As someone who works with 100Gbps networking:

• why the heck do these routers run Lua of all things???

:w !sudo tee %

Warning: does not work for neovim

This probably sounds pedantic but based on this the issue isn't that the software is Russian. It's that the software is under the regulation of an authoritarian government (which is Russia)

It's a royal "we".

Stick to a small instance with a small witchy vibe. You can get by by looking at local + subbing to only topics that you're interested in.

Personally I find my current instance + some of the literature instances (literature.cafe) very comfy. I blocked out 196, but that was only because it was big enough that it was drowning out all other discussions.Then I join in on some niche lemmy.world tech topics from time to time.

Do not get a Thinkpad if you're using it for graphic design. The screen color calibration is terrible (even when compared to low end devices)

Last I checked I think some of the Dell laptops have a decent screen (XPS, latitude lines). But they tend to be more on the pricer side.

8gb RAM and 256 gb storage is perfectly fine for a pro-ish machine in 2023. What's not fine is the price point they are offering it (but if idiots still buy that, that's on them and not apple). I've been using a 8gb ram 256 gb storage Thinkpad for lecturing, small code demos, and light video editing (e.g. zoom recordings) this past year, it works perfectly fine. But as soon as I have to run my own research code, back to the 2022 Xeon I go.

Is it Apple's fault people treat browser tabs as a bookmarking mechanism? No. Is it unethical for Apple to say that their 8GB model fits this weirdly common use case? Definitely.

Reminds me of FFXI, where the devs considered Alt-Tabbing on PC cheating thus made it deliberately crash to desktop.

I'm in academia and I can report that still nobody uses those.

For your own archiving, just use Zotero.

For writing papers, use bibtex.

All those citing websites are just scams for high school/undergrad students trying to find their footing. There is no reason they should exist.

The problem is that hardware has come a long way and is now much harder to understand.

Back in the old days you had consoles with custom MIPS processors, usually augmented with special vector ops and that was it. No out-of-order memory access, no DMA management, no GPU offloading etc.

These days, you have all of that on x86 plus branch predictors, complex cache architecture with various on-chip interconnects, etc... It's gotten so bad that most CS undergrad degrees only teach a simplified subset of actual computer architecture. How many people actually write optimized inline assembly these days? You need to be a crazy hacker to pull off what game devs in the 80-90s used to do. And crazy hackers aren't in the game industry anymore, they get paid way better working on high performance simulation software/networking/embedded programming.

Are there still old fashioned hackers that make games? Yes, but you'll want to look into the modding scene. People have been modifying the Java bytecode /MS cli for ages for compiled functions. A lot of which is extremely technically impressive (i.e. splicing a function in realtime). It's just that none of these devs who can do this wants to do this for a living with AAA titles. Instead, they're doing it as a hobby with modding instead.

Sounds like a job for crowdsec. Basically fail2ban on steroids. They already have a ban scenario for attempts to exploit web application CVEs. While the default ssh scenario does not ban specific usernames, I'm pretty sure writing a custom one would be trivial (writing a custom parser+scenario for ghost cvs from no knowledge to fully deployed took me just one afternoon)

Another thing I like about crowdsec is the crowd sourced ban IPs. It's super nice you can preemptively ban IPs that are port-scanning/probing other people's servers.

It's also MIT licensed and uses less ram than fail2ban.

Of course I don't carry 5 external drives with me all the time, that would be ridiculous.

I carry the whole HBA.