That sounds... a bit paranoid? At least on Linux (Gnome), if I click to "safely remove drive" it actually powers off the drive and stops external mechanical drives from spinning. No useful syncing is going to happen anyway once a hard drive no longer spins. A modern OS should definitely be reliable enough that it can be trusted to properly unmount a drive.

> For the laptops that I actually carry around and plug and unplug things to etc, normal amount of time between reboots for me is somewhere between every 1 and 3 days. Cold boot is plenty fast anyway, so shutting it down after a day of work or when ejecting an external HDD or SSD doesn’t really cost me any noticeable amount of time.

I personally don't reboot my laptop that often, but it's not because of a boot taking too much time. It's because I like to keep state: open applications, open files, terminal emulator sessions, windows on particular virtual desktops, etc.

Some of those chipsets were fine and others were less reliable or compatible. The quality of the drivers for each chipset may also have mattered.

How long are the inputs that you get problems with?

Of course compression being now computationally cheap also helps.

This is a bit of a nitpick and not even relevant to the topic, but that's not the reason cryptographic hashes are (assumed to be) one-way functions. You could in principle have a function f: X -> Y that's not invertible but for which the set of every x that give a particular y could be tractably computed given y. In that case f would not be a one-way function in the computational sense.

Cryptographic hashes are practically treated as one-way functions because the inverse computation would take an intractable amount of time.

Probably beweep; lament, weep over.

> pinunge(?)

This is explained later on the page. "Where a modern writer would say he underwent torture, a 1200-era writer must say that he suffered pinunge instead."

I also couldn't understand this one although the word "pining" did come to mind, apparently not totally off, as that has apparently come from the same ancestor. Didn't help me figure out the intended meaning, though.

> No scar(?) is never hit(?) forgotten, not uuhiles(?) is libbe(?).

I guessed this meant something along the lines of "[?] shall I never [?] forget, not while I live". I didn't figure out that "uu" is actually "w" until that was explained, so it escaped me that "uuhiles" is "while[s]", though.

Railroad Tycoon is a strategy game with competition whereas Transport Fever is pretty much a building and optimization sandbox. Even Transport Tycoon falls more in the latter category, IMO, despite superficially having competition even in single player. (I haven't played OpenTTD in a long time so I don't know if the AIs are nowadays competent enough to make the competition interesting.)

In RRT, with cut-throat competition enabled your company can even be opportunistically bought by the competition if you aren't careful. You can also be driven out of cities by rate wars. Some of the other strategy aspects feel perhaps a bit artificial -- you can't cross the other companies' track, for example, so you can effectively cordon off areas from competition. Nevertheless, those competitive strategy aspects add a significant edge to the game.

I've also played a lot of Transport Fever. The competitive aspect, even if against the old and cheating AI, is probably one of the reasons I still end up returning to the old Railroad Tycoon now and then, though.

Some of the technical limitations of the original are somewhat frustrating, though, so I find the reverse engineering effort really interesting.

I'm sure that still looks unprofessional to some people, just like any jargon that isn't corporatese does.

It doesn't mean the diets of humans are biologically supposed to consist of huge amounts of meat.

Most apex predators are of course obligate carnivores. But humans are probably near the top because the use of weapons and tools makes us highly dangerous, so most land animals are wary of humans. Even many predators don't prey on humans for food.

(Although some large land predators do, mostly when they're desperate for food.)

Whether that was a Windows compatibility issue or potentially some display driver thing, I'm not sure. (90's Windows games may have used some DirectDraw features that just don't get that much attention nowadays, which I think may have been the issue, but my memory's a bit spotty.)

Just about every commercial software license says the software is licensed, not sold.

Of course the practical difference is in whether you can trust you'll be able to keep using the product indefinitely or have to rely on the publisher's goodwill.

(Also, whether the idea that a software product is only licensed and not sold is legally valid of course depends on the jurisdiction and legal interpretation. IIRC back in the day some people tried to argue that you couldn't resell a game or other piece of software you bought on physical media because the software was only licensed to you, not sold. That argument didn't necessarily fly.)

The difference with the 386, I think, is that AFAIK the second-sourced 8086 and 286 CPUs from non-Intel manufacturers still made use of licensed Intel designs. The 386 (and later) had to be reverse engineered again and AMD designed their own implementation. That also meant AMD was a bit late to the game (the Am386 came out in 1991 while the 80386 had already been released in 1985) but, on the other hand, they were able to achieve better performance.

There are cases where a password manager may not solve the problem, though. It doesn't help if I forget my disk encryption or work AD password and I need to be able to login before I can get to the password manager in the first place. Enterprise IT is also where you find some of those frustrating password policies, such as long and complex passwords with mandated changes every month or two, and where you usually can't choose your management tools.

Of course those particular passwords usually get typed so often that remembering them isn't much of a problem. And password managers work well for pretty much all secrets that aren't needed that often.

I suppose in some schools computer science programmes might be fairly distinct from engineering ones. However, it seems that in lots of places a bachelor's in computer science is rather an generalist degree that covers lots of (mostly software) tech topics and some CS theory.

I'd still have trouble calling myself a software engineer, though, since I don't technically have an engineering degree, even though in lots of places my job might be described as such.

I also don't know a single programmer/developer whose job is distinct from field 2.

It sounds like leetcode problems require either memorization of a significant number of algorithm design patterns or seriously sharp algorithmic problem solving skills.

I'd be more worried about document interoperability between government agencies and other organizations such as companies that do work for the government. The government could of course mandate contractors to use an open source office suite which would extend the need for training to those companies.

Also, I've seen some orgs make heavy use of Office formats in terms of e.g. surprisingly elaborate formatting, document history and comments, and although I haven't tried to use those in LibreOffice, I wouldn't be sure it supports all of those in the same extent some people have learned to use them in Office.

My work laptop with a high(ish)-end AMD laptop CPU and reasonable hardware quality drains the battery in a couple of hours. It also doesn't feel any faster than my personal three-year-old more lightweight (also AMD, same brand) laptop. In some cases the private device is faster despite its lower specs. Its battery would also easily last 5 times longer than the work one, probably, if I used it on the road.

(Incidentally, the poor battery life isn't much of a practical concern with the work device either because I need to use it at the desk 98% of the time anyway. But I can certainly see how crappy software and configurations can make using those devices a pain.)

> Give me something solid that will last 5 -6 years with a serviceable (I don’t care if it’s glued or torx’ed or whatever in, just as long as it’s replaceable) battery, and I don’t care if the RAM and SSD is soldered to the chipset.

I'm okay with that, even if I'd personally prefer the serviceability. But I'm honestly not okay with the idea that it's fine to just toss a laptop after two years. I want people who do that to get their own planet.

Also, an 8 GB RAM upgrade makes little sense nowadays but a 16 -> 48 GB or 32 -> 64 GB or 32 -> 96 GB upgrade can actually make an otherwise reasonable device better if the amount of RAM becomes a bottleneck.