You’re focusing too much on what you are supposed to do and too little on what you could be doing.

I would grab this with both hands. Max out the education, and work on side projects that don’t impact the day job. I mean, that is what the “show up sometimes” means, right? Ya gotta warm the seat but you don’t have much to do? So fill that time with things that improve your skills!

I still run a small constellation of programs (some obscure) that are required for my workflows that have neither a Linux version that is perfectly file-compatible, nor can be run reliably under WINE.

Plus, I also provide tech support for others, so being able to “mirror” actions on my own iron as I’m helping them is a massive plus. Differences between installs has helped me catch config issues on many occasions.

So unfortunately, running Windows is still a must-do for the foreseeable future. Now granted, I also have a good half-dozen workstations, which also run MacOS, OpenBSD, OpenSUSE, and various other virtualized fun shit (HaikuOS, etc.).

RUFUS is a lot simpler.

And upgrades keep all settings, including local accounts. They always have.

Build your USB installer using RUFUS.

The SELECT drop-down (the down arrow itself, not the entire button) even downloads a generic multi-version of the latest Win11.

It’s at the last step before creating the installer when RUFUS gives you a bunch of settings that you can leverage, one of which is a Microsoft Account bypass so you can create a local account.

Signing in with a Microsoft account is what they really want you to do.

And for the sake of your personal data, it’s the absolute last thing you should ever submit to.

The number of people who have lost their entire digital life thanks to losing access to their Microsoft Account (doubly so now that BitLocker auto-engages, which makes direct extraction from the drive impossible) is just too damn high.

Always, always create a local account on install. That path is still available, even through USB installer builders like RUFUS.

Windows 11 can be wrangled into something decent, but it requires an immense amount of wrangling on initial install to do so.

As an example, XP needed 8-12hrs worth of work before I was happy with the way I had it configured. Win11 needs about 32-48hrs of work and testing. Some bits - like violently bludgeoning File Explorer back into a halfway XP-like folder tree - takes deep, repeated dives into the registry to properly and permanently eviscerate things like the Library and Home (quick access).

A prior company I worked at had a compliance division whose work was about 80% Oracle. As in, their attention over preventing Oracle JRE installs in favour of Azul Java was 4× higher than ensuring anything Microsoft - or anything else under the sun, actually - was properly licensed.

The problem isn’t climate change itself, or rising temps.

The problem is the SPEED of these changes.

We are seeing in just a century what previously took hundreds of thousands of years. This imparts an immense amount of inertia that no other prior warming event has ever come close to. Even if we were to stop human CO2 production immediately, the inertia will continue to warm the planet and trigger feedback loops for the next several centuries… environmental feedback loops that will continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere even if there are no humans left.

Plus, it is not allowing the planetary biosphere to adapt in time. Prior warming events were so slow that ecosystems were able to migrate across entire continents to follow the temperatures and rainfalls that best suited them. This requires tens of thousands of years at minimum to achieve. So the very plants and ecosystems that are meant to “put the brakes” onto any change are being destroyed in real-time. in a century or so there will be no significant biosphere left to pull CO2 out of the air faster than it is going into the atmosphere.

The possibility for a full-blown Venus Scenario before 2200 becomes greater every year. Warming continues to accelerate. More and more CC events start kicking off “well ahead of schedule”. And thanks to the Parasite-Class lust for wealth locking us into the worst-case-scenario “business as usual” path, we are truly fucked.

I have always liked the idea of assembly languages being able to program so close to machine speed.

But working with assembly has always felt like trying to build a mansion with what was left over after several Category 5 hurricanes flattened an area… and with zero power tools and machinery, to boot. Just hand tools and no supplies except that which you can salvage.

Wow… doubling down on the bleeding ignorance, are we?

That’s not a good look for you, when everything you say is trivially wrong. As in, not just demonstrably wrong, but trivially wrong.

Even simple googling demonstrates that you are a complete moron.

basically none of what you say is true until ~2020 model year.

Ahem. You were saying?

OnStar had cellular modems in vehicles for the last 30 years. They were not “real time” like post-2006, when 3G connectivity started to be installed, but they did dial up the mothership to upload usage data and accept instructions like whole-vehicle immobilizations in the case of theft.

Ignorance is not a good look for you.

They exagurate,

Sorry, everything I have mentioned is happening right now. It is no longer any kind of an exaggeration.

Repairability is under direct attack from Hyundai as one of the first traditional automakers, and Tesla has been fighting repairability for a lot longer. You try and poke at most any Tesla part, and it drops into “limp home mode” until a dealership clears the problem.

DRM/Subscriptions are found from many manufacturers now, from Honda and BMW and many others.

About the only “old news” is the privacy one, with the Feds spying on always-connected cars since 2010. And connectivity has been there decades earlier via OnStar, albeit not in the form we now call “real time”.

Wow, you really are a bleedingly ignorant asshole.

The Feds have spied on connected cars for the last 15 years.

As in, real-time uploads being spied upon. Since 2010. Because that is when the tech became truly wide-spread

And cars have been recording and sending data for a long time before that via OnStar, just not in what we view as “real time”.

Pretty much nothing that you just said is true. What car can’t you change the brake pads on without going to that brands official repair shop?

Hyundai. In terms of the major/historical brands, it has started with Hyundai, and other brands are also getting in on the act.

Plus, Tesla has been doing it for years, now. A Tesla will go into “limp home mode” with almost any kind of unauthorized repair you do to it.

As for the data one, how exactly is all this data being transmitted?

Since OnStar was first released, in the late 80s, it has gone over cellular modems. It’s how anyone with OnStar in their vehicle could have it remotely disabled from the very first OnStar vehicle onward. And pretty much every vehicle manufactured after 2006 has a cell phone SIM or eSIM installed so as to provide real-time data stream to the mothership, and by 2014 this even included consumer access to the Internet via 4G LTE services.

Ignorance is how you’ve gotten egg on your face. You might want to do some fundamental research next time.

I strongly suspect that any images of him are AI generated, and this is a psi-op.

Judging from prose like Mobi Dick, it was written at about the same time, covered 10+ pages, had 342 commas and semicolons, and was a single epic run-on sentence.

Cars.

Most any vehicle made after 2006 will have one or more of these three issues:

1. Lack of repairability. Not just computerization, but auth to the point where changing your brake pads and rotors can make your vehicle refuse to move until those brakes and rotors are authorized over the Internet by the vehicle manufacturer. And the software to do so costs $1M to buy, needs a $6k/mo subscription, and can only be bought by authorized dealers, locking out independent repair shops.
2. Privacy. Almost all vehicles after 2006 and any before that with OnStar records everything the vehicle does and sends that up to the mothership to be repackaged and sold to data brokers. Then your insurance gets a copy and jacks up what you pay because you braked hard and sped slightly over the limit a few times. Modern cars will also record everything that happens inside and around the vehicle, to the point where when you buy the car you have to sign a waiver that states they have permission to record anyone doing anything inside the vehicle, up to and including having sex in the back seat.
3. DRM/subscriptions. When you buy a vehicle with all the bells and whistles, but many of those bells and whistles are shut down until you pay $$$/mo to have them turned back on. Sorry, but if the vehicle came with it, I will gleefully crack that software until I can use that feature. I paid for it when I bought the vehicle, so I have every right to use it without paying a cent extra.

The foundation of the vast majority of agricultural fertilizer is urea and DAP, and the gulf countries make about 40% of the world’s supply with Iran being the single largest exporter in the world.

Sulphur is also a critical phosphate production, and most sulphur these days comes from petrochemical refinement.

Poly tunnels can help grow small-scale crops well into the spring and fall. An earthen greenhouse can do so year round even in places where it gets to -40℃.

The problems will definitely be showing up next year. In order for there to be enough fertilizer produced by this fall time (for crops produced in the southern hemisphere) as well as next year (for the northern hemisphere), the Strait of Hormuz would have needed to have reached 100% per-war traffic by July 1st.

It has barely reached 33%.

This means that supplies for fertilizer manufacturing is now months behind schedule, and fertilizer supply for farmers is going to be hellishly expensive through next year. Many farmers may have to try to grow their crops without any fertilizer, leading to potentially severe food shortages worldwide-wide.

The time to have learned how to grow your own food - to ramp up experience over many years - was a decade ago. My wife and I started in the mid 2010s, and are only now hitting our stride with about 230m² (≈2,500ft²) of our yard under direct cultivation, and plans to rehabilitate the other 140m² (≈1,500ft²) into equally quality soil via several metric tonnes of horse manure and soil sifting to remove the copious rocks and boulders.

It takes a shitton of work to build up a good garden that requires minimal work to start up every spring. But with that original section, we just have to drop seeds directly into the soil and add straw (Ruth Stout method) once the seedlings are up to suppress weeds and hold in moisture. The spring prep work for just that section has dropped by almost 80% over the last five years.