You are exactly right. It’s going to require more work. You are going to have to run your own network cables through your house and use commercial hardwired IP cameras and learn to program them and also set up a local DVR to record the footage. You’ll basically have to build what a retail store uses. You’re not going to find what you’re looking for in residential garbage tech. Stick to commerical equipment, because commerical IT is usually not too fond of installing crap that arbitrarily phones home and tend to run way more locked down networks than what you find in a typical home.

The zoomers and gen-alpha aren’t doing much better. Just ask the average teen what a filesystem is and how to find a file without it being organized in some sort of media gallery app.

As a millennial, I often feel like I’m surrounded by tech illiterates on both the upper AND lower sides of my age bracket.

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C++ because I use it for embedded systems, interfaces with and can easily use C code (opening up the ability to use 40+ years of libraries and already written code), and I’m 43 years old and don’t feel like learning an entirely new programming paradigm (I like OOP it makes the most sense to me).

I like being able to drill down and manage all my own resources like memory, etc. when I need to as well. I’ll use raw pointers with higher level abstractions all day depending on what’s convenient.

std::vector<std::vector<bool>> is how I stored the representation of a play field for a Tetris game I made once.

Started messing around with it some time in 2003, on Mandrake Linux when I was 21 years old. Experimented and ran servers with various distros in the years since but it didn’t become my daily driver until about 2014-15, with Debian.

“American Spring” hahaha that’s a good one. We’re going to continue to collectively sit on our asses riding the wave of fascism right into hell while eating Wendy’s and playing Xbox.

KDE since 2002. KDE 4 lyfe.

Option three: YOLO it and be the first to come up with a working config for it after ripping your hair out for weeks.

And then never tell the rest of the Internet…

Jokes never translate well. Even between somewhat-related languages, like western European ones. Best to just not.

Imagine your oven or clothes iron turning itself on while you’re not home. Why TF people just accept their computers doing this is beyond me. Either it’s a boiling frog situation, or people simply don’t remember the times us users had complete control over our devices and think things were always this way.

As an 80s/90s kid, I can tell you they most definitely were not.

Yes. That’s a given. As long as it’s in the back end, there isn’t a problem. My concern is if someone out there still isn’t checking it at all. There must be some inept devs out there if SQL injection attacks on the web are still a thing. That’s the kind of thing you’d hear about way back in 2004. Hell I know to defend against it and I don’t even do web development.

I wanna meet the web dev who’s still not sanitizing inputs in 2025.

Open source the planet.

When it decides to follow the design pattern of some teen in their bedroom making an RPG with 10,000 nested if/else statements.

I don’t want to know what installing Windows looks like.

I’m pretty sure it involves slimy tentacles reaching into all your private areas/data.

Yeah that sounds like a typical BMW engine layout.

If there’s only one physical ethernet port, I’m not sure why there are two wired connections. You try deleting the inactive one? Could have been a bug in an update script that hosed it.

Lemme tell you something, DO NOT learn BASIC as your first language. As a hobbyist, I avoided C/C++ for 25 years because I just didn’t get pointers and memory manipulation, and messed around with other languages like JS and PHP instead (also BASIC’s GOTO and GOSUB kinda ruined me as a programmer for a few years). But once it finally clicked a couple years ago, I now want to write EVERYTHING in C/C++.

I think plain C at least should be everybody’s first language. It literally reprograms your brain to think exactly like how a computer internally functions. I never got that with other languages, because they were so far removed from the actual machine.

Edit: also, after learning some of it, it’s pretty neat when you do stuff like look at parts of the Linux kernel source code and think “wow, I know what’s actually happening here now!”.

Linux and Windows are, I think, too different conceptually

That is correct. Linux is a UNIX variant/clone, one of many. UNIX isn’t just an OS, it’s an entire concept on how to build and organize an OS. People keep wanting it to be Windows, but it will never be Windows. I wish it could just stand on its own as a flexible, open, UNIX-like system with its own strengths, not just be a drop-in replacement for Windows on the desktop. Let’s make the UNIX way of doing things the normal, everyday way of doing things.