I'd say ffmpeg is a good example, it's used by almost every piece of software that has to manipulate audio or video (including messaging applications), yet not many people know about its existance.

Hi, I'm the original author of LibreSpeed. When you load the website it downloads a list of servers and tries all of them to see which one has the lowest ping, that's what you're seeing.

Italy.

Cooking, every foreign person I know eats 20x more takeout and fast food than I do.

I will not install your shitty app

Various reasons over the years:

• Don't want to risk making the workplace unpleasant (twice)
• Wrong race that would upset my parents (twice)
• Lives too far away (twice)
• Age gap (once)
• Me being exposed to porn at a very young age (first time I was 3 or 4, and I grew up with unsupervised internet access) gave me a completely broken sexuality and I don't want to bring other people into this mess
• Feeling inadequate, ugly or uninteresting (I used to be very fat so you can imagine how I grew up)
• Feeling that my interest in the other person is not genuine and that I only see her as a sexual object

In the end, I'm 32 and single, my friends are getting married and starting their own families and I have this dreadful feeling that I missed out on something important in life, I drown this feeling in work, video games and all sorts of projects, but when I'm alone and I can't think of anything to do and I start thinking about the future, I want to kill myself.

Generally speaking, Linux needs better binary compatibility.

Currently, if you compile something, it's usually dynamically linked against dozens of libraries that are present on your system, but if you give the executable to someone else with a different distro, they may not have those libraries or their version may be too old or incompatible.

Statically linking programs is often impossible and generally discouraged, making software distribution a nightmare. Flatpak and similar systems made things easier, but it's such a crap solution and basically involves having an entire separate OS installed in parallel, with its own problems like having a version of Mesa that's too old for a new GPU and stuff like that. Applications must be able to be packaged with everything they need with them, there is no reason for dynamic linking to be so important in Linux these days.

I'm not in favor of proprietary software, but better binary compatibility is a necessity for Linux to succeed, and I'm saying this as someone who's been using Linux for over a decade and who refuses to install any proprietary software. Sometimes I find myself using apps and games in Wine even when a native version is available just to avoid the hassle of having to find and probably compile libobsoletecrap-5.so

They're very few addresses, you can tell the OS not to use them. Take a look at this: https://www.memtest86.com/blacklist-ram-badram-badmemorylist.html

Crypto were a good idea on paper, they could have rid us of centralized banks and provide fully anonymous transactions, instead we got massive exchanges that require your identity to do anything, massive speculation, money laundry, ponzi schemes and GPU shortages.

At this point I don't even care anymore about what it could have been, fuck crypto.

It's just bait for investors. This is the kind of crap that gets people with money and zero understanding of computers to buy stocks.

As Richard Stallman once said: "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone".

Arch Linux. Everyone said it was hard to use, unstable, etc. but my experience with it has been the exact opposite.

Yes, the install process is needlessly complicated (although it got a lot simpler now that we have archinstall), but the OS itself is rock solid and rarely has any issues that require more than a reboot or a package reinstall to solve. The AUR is a godsend too if you don't want or don't know how to compile stuff from source.

The problem with 5Ghz is that it doesn't go through walls very well compared to 2.4Ghz, resulting in APs having less range (or having to use several times more power)

I think this one beats them all.

My home server keeps a few services up, including an instance of Jitsi Meet. The server runs nixos and the nixos package for jitsi is incomplete to say the least and doesn't even support authentication, so I use the docker-compose version and I have a script that runs periodically to keep it updated. So far so good, right? Well, no.

Because the server is at home, I have a dynamic external IP address, so I have to use a DDNS provider, but jitsi doesn't expect this and uses a stun server at startup to determine the public IP of the server once, so if my connection goes down or is restarted and the IP changes, jitsi needs to be restarted or it won't work anymore.

The solution?

• My router runs OpenWrt, so I am able to run a script that checks for external IP changes. When a change is detected, it uses SSH to connect to my server to restart jitsi
• Because I don't want the router to just be able to run any command, I created a jitsi-restart user that has no shell
• When the router tries to log in with its pubkey, sshd creates a file called restartasap in the jitsi folder and closes the connection
• On the server, there's a systemd unit running a script as the jitsi user that periodically checks for that file, and if it exists it deletes it and restarts jitsi

I've been running this setup since mid 2020 and I expect this to continue until IPv6 becomes the norm.

It means it's what we in the trade call "a nothingburger". On Windows you need to explicitly install a malicious driver (which in turn requires to you to disable signature verification), on Linux you'd have to load a malicious kernel module (which requires pasting commands as root, and it would probably be proprietary since it has malware to hide and as every nvidia user knows, proprietary kernel modules break with kernel updates)

People think I can hack anything ever created, from some niche 90s CD software to online services

It's always sad to see users being mistreated like this but what never ceases to amuse me is the amount of time that Windows users are willing to waste in order to remove all this trash from their systems and have a usable experience, only for it to be ruined again with something worse with the next update. At this point, they either don't know that alternatives exist or they have Stockhom syndrome or something.

I used to do that A LOT and you can still find all my old guides on my website as a testament to that, they were soooo long, it took hours to do a "clean install", they took days to write, and even then I would run into so many issues because of Windows Update... One day I realized that I was doing more work to make Windows usable than the average Arch user and I just gave up. Linux wasn't ready for gaming yet so I had to dual boot for a while, but thankfully that's not a problem anymore. I couldn't be happier.

I'm the author of the project. The servers are simply overloaded af unfortunately. It's a fairly popular project and we don't have enough servers to support this many concurrent users.

As much as I dislike Microsoft, back in 2015 I used Windows Phone 8.1 for about 6 months and I absolutely loved it, the UI was so smooth and polished, even on low end phones, until WP10 came out and it ran like trash and I went back to LineageOS.

AI is to computer science what black magic is to science.

Seriously, what do you get after you've spent days and days to train a model? An inscrutable blob that may as well be proprietary software written for an alien CPU; studying it is damn near impossible, understanding how it works would require several lifespans, and yet it works, and we trust these models and use them to get solutions to problems that would normally be impossible to handle by computers using "real" computer science. And one day, this trust will bite us in the ass, not in the form of an "AI rebellion" but with every system that uses AI becoming unreliable because of situations outside its training.

The electromagnetic field generated by headphones is miniscule and the frequencies are very low, whatever's causing your headache is not a tiny electromagnet. Depending on the type of headphones and the volume used, however, the sound itself could be causing it, especially if you're using some 3D spatial filter, those don't always play well with how our brains and ears work.