My high school never had math competitions so I’ll never know how I’d do. :(

Even knowing this, I’m still both in awe and jealous of talented people. Some people I know who can practice so much that they become exceptional at something seem to be immune to burnout on their passions for long periods of time, or seem to have a brain chemistry that remains resilient in the face of it, and that ain’t me. I’ve suspected I have ADHD but it’s hard to get a diagnosis and my doctor said he’s hesitant to diagnose his patients even though he thinks it’s possible (and I’m in Canada where I’m lucky to even have an assigned family doctor so I can’t really get a good second opinion on that). Programming just happens to be one of the few things that I get burned out on the least compared to everything else and even then it’s hard to sustain interest in it for long periods.

I kind of don’t want Linux to become mainstream tbh because then corporate enshittification becomes a much more real threat.

Refers to system uptime in the IT world. Six nines means your goal is to guarantee that your systems are up and available 99.9999% of the year. So basically no outages for more than ~31 seconds in a year.

Just about any place I know that uses C++ also does that with C++ so that’s nothing unusual for C++ specifically. It’s too big of a language to reason about very well if you don’t, so you’ve gotta find a subset that works.

I mean you could certainly have both but Linux treating its terminal as a first class interface is a big killer feature of Unix/Linux I think and why it’s still used in the server/dev world so much. Having a command line interface that’s not an afterthought, fully scriptable, and can be automated is very convenient for large tasks that need to be chained together whereas on Windows you have things like PowerShell where not every program you want to do things with in PowerShell has a way to interact with PowerShell, since in Windows you have the opposite problem of GUI being the only first class interface. I think I’d be worried that if you de-emphasized the terminal more you’d get the weird situation that happened to Windows and PowerShell whereas it’s usually not super hard to build your own GUI around an open source terminal program. A lot of people aren’t especially motivated to do that so some programs don’t have GUIs, but if you’re feeling like more programs need one then go for it.