Also, the author has a standalone blog post on the topic from 2011, Expression Parsing Made Easy.

Put a rescue distro on a USB stick. When you first boot the laptop, use the rescue distro. Write down the USB IDs (lsusb) and PCI IDs (lspci). Read through the kernel boot log (sudo dmesg | less) and write down the names of any kernel drivers that might matter; WiFi, GPUs, USB bridges, and keyboard layouts are important in particular. For laptops, look up manufacturer-specific drivers for keyboards, fans, and power management.

Linux requires about 8MiB of RAM to boot. The entire netbook movement relied on machines with 2GiB or less; I remember putting Linux onto a 2GiB Sony VAIO that had struggled to boot Windows. Your laptops aren’t too small, but you may be choosing distros with poor hardware support or large monolithic packages. I bet that one of Debian, Gentoo, or NixOS would boot on those machines that still work; of those, Debian is probably easiest.

Old laptops sucks. Windows use to be very efficient. XP and 7 has held up very well after all these years. And most importantly Linux isn’t a one size fits all solution.

Nah, Windows sucked back then too. If a machine boots Windows XP or Windows 7, then it can easily be made to boot an out-of-the-box Linux distro. The Asus machine you listed might have some boot issues, but the Acer and Dell do not appear different from any of the Acers or Dells that I’ve put Linux on in the past decade. My daily driver is a $150 refurbished Dell Latitude 5390 running NixOS.

It’s not even an analogy; pointers and reference mechanics are the same concept in programming and linguistics. See the page on referents for an example blend of viewpoints.

Forget about your job for a moment. In general, why are you willing to set a threshold on how accessible your work is? I urge you to forget about how callous your employer wants you to be.

across the Internet … doesn’t require storing data twice

A flavor of the CAP theorem applies here; if you want your data to be available even during network partitions (and those are going to happen on the Internet!) then it has to be duplicated somehow. For example, I still have a soft spot for Tahoe-LAFS, which allows users to control how much duplication will be used and typically is configured to have some redundancy. Typical cloud providers build redundancy into their storage products; for example, it’s known that Google’s Colossus storage system uses Reed-Solomon to trade space for durability.

Pick a language like Perl, where some packages are written in C and some are written in pure Perl, and you’ll get to experience the same cryptic GCC errors, sometimes. There’s no secret to pip; many Python developers upload wheels with pre-compiled binaries, including Windows-compatible binaries, and so you don’t have to run GCC because they already did it for you.

Nah, just use direnv instead, comrade.

Other way around, actually; C was one of several languages proposed to model UNIX without having to write assembly on every line, and has steadily increased in abstraction. Today, C is specified relative to a high-level abstract machine and doesn’t really resemble any modern processing units’ capabilities.

Incidentally, coming to understand this is precisely what the OP meme is about.

Most consumer-grade NICs have a default MAC address which is retrievable with device drivers, but delegate (Ethernet) packet assembly to the OS. If the OS asks the NIC to emit a packet, then the NIC often receives the packet as a blob, DMA’d from main memory, and emits the bytes as octets. Other NICs do manage packet assembly, but allow overwriting the default MAC address. By the time I was learning Linux, we had GNU MAC Changer available in userland with the macchanger command, and many distros have configuration for randomizing or hardcoding MAC addresses upon boot.

I want to say that this is all because olden corporate network management policies could require a technician to replace a NIC without changing the MAC address, but more likely it is because framing and packet assembly was not traditionally handed to a second controller, and was instead bit-banged or MMIO’d by the CPU.

In the Nix ecosystem, I appreciate Cachix quite a bit. It’s much easier than running a Hydra.

Conway’s Law is a category-theoretic statement; it asserts the existence of a homomorphism on graphs, mapping from modules to code authors. Quoting Conway’s original paper:

Speaking as a mathematician might, we would say that there is a homomorphism from the linear graph of a system to the linear graph of its design organization.

The author does not really show an understanding or respect for the underlying maths.

Hi! Please don’t link anything from this subdomain again. It was considered a plague back on Reddit, and this sort of content-free post shouldn’t be encouraged here either.