Lingerie, drugs, snacks, toys, etc. cost money!

Start a cocaine or ketamine habit and you will always remember to have it on hand.

Yes, OpenCore Legacy Patcher.

Regarding Linux distributions, I don’t have a specific recommendation. You might be worse off with a distro that doesn’t include nonfree drivers for wifi, bluetooth, graphics by default. IIRC these MBPs use Broadcom Wifi chips. Ubuntu and derivatives would be my first try. Definitely read up on how to install Linux on MBPs. You probably might have to configure something in OpenFirmware/EFI.

This is also true for other people.

The biggest issue is security updates and a current internet browser.

Of course I can use a 30 year old computer that still works with the software it can run.

LibreOffice is okay for some stuff, but shows its limitations pretty quickly once you use it for more serious tasks.

• Writer is the best of the suite and has deleted comments for me several times without ability to recover.
• The spreadsheet is a toy compared to Excel spreadsheets used in pretty much any business.
• The presentation software produces ugly results by default.

The only things LibreOffice has going for it, is the price and that the UI doesn’t change. LibreOffice has no good mobile apps.

Better alternatives to Microsoft Office are Google Docs etc. and Apple’s iWork suite. Both have good compatibility with Microsoft’s files and run great on mobile.

Google has ease of use, easy sharing and collaboration. Apple’s iWork has great usability and features and produces beautiful results by default. The suite comes free with every Apple device. Google Docs is free to use as well.

That’s of course ignoring the workhorse called Outlook. You can kind of approach its features with a handful of other applications, but won’t reach the same functionality.

LibreOffice has one unique application in its suite: Base local database. Microsoft Access and FileMaker used to very popular, but faded into the background over the last decade.

15 years is actually reasonable.

I have a ten year old laptop with an i7 processor, 16 GB RAM, and 1 TB SSD. It still does most things, I bought it for initially just fine. Granted this was one of the best laptops you could buy at the time.

Apple stopped supporting it with a current version of macOS a couple of years ago sadly. It’s still possible to patch newer versions to install and run on the old machine, but it’s a bit of a hassle.

Never use numbers when calculating dates. Use the data formats and constants the calendar library provides.

Chat GPT makes up everything it says. It’s just good at guessing and bullshitting.

Chat GPT makes up everything it says. It’s just good at guessing and bullshitting.

It’s correctly used in the text.

Number of steps < 500 is equivalent to 500 > number of steps.

The waste and corruption in private industry is mind bogglingly huge compared to the public sector.

How did Heartbleed and Goto fail happen in OpenSSL then?

I agree with you.

Lots of open source software uses arcane concepts because lots of it is old. See Xorg as a prime example. That was outdated 20 years ago already.

Closes source software gets exploited and hacked all the time. They take security seriously as well.

Look at OpenSSL and the heartbleed and similar high profile security failures for how even using high profile open source software is not automatically more secure.

You theoretically can see the code. You don’t actually look at it. Nor can you even have the knowledge to understand and see security implications for all the software you use.

In practice it makes little difference for security if you use open or closed source software.

Yes, banks are used for crimes on a massive scale. Usually that’s not available to small time people.

Crypto can be used for criminal activity with a low barrier to entry. There are several use cases where things maybe should not be illegal in the first place. Like buying drugs for example.

ADB was superior.

Java has been running serious server software since the mid 1990s. Think WebObjects running on Solaris. Lots of business stuff with big databases still run infrastructure like that.

Java still has the big advantage of being machine agnostic. No need to recompile for ARM or Intel.

Early Swift was very slow to compile and start. The debugger was nonfunctional.

Otherwise it was pretty usable. Especially since it got to leverage the huge libraries written for Objective-C.

Which meant it lacked some basic collection types. A Swift native Set was introduced with Swift 3 IIRC. Before that you had to bridge back and forth between Swift and Objective-C. Sometimes leading to unexpected behavior at runtime.

In Objective-C if an object reference was nil, you could send it messages (call methods) without a problem. Swift however did away with this. Optionals had to be explicitly unwrapped. So if the annotations weren’t correct, Swift code would crash at runtime where Objective-C would have been fine. Lots of bugs related to that existed.

Swift peaked around version 4. Since then, they have been adding kitchen sink features and lots of complexity to feel smart.

I still would have preferred an Objective-C 3.0. Chris Lattner was a C++ guy and never really understood Objective-C culture and strengths.