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.

The oldest millennials are in their 40s. They’ve moved on to talking shit about zoomers. It’s kind of weird seeing everything repeat itself like that as I get older.

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.

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.

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.

It’s okay, you can find alternative install media here: https://distrochooser.de/en/

Learning C: Random asterisks go

You gotta put the sticker on lest you forget it’s 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.

It’s not very good at it though, if you’ve ever used it to code. It automates and eases a lot of mundane tasks, but still requires a LOT of supervision and domain knowledge to not have it go off the rails or hallucinate code that’s either full of bugs or will never work. It’s not a “prompt and forget” thing, not by a long shot. It’s just an easier way to steal code it picked up from Stackoverflow and GitHub.

Me as a human will know to check how much data is going into a fixed size buffer somewhere and break out of the code if it exceeds it. The LLM will have no qualms about putting buffer overflow vulnerabilities all over your shit because it doesn’t care, it only wants to fulfill the prompt and get something to work.

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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.

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.

Nope, stolen from a Telegram group chat, not sure where it’s originally from.

That’s the static variable in the function sticking around and watching the madness unfold.

I remember some dude on the Internet with a jar and an MLP figurine that might be able to help you out.