Oh, I’ve got no complaints about the article or even its title. Few people learn Perl or Raku these days so it would be surprising for most people.

I thought it was interesting myself - Perl’s my go-to scripting language but I never used Raku. I might consider it next time I have a non-trivial scripting project.

I’m not sure why that’s surprising. Raku started out as Perl 6. Perl was designed primarily for use in a shell environment. Convenience features like the arguments to MAIN bit are in line with Perl philosophy.

Have you tried burping and jumping up and down?

It’s can’t in the sense of “I can’t eat another bite.” Yes, until your stomach bursts and you die, you can eat another bite, but everyone understands what you mean.

I can’t watch YouTube with ads. The “without forcing myself” is implied.

It’s difficult to eliminate the use of electricity, although generally you’d have them on a battery backup.

Internet is required to contact the fire department or other emergency center (these panels tend to do more than just fire). Used to be just phone lines using a touch tone code, but phone lines are going away. They’re pushing hard for cloud solutions now for security panels - I imagine fire will go that way soon enough.

I don’t see it as irrational. You’re thinking about it the wrong way round.

Manufacturers buy chips from proven sources, where the chip can be traced back to the fab that made it. The entire system of trust is built on the assumption that the chip designers and fabs are trustworthy and that the shady stuff happens elsewhere in the supply chain.

When the designers can’t be trusted, it breaks everything. Up until now it hasn’t been a problem except in extremely sensitive areas like military equipment - only governments can force a company to risk everything by compromising their own products. But take the risk away - make it cheap enough to design new microcontrollers - and what’s to stop a chip designer from taking money from (for example) the Russian mafia? IoT is huge, everywhere, and Risc-V is ideally suited for it.

I don’t think it’s so much “security by obscurity” as it’s an issue of a much lower bar for chip production. Intentional back doors or malware represent a huge risk for a product line, so manufacturers won’t put them in without someone like the NSA leaning on them. It’s a simple risk/benefit calculation.

But the risk is much lower if you can snag a processor design off the 'net, make your modifications, send it off to a fab and sell it under a fly-by-night operation. If it’s ever discovered, you take the money and run.

I see this sort of thing all the time.

There’s a disconnect between the time scales for industrial equipment and the time scales for IT and telecommunications. A PLC running a factory might last 30 years, but the software to program and troubleshoot it won’t run on modern operating systems or computers. The company doesn’t want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to upgrade it when there’s nothing wrong with it.

Same with telecommunications - POTS worked for a century, and over the last decade we’ve seen it largely disappear, which makes fire alarm panels everywhere inoperative. We recently ran into an issue where a fire marshall refused to allow anything but POTS and all of the non-end-of-life hardware only supported IP.

I don’t believe so - the docs mention several ways to boot a pi but most only work for newer models.

An option might be to boot an SD card read-only and run everything over NFS. It’s trivial to do that sort of thing with some UNIX clones (OpenBSD, for instance), but I don’t know about a modern Linux.

Or make your own, like the tankie mod is doing.

It might be too outdated to do major services, but it’s still fine for its original use - interfacing with electronic components.

You could build a weather station, monitor temperature and humidity in your attic and crawlspace, automatically water plants, etc. You don’t need much electronics knowledge for that sort of thing.

Meh, it’s happened before and things were OK.

Looking at pictures of external design is usually pretty safe to look at when you’re at work. I imagine architects do it all the time.

Search for “Friede sei mit Dir”

Sometimes NSFW images are appropriate in otherwise SFW communities. For instance, imagine a community on exterior design that had a post with a picture of that building in Germany with the five-story-high penis on it. Or a community for desktop themes that has a post with nudes wallpaper. Or a community about a certain celebrity that posts pictures of her car wreck.

I’m not sure I understand. I’m working, so I’m charging for it.

There are a lot of different flavors of being on call.

I’m on call all the time. That just means I might get a phone call at any time and have to help one of our techs on a site. I don’t have to be near the office for that - it’s the knowledge in my head they want.

I charge regular time for it.

Thought about it, was browsing their site, then the page turned dark and a popup asked for my email address to sign up for their newsletter.

So I won’t be buying one.

Imagine what life was like when people used typewriters.

Those IBM Selectrics, especially. Hit keys (mostly) silently, hit Return, and that little ball goes BBBRRRAAAPPP! across the page all at once.

That said, I’ve been in offices where they used all IBM equipment (including Type-M keyboards) and after a while you don’t hear the typing. That might be because you’re going deaf, though.