Side note: please don’t abuse the word “toxic” until it becomes absolutely meaningless. Let’s keep that to a more fitting context, having a

I was expressing an obviously personal opinion about the language itself, which is objectively a dull, barren wasteland that sucks out your soul while you walk it. That is precisely the reason why it’s so widespread and loved by business entities and managers - there is no excitement, no surprises, just an everlasting monotony of keys clicking produced by a horde of clones wearing button-down shirts while sitting in absolute identical cubicles, creating yet another instance of FactoryProducer. It’s very easy to plan and schedule for, while at the same time being unnecessarily verbose and mildly unproductive (compared to other languages).

Look, the JVM is fine, just pick another language. There is plenty of work doing Kotlin. But yes, if you’re doing this only for the money, go ahead. I’ve always been unable to separate my job fromy personal life and my other interests, I couldn’t imagine being cursed by Java again.

If you can sit somewhere for 8 to 10 hours each day, doing something that isn’t fun and separate yourself from it, not going insane, all the power to you. I also get that not everyone has the luxury of picking their favorite toy and making it their job, but I firmly believe there are options that are not Java.

Now, if you’re one of the rare types that actually enjoys Java, meet me in the closest Denny’s parking lot, I need your cranial measurements.

Please note: this post contains hyperbole and humor. I don’t hate any of you, I just hate Java

My personal recommendation:

• Pick up Python, it’s easy to learn and highly productive. If you also learn fastAPI, you can benefit from highly validated, declarative models to build REST APIs in the backend, well fast. It will yield quick results, you won’t become demotivated and you can pick up a paid project soon.

• Pick up Rust. It’s “in” right now and I get requests from marketing people that know nothing about programming, asking if their project could be implemented in Rust

• Go with memorizing the shell commands first, try to understand git later. Get productive, try to get where you were with e. g. svn or cvs. If you are comfortable, look at something in depth if you have a problem that you can’t solve with the knowledge you have.

• Fuck Java, seriously.

• You have commercial interests, so it is probably wise to look into becoming a fullstack dev to maximize the kind of projects you can do. Look into React, vue.js, svelte. React is probably still the most widely used framework, you’ll quickly do a project with vue.js and svelte is a super interesting look into things to come.

That dude is joking of course, but touching someone in a subtle manner can be used to both express and indicate interest.

If all else fails, entangle him with silk and consume him.

With type annotations, this problem is mostly alleviated in practice, while still keeping the productivity gains of duck typing.

Based on this comment*, I’ll migrate a large project to bazel now. I’ll report how it goes.

• disclaimer: the comment just pushed me over the edge

I don’t hear it either, though.

Yes, absolutely. Not all hinges are adjustable, unfortunately. In fact, I’d argue that most are not. Just have a look at the hinges at your place (doors, cabinets, toilet seat etc.), most will be very simple mechanisms with no inbuilt adjustment.

You can adjust the play mechanically, of course - that is, through application of a certain amount of force via deformation, which can be a destructive process if not done carefully.

There are hinges that expose an axial screw that allows for precise adjustment of hinge friction, but I have not seen those used for laptop display lids (nor did I personally encounter those in the small dimensions you would find on a laptop) . You’ll find examples of those at Misumi or McMaster - Carr.

If your goal is to increase the friction in your laptop’s display lid hinges, you might find that simply tightening all screws of and around the hinge often does the trick. Even though the main axial screw is not meant to be user accessible, it serves basically the same function and can tighten up the hinge. Tightening the screws used for mounting will ensure the lid doesn’t wobble. You will have to (partially) take your laptop apart for that, naturally.

If your hinge doesn’t have an axial screw at all and uses, let’s say a pin, you might have to employ another method, but that would really depend on the actual mechanism being used.

Absolutely, if there is enough plastic left, melting is one of the best options. That also enables mending plastic by melting in metal pins or strips via a cheap plastic welder for 10 bucks (success can be great, but it’s highly dependent on the geometry and how things broke).

Edit: no, as I said, that’s absolutely fine if there is a chunk of sturdy plastic to accept the insert. I just wanted to present another plastic repair technique for the sake of completeness, if somebody stumbles into this comment section.

This is correct and good advice. I’d like to add that it’s also an option to glue in a threaded metal insert in case a self - tapping plastic screw was used and the original thread is stripped.

by loosening the screws of the hinge.

Generally all correct, here is a resource with a lot of in-depth information and additional links:

https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-lithium-based-batteries

It’s not true that precision measurements are impossible with low value resistors, a lot of measurement equipment works exactly like that - it might just be more expensive than what the manufacturer is willing to budget for.

Tuxedo also offers products with an aluminum body, and while they do import the hardware from China, you get the local service and warranty guarantees any company in the EU must provide, so that’s fine by me.

Also, honest question: what do you think a unique laptop is, in particular when buying from a mass consumer brand like Lenovo? I really can’t figure out what that’s supposed to mean.

lspci will read the vendor and device id via PCI and use that to determine what the device is. You might want to make the output a bit more digestable / useful via lspci -s 03:00.0 -k -nn, but I’d assume the ids that match an 2070 will show up.

Could you please take the card out and provide us with a few pictures from different angles, maybe getting a good look at the actual chips?

I’d like to rule that out before chasing rabbits here.

Also, you could always run nvidia-settings, which will show information about an NVIDIA card using a different access method.

I’d still like to see the pictures of the card though ;)

Sure. But the number of targets you could acquire there is miniscule compared to simpler delivery mechanisms, via a malicious app download, for example, and you have larger costs (hardware) and added risks, e. g. being captured on CCTV during installation.

That’s why I said, the cost/reward ratio is really off.

Oh, that makes everything a lot easier. The majority of the relevant settings will be in your home folder then, i. e. in the ${HOME}./.config folder, while some might also be in ${HOME}/.local/share etc.

You probably want to backup the whole home folder anyway, so that would pickup most of your settings. In order to make that work on a different system, you would have to install all applications you were using on the tablet as well. Luckily, software installation in Linux is pretty easy, so you can export a list of installed applications from the Surface and then re-install them on your target system before migrating your home folder. The software list should become part of your backup. See e. g. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/82880/how-to-replicate-installed-package-selection-from-one-fedora-instance-to-another for an idea of how to perform this.

I have used this approach in the past and it will get you 95% there. There might be some global system settings that you’d like to also transfer to your new system, but you can add those as you discover you miss them on the target system.

In general, no, this won’t work. In your case, you’re lucky since at least the Surface Go is using an x86 CPU, so it’s not completely out of the question, but transferring the image as-is to a completely different device typically does not work without modification.

Simple example: your target device might not refer to existing hardware (let’s say a storage medium) in the same manner as your old device, so the existing references in your cloned image won’t work. There are other issues of course, e. g. missing drivers for different hardware present on the target device.

It’s possible to modify the image so it would boot, but given the Surface runs Windows, that’s going to be a chore. I’d consider this an interesting project if bored on a slow weekend, but I’d most likely just do a filesystem backup of relevant data and call it a day.

Honestly, that just seems like you’re treating dd as some kind of arcanum. dd works just fine and I’ve been doing 1:1, full system backups for decades with it, no issues. Honorary mention for ddrescue / dd_rescue for recovery options, i. e. re-trying bad sector reads etc.

In fact, when Clonezilla doesn’t know your filesystem, it will simply employ dd to copy the data sector by sector.

I’d argue that Clonezilla (due to its use of partclone) is actually a less complete form of backup, since it will only copy used blocks, you don’t really end up with a clone of your devices, just a copy of what partclone believes to be your data. Don’t get me wrong, that is fine in most use cases, but there are some cases where this doesn’t cut it, e. g. wanting to backup / restore a storage device from a PLC where the vendor had the glorious idea to store licensing data in unused sectors, or when you want to create a forensic disk image, might want it look into d3dd then, although it absolutely works using regular old dd as well, d3dd just adds some amenities.

All I want to say is: dd is an absolutely reliable tool and can be a one stop solution for device backups. Also, I have absolutely no quarrels with Clonezilla, if it fits what you’re trying to do and it works, great.

Not necessarily, if you find an exploit that allows you to install malware without user interaction, Mactans famously did that for an older iOS version.

I’d still argue that making good use of such an exploit and rolling out the necessary, physical infrastructure does not have a great cost/reward ratio.

None of the training data for the commonly available AI models probably includes a significant amount of footage from endoscopic pipe inspection cameras, so no surprise here.

That being said, it’s absolutely possible to feed those images to a pre-trained model to continue its training and get good results.