It’s funny, because that’s exactly what I did around the age of 13 to bypass my school’s firewall. I had everything on a USB drive, including Ghostzilla and PuTTY so I could browse through an SSH SOCKS tunnel. Mind you, my home computer was the SSH server – but these days it wouldn’t be hard to get a VPS in a less restrictive country:

“Hey [parent], can I borrow your credit card to set up a server so my friends and I can play [game] together?”

It takes one kid in a group to set something like this up.

My daily driver laptop, home servers, media center, NAS, etc are all Linux.

My gaming computer isn’t – as much as I would like it to be. There are certain things (particularly VR) that don’t want to work well in Linux.

You kids don’t know how good you have it!

Theft, rape, and murder are “natural” too.

I flew from Jermany to Tanzania and saw some jeriatric jiraffes.

I say it “Jif” because:

• That’s what the format’s creator named it.
• It’s weird, but “soft G” is a thing and acronyms and the only “rule” for pronouncing acronyms is “it’s easy to say”.
• It annoys people that are way too invested in it. Sure, it’s immature – but it’s low stakes and not particularly “shitty”. I enjoy it and you only YOLO once.

I was working with a buddy on a “startup” that was more of a hobby than anything (and didn’t go anywhere). The early prototypes were controlled by Arduino and Pis early on – ease of software development was key as we experimented with and dialed in the hardware. The later prototypes used an ESP32 though, because we’re aren’t idiots.

I’m a hobbyist at best: it kills me that there are well paid “professional embedded software engineers” out there that can’t work with actual embedded hardware. All I could think of was this article on electrical engineers that can’t solder. The complete lack of real world, hands on experience with the hardware blows my mind.

My niece struggled with using a mouse when she was in middle school – her experience with UI was exclusively touch screens prior to that.

The verge had an interesting article on this phenomenon

I’ll add “it’s not their fault”. In the race to make technology intuitive and idiot proof we’ve removed the need to actually learn how technology works past a superficial level.