I think it depends a lot on context.

Wiping the dust off an old, low-spec ex-office PC, getting it barely functional, throwing a couple of RGB lights in it and trying to pass it off as a competent gaming rig for a high price would be completely unethical, I agree. But salvaging an old PC, actually refurbishing it into something useful for light day-to-day use, and selling it as such with a small markup to cover parts and labour seems completely fine to me.

You and I may have the skills needed to take a worn-out old PC and breathe new life into it easily, but not everyone who’d be happy with a modest secondhand system can do that.

As it happens, until just a few years ago I was running my high-end games on what started as a secondhand commodity PC with an i5-3470, without complaint.

Thank goodness it’s not just me! When I first saw this post yesterday, there were no comments and it was already quite downvoted. I wached the first 1/4 or so and didn’t find anything objectionable; actually it seems quite good. I started checking to see if the guy had recently fiddled kids or spoken out in support of ethnic cleansing or something. The downvotes don’t make sense to me either.

Seriously, the best option is whatever matches the brightness of your screen to its surroundings. I read about this decades ago and it eliminated screen fatigue for me.

If switching to dark mode works for you, great. When I worked on a PC in a well-lit office all day, I would open a program with a white background, hold up a blank white piece of paper next to the screen, and adjust the screen brightness until it looked about the same as the paper. I did this once or twice a week because I was near a set of picture windows and I was affected by weather and the seasons, but in a room with more artificial light it would be “set and forget”.

It seemed very dim at first, and several of my coworkers commented on it. It took a few days of resisting the urge to turn the brightness back up, but I got used to it and never went back.

My PC at home is currently set up in a partially shaded corner of a well-lit room, so I put a dim little light bar behind the screen to make the wall match the brightness of the screen and the rest of my desk/room.

A couple of other commenters have given excellent answers already.

But on the topic in general I think that the more you learn about the history of computing hardware and programming, the more you realise that each successive layer added between the relays/tubes/transistors and the programmer was mostly just to reduce boilerplate coding overhead. The microcode in integrated CPUs took care of routing your inputs and outputs to where they need to be, and triggering the various arithmetic operations as desired. Assemblers calculated addresses and relative jumps for you so you could use human-readable labels and worry less that a random edit to your code would break something because it was moved.

More complex low-level languages took care of the little dances that needed to be performed in order to do more involved operations with the limited number of CPU registers available, such as advanced conditional branching and maintaining the illusion of variables. Higher-level languages freed the programmer from having to keep such careful tabs on their own memory usage, and helped to improve maintainability by managing abstract data and code structures.

But ignoring the massive improvements in storage capacity and execution speed, today’s programming environments don’t really do anything that couldn’t have been implemented with those ancient systems, given enough effort and patience. It’s all still just moving numbers around and basic arithmetic and logic. But a whole lot of it, really, really fast.

The power of modern programming environments lies in how they allow us to properly implement and maintain a staggering amount of complex minutiae with relative ease. Such ease, in fact, that sometimes we even forget that the minutiae are there at all.

“rd” and “rmdir” only work on empty directories in MS-DOS (and I assume, by extension, in Windows shell). “deltree” is for nuking a complete tree including files, as the name suggests.

JS has saved me many hours of mind-numbing, error-prone manual keyboard work by giving me a way to hack together a simple bit of automation as a web page.

Even when a computer has been ham-fistedly locked-down by an overzealous IT department, I can almost always still access a text editor and a browser that will load local HTML files.

Also over on itch for pay-what-you-want, with extras.

When you use any piece of Internet-enabled software, any and all data that passes through it can theoretically be copied and siphoned off back to the authors of the software.

Should they do it? No. Can they do it? Yes.

Does Mozilla do it? They say they don’t, and I’m inclined to trust them. Do other major browsers do it? Absolutely.

As regards your physical location, geoIP databases can get pretty close these days.

Sure. Almost 40 years ago I started learning to program as a kid, and the only reason I knew the word “syntax” at all was because the default error message in my computer’s BASIC interpreter was “SYNTAX ERROR”. I didn’t learn what it actually meant until many years later, in English class.

I taught myself with the excellent Usborne books, which are now all downloadable for free from their website. You won’t be able to use them as-is (unless you get your kids to use an emulator for an old 8-bit home computer), but I’m sure you can still get some useful ideas, and maybe even copy small sections here and there.

As others have mentioned, my school also taught us a little LOGO, which was a bit of fun for me but rather simple. I remember that most of my classmates enjoyed it, though.

How many techie types have had someone come to them and say something like “Hey, you know tech thing XYZ? You know how it sucks? Well I’ve got a great idea: make a BETTER one! So what do you say? You whip it up in an afternoon, I’ll handle marketing, and we’ll be rich!”

Like they really thought that the issue is just that no-one can see the flaws. They thought that the fix is super easy and they’re just the first person clever enough to see it.

I’m guessing it’s because “SyncThing” is a proper noun.

Not to take away from your very good point, but I think the word you might be looking for is “eqivalence”.

Some people can hold their length, but only in private.

I scored 12/28 on https://jsdate.wtf/ and all I got was this lousy text to share on social media.

the boss can detect headphones going on your head and music starting from 50 feet away and instantly be behind you with a burning question that doesn’t make any sense.

I’m sure you realize that the question doesn’t make any sense because they had to think of it on the spot, just to prove that you can’t wear headphones in the office due to all the important ambient office talk you need to be a part of.

One of my best, most competent bosses once said to the team “I don’t understand how you guys can work while listening to music, but as long as your output stays high, I’m not going to interfere.”

Reading the FAQs, the whole situation smacks of changing for the sake of change. It seems like some important functionality of the old system isn’t available in the new system, but they’re pushing it through regardless. Combined with this downplaying of Linux support, perhaps some political representatives with low technical skills have been talking to some lobbyists. And unless the Finnish school system has bought into Chromebooks in a big way, they seem unusually eager to support ChromeOS.

I wonder if the whole Secure Boot/Microsoft shim key issue is a part of this.

How about that worst of both worlds, the tutorial where the author starts out writing as if their audience only barely knows what a computer is, gets fed up partway through, and vomits out the rest in a more obtuse and less complete form than they would’ve otherwise?

1. Turn on your computer. Make sure you turn on the “PC” (the big box part) as well as the “monitor” (TV-like part).

2. Once your computer is ready and you can see the desktop, open your web browser. This might be called “Chrome”, “Safari”, “Edge”, or something else. It’s the same program you open to use “the Google”.

3. In the little bar near the top of the window where you can write things, type “https://www.someboguswebsite.corn/download/getbogus.html” and press the Enter key.

4. Download the software and unarchive it to a new directory in your borklaving software with the appropriate naming convention.

5. Edit the init file to match your frooping setup.

6. If you’re using Fnerp then you might need to switch off autoglomping. Other suites need other settings.

7. Use the thing. You know, the thing that makes the stuff work right. Whatever.

Congratulations! You’re ready to go!

This is another good point. I’d try turning off Fast Startup first, and if that alone doesn’t clear the issue, try this (leaving Fast Startup off).

Make sure that Windows Fast Startup is turned off. I don’t know if that’s specifically the problem here, but in my experience quite a few “everything’s fine, it should be working!” boot issues have been resolved by booting into Windows, turning off Fast Startup, and then doing a full shut down before going back to Linux, especially on laptops.

I was so triggered by the conversion from char-to-int-to-string-to-packedint that I had to write a bitwise version that just does char-to-packedint (and back again), with bitwise operators.

https://pastebin.com/V2An9Xva

As others have pointed out, there are probably better options for doing this today in most real-life situations, but it might make sense on old low-spec systems if not for all the intermediate conversion steps, which is why I wrote this.