Hilariously VLC will happily skip the “unskippable” ads on DVDs

I honestly love the new nested replies in email chains they added to the inbox view a few months ago. It makes a messy inbox so much less messy looking

You could always go the used/refurbished route to not directly give the chocolate factory money

A big part of it comes from the security model and Linux historically being a multi-user environment. root owns the root directly / which is where all of the system files live. A normal user just has access to their own home directory /home/username and read-only access to things the normal user needs like the /bin where programs are stored (hence /bin/bash in lots of bash scripts, it tells the script what program to run the script from)

Because of this model, a normal user can only mess up their own files, while root can mess up everyone’s files and of course make the system non-bootablem. But also you can have user Bob signed in and doing stuff but unable to access user Alice’s files, and user Alice can be doing stuff and even running the same programs that user Bob is running (since it’s read only there’s no conflict) and then the administrator can log in as root to install something because they got a ticket to install suchandsuch for soandso.

Back to your point with sudo, sudo is Super User Do, so you are running a single command as root. By running it as root you can potentially be messing up with Alice and Bob might be doing, and most importantly whatever you are running with sudo can potentially affect any file on the computer. So if you run the classic rm -rf / it will delete every file that the user has write access to, so if bob runs it it’ll delete all of /home/bob/ but Alice will be unaffected, and the admin can still log in as root to do stuff. But if you run it as root you’ll quickly find the server unable to boot and both Alice and Bob will be very upset that they can’t access the server or their files

If you host a website you’ll generally take advantage of this by giving the www folder read-only access so that web users can only see webpages and can’t start reading random system files, or for server software you can create a dedicated user to run that server software as, so if someone were to somehow exploit a vulnerability and gain access to that server user they can only mess up the software and no system files

I got one for work. It literally just pastes into ChatGPT

I have memories of some random afternoons at the consulting firm my mom worked at, where everyone’s just poking at spreadsheets. I can’t imagine how cool the memory of going into the server farm and doing some hardware work there would be

Folder structures are a bizarre thing for many people

When learning about this I learned that in the analog days folks would actually put physical folders inside of physical folders and it both makes tons of sense and is mind blowing at the same time. -Late Millennial born to IT parents

With the amount of password resets I have to do at work, I can’t say I’m shocked

qbittorrent search makes it stupid easy too

There’s actually a real world example of this. Some cats that are disected in schools are euthanized cats from shelters, because the alternative is cat farms that breed cats just to be killed and disected

Contextual ads can be simple images/html without 20 thousand scripts buried in

The short answer is that new Bluetooth codecs have made the latebcy pretty much unnoticeable

I tossed mint on a PC after about 8 years of not using mint at all and I’ve been extremely impressed at how stable and friendly it is. It works exactly how you expect it to and Cinnamon has the best default workspace implementation of any DE I’ve used

get hyped for COSMIC

Honestly I’m just excited for a non-gnome DE with an actual company backing it. I can’t wrap my head around gnome’s expectations for how you use it, so the fact that it’s the default on every enterprise-backed Linux project is annoying as heck

Huh! Thank you very much for the detailed answer that’s extremely interesting!

Checking nmap’s documentation it looks like it’s perfectly possible to detect open udp ports

You should NOT have a WG tunnel from the home network to the VPS with fully unrestricted access to everything.

This is what I came here to make sure was said. Use your firewall to severely restrict access from your public endpoint. Your wiregaurd tunnel is effectively a DMZ so firewall it off accordingly

The really nice thing about tailscale for accessing your hosted services is absolutely nothing can connect without authentication via a professionally hosted standard authentication, and there’s no public ports for script kiddies to scan for, spot and start hammering on. There’s thousands of bots that do nothing but scan the internet for hosted services and then try to compromise them, so not even showing up on those scans is a good thing.

For example, I have tailscale on my Minecraft server and connect to it via tailscale when away from home. If a buddy wants to join I just send a link sharing the machine to them and they can install tailscale and connect to it normally. If for some reason buddy needs to be cut off, I can just stop sharing to that account on Tailscale and they can no longer access the machine.

The biggest challenge of tailscale is also it’s biggest benefit. Nothing can connect without connecting through the tailscale client, so if my buddy can’t/won’t install tailscale they can’t join my Minecraft server

My dad switched for vista, I switched for 10 for a while. Who knows, maybe I’ll switch for 11 too

No problem! I’m just an information sponge and I’ve lucked out with really good mentors so far in my career to learn from