the users.
They sure love them some Java. It’d be nice if they focused more on C/C++/Rust, you know, actual bare metal system languages that make you think about memory management.
Edit: I used to have a roommate who was studying compsci and they were making him program a PIC18F microcontroller on a development board in assembly. It was kinda fun because while he wasn’t using it, I’d have fun with it just programming normal C and making all the blinkenlights and gizmo peripherals on his board do shit, while he was struggling to even read a sensor.
I don’t care what you do, you do you. I just like actually knowing things when I need to know them, and have the capacity to solve problems myself without being dependent on tech for everything. It’s like being able to figure out how to change your own engine oil vs. paying somebody to do it for you.
Did they come up with all concepts themselves? Do they exclusively code in assembly? Wire their machines by hand? Operate the switches manually? Push the button off the Morse machine themselves?
We read books. We went to classes. We got our hands dirty and failed, again and again and again until it clicked and we got it right. That’s the part that’s hard. LLMs are a tool. Not a replacement for a good programmer who understands what they are doing. Use them to help you save time with tasks you are already familiar with. Don’t use them as a college professor. Because eventually it’s going to teach you wrong, that’s how they work. And without knowing some basic concepts about the subject you’re inquiring about, you’re not going to catch it when it does go wrong.
I’m 42 by the way, and I still learn new things every day.
It is far more efficient to ask specific questions instead of reading the whole documentation.
I’m going to bring up an excerpt of your previous comment, because this is an example I want to make. Say there is something in that datasheet (I’m completely making this up as an example) about needing a certain value resistor to set the charging current, and ChatGPT fails to mention this and simply tells you that the battery takes the voltage directly from the circuit without it? Then you have a fire on your hands, because you decided to NOT to read the datasheet and skip crucial info. If you keep taking AI generated text at face value, it’s going to bite you in the ass one day.
Electronics is my main hobby, so you can bet I’m poring over datasheets all day too, and little gotchas like that are all over the place. You simply cannot trust them with these things the way you can trust a good old book or someone that’s been doing it for a long time.
I really do not understand how this community is so toxic regarding this.
I’m guessing it’s because you’re surrounded by people who DID spend the extra effort to learn something on their own without having their hand held, and now just see people trying to take the easy way out.
You’re not unique. We were all in your position once.
You don’t learn as well when you have someone/something else do the thinking for you. It’s nice to NOT have to keep going back to an LLM for answers.
It kinda does matter if you want updated drivers and packages and stuff. I use Debian because I love its bare bones, generic approach and I’m used to it, but I’d never recommend it for anyone playing the latest games unless they like cruising five years in the past.