Blemgo

Honestly, due to how it's a paid app, I don't see any viable mass adoption. Possibly great for a professional/corporate setting, but considering that Signal is free and some people already have a hard time leaving WhatsApp, it'd be hard to convince anyone to pay for a messaging app.

I disagree. I'm running Bazzite, which is based on the immutable variant of fedora, and it runs like a charm, even without much knowledge. Most drivers are prepackaged, so stuff like WiFi aren't much of a hassle anymore and I haven't had any issues with Flatpak. It basically eliminates all fiddling at the cost of customizing your OS as much as other distros. Honestly, SteamOS did show that immutable distros are the de facto future for new users. So far I know of Bazzite and Fedora's immutable distros variant, but there might be more.

Honestly, as weird as this movie and its premise was, it's a very interesting and recommendable watch.

"working in the LLM server farms makes you wish for a nuclear winter."

I mean, that's the empiric method. Often theories are easier proven by showing the impossibility of how the inverse of a theory is true, because it is easier to prove a theory via failure to disprove it than to directly prove it. Thus disproving (or failing to disprove) free will is most likely easier than directly proving free will.

I do get that one wants to be careful when it comes to viruses, but just outright not believing others without doing your own research is just as harmful as blindly believing in something. If you don't have precautions against websites running malicious code (e.g. ublock origin), you're already treading on dangerous ground regardless. Doubly so if you don't make snapshots.

If you really want to be paranoid you can also click the link inside a USB image, or a sandbox. I would however advise doing research on winehq.org if you are running Linux, since it's generally a good resource for running Windows apps.

May I ask what made you ditch your IT career?

I'm in an IT career as well (admin work), relatively a newcomer (finished my apprenticeship 1-2 years ago), but honestly I've already considering whether this is right for me. Don't get me wrong, I love the work itself, just knowing that so many companies underfunding their IT department and thus causing more stress for it makes me question whether this is something I want to subject myself to.

I'm not sure I really agree with the reasoning on why HL:Ep3 was never developed. Sure, Valve game usually revolves around some game-changing mechanics, but at the same time, Episode 3 was more than just a game, but a sendoff of a big franchise, at least for a time, and a promise to their fans: that 3 episodes are made.

I think that this was one of the signs of the cracks forming in the game developing sector of Valve. It's been well known that the dev team within Valve has slowly developed to a more toxic environment where veterans vetoed a lof of stuff from newer employees, leading to stagnation and developers getting silently shunned for working on projects like TF2 because it wasn't considered "profitable", when there still was, and is, a sizeable community revolving it.

I would have said playing it safe and making a sort of "best of" of popular mechanics used in the previous games would've been the best choice, because that would be the best possible sendoff for the series of episodes. After all, at that point people mainly wanted a conclusion to the story arc, a moment of "this was the HL2 era, thank you for playing", rather than something completely new.

Ah, seems to be right, my bad.

Also, to correct myself a bit more: it was Europe's biggest datacenter.

If memory serves right, one of Germany's datacenters went up in flames a few years ago because they had wooden flooring and no adequate fire suppression systems.

EDIT: it was in France, and Europe's biggest datacenter.

While I agree that dd can be easily used, it still is a dumb command (as in its only purpose is to write and nothing else), which can result in some issues regarding validating the integrity of the installation, at least for a beginner.

Furthermore, it can be disastrous if you don't pay attention to what you type in, as it will happily overwrite anything you type in.

Also, I don't think that dd alone should be used as a backup, as it might result in inconsistent backups. The best simple backup system, no matter whether you are a beginner or an expert, are snapshots, and maybe using dd to backup those to an external drive to be sure.