It’s never going to happen.

This seems both awesome and dangerous. The two analogies that come to mind are home canning and home brewing. They’re both generally safe and easy. But every so often someone gives their family botulism.

Then Diogenes comes rolling through in an RV.

While the priors seemed to suggest it could float, the update step showed that was an outlier.

I’ll show myself the door.

Exactly, the same way I handle all my credentials.

My career path has been pretty straightforward. I went to a state science and engineering university with a starting major in physics but switched to electrical engineering after two years. While there I had a few student jobs at the various campus labs, helping with research projects and doing some simple programming.

After I graduated I got a job at a small nearby observatory where several friends worked. I started by operating and maintaining the telescopes then did some software work to expand our capabilities.

Once my partner graduated, I found a job in the nearby city at a small engineering firm that mostly did subcontracted work for the big defense companies. I split my time there between electrical engineering and embedded software development.

After several years there, I realized that there was no real path forward due to living in one of the big square states so I started looking and found a job with an established Bay Area company through a friend. Since then I’ve worked at a few different companies, from tiny startups to the FAANGS. I’ve generally moved up every couple years and now manage a large team at a mid sized startup. Like most engineers, I’ll probably never be really rich, but always comfortably employed.

There are three things that really helped my career.

1. College - I know, it’s expensive and such. But even so, it is so worth it. Sure if you get a degree in underwater basket weaving at an expensive private university or it’s probably a financial waste, but STEM degrees are an excellent investment. It’s not just the paper, but the experience, contacts and friends that come from a traditional on-campus in-person university.

2. Friends - The majority of my jobs, and in particular the ones I’ve needed and enjoyed the most came from friends and colleagues. Make those connections, be a good friend, and good things will happen.

3. Hobby programming - I started writing code in elementary school in BASIC. Later in college I would experiment with small programs to scratch an itch, learning C++ and Python from books on my own. Those experiences were vital in my ability to learn how to tackle new problems and learn how to execute when I had to.

Bonus point 4) Reading “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. Seriously, learn to plan and execute. Don’t be a flakey “ideas person”, get shit done.

And… they’re basically all correct. Linux does run on all sort of machines, even really ancient ones. It has a solid command line environment, or rather lots of them. And it’s astounding powerful. Windows does still blue screen, is currently the best place for gaming, and wow is MS fucking you with Win11. Macs can have a cool setup, are really simplified for most users and expensive.

And not just any god, but the right god and worship in the right way? People were literally killing each other over whether altars should have rails around them or not and how a church’s middle management should be organized.

By almost every measure, the world is better than it has ever been. Violence, poverty, starvation are all at or near record lows worldwide. Average lifespans are way up. We are just way, way more aware of what is going on in the world, and bad news drives more clicks than good news.

There are some cracks, no doubt. For example climate change is showing its ugly head, inequality is rising in the US and some other developed countries, and lifespans are taking a slight dip in parts of the US. But, compared to almost anywhere at any time during history, this is a golden age.

I’m one of them. For a lot of reasons my partner and I want to move, but we have a 3% mortgage. Even though we have a large amount of equity, we still can’t afford to buy now. I’m looking a getting a loan from my parents, which is ridiculous considering our situation but almost 8% interest rates mean our payment would just about double from what we have now.

I’ve only worked on a few embedded systems where C++ was even an option, but they allowed 2, 4, 5, and 7. Though, for the most part most classes were simple interfaces to some sort of SPI/I2C/CAN/EtherCAT device, most of which were singletons.

Take a look at what even the proposer is saying wouldn’t be allowed in:

 (1) new and delete.  There's no way to pass GFP_* flags in.

 (2) Constructors and destructors.  Nests of implicit code makes the code less
     obvious, and the replacement of static initialisation with constructor
     calls would make the code size larger.

 (3) Exceptions and RTTI.  RTTI would bulk the kernel up too much and
     exception handling is limited without it, and since destructors are not
     allowed, you still have to manually clean up after an error.

 (4) Operator overloading (except in special cases).

 (5) Function overloading (except in special inline cases).

 (6) STL (though some type trait bits are needed to replace __builtins that
     don't exist in g++).

 (7) 'class', 'private', 'namespace'.

 (8) 'virtual'.  Don't want virtual base classes, though virtual function
     tables might make operations tables more efficient.

C++ without class, constructors, destructors, most overloading and the STL? Wow.

According to the github analysis, the kernel repository is:

• C 98.3%
• Assembly 0.7%
• Shell 0.4%
• Makefile 0.2%
• Python 0.2%
• Perl 0.1%
• Other 0.1%

So yeah, its basically all C, plus a tiny bit of assembly for very low level bootstrapping and some helper scripts.

There is no C++ allowed in the Linux kernel and Linus has gone on several major rants about how terrible a language it is.

There was an interesting physics paper recently that suggested that time travel was possible, but you wouldn’t be able to travel to before when the machine was built. Of course, it also would require an impossibly huge amount on energy, but that’s a problem for the engineers.

Much like all of life. Expectations cause suffering.

Minidisc was super cool. I never had one, but some of my college friends did and it just seemed so much better than a Discman.

That was the path I took, but I remember a few college friends and several professors had a Zip drive, as did many of the computers in the lab. By the time I had the money and the need for something like that, 1Gb flash drives were cheaper.

That’s going to be a function of your SD card reader and the quality of the card itself. If you’re really concerned, copy it to your HDD, then read again and verify. And then when writing, do a verify step as well.

Uh, you very much can take an image of an SD card, the same as with any other block device.