I appreciate the interest in doing all the math, and I am also not specifically familiar with audio or the audio library, but I believe you could use a similar argument against the OG library of babel, and I happen to know(confidently believe?) that they don’t actually have a stored copy of every individual text file “in the library”, rather each page is algorithmically generated and they have proven that the algorithm will generate every possible text.

I’d wager it’s the same thing here, they have just written the code to generate a random audio file from a unique input, and proven that for all possible audio files (within some defined constraints, like exactly 15 seconds long), there exists an input to the algorithm which will produce said audio file.

Determining whether or not an algorithm with infrastructure backing it counts as a library is an exercise left to the reader, I suppose.

I’ve used alacritty for ages, its lack of ui is appealing on a tiling wm and it is as performant as i need it to be

specifically he had to absolutely bomb a stand up routine. I forget if Ally wrote it for him or if they just made him write bad jokes but it was NOT as good as Grant’s usual writing

MacBooks actually aren’t too bad to get into, but doing anything once you get the bottom off is another story- there isn’t much that isn’t soldered down.

I actually regret pointing out rust- it’s what I’ve been looking at learning myself, and I think it’s a poor choice for a first language, just because you can learn the basic stuff in something like python and have far less time spent fighting the compiler and needing to understand memory. Still a cool language, though.

Metasploitable is more or less what I meant, yeah. I would recommend, if you have a spare machine, install proxmox/esxi so you can virtualize a whole environment around it and learn about working with those things. You sound like you probably have linux experience, but being able to say that you can work on a server purely through the terminal is big, even if you only touch network equipment in your first role you will perform much better if you can ssh into a box and do anything you need to do.

It sounds like you already have enough to start applying for junior positions, I was in basically the same knowledge state when I got my first it job earlier this year. It took me months of hardcore job hunting to get a position, but if you have a real passion for stuff and show that you are a tinkerer and excited to learn more, that is what people are looking for. There have been a lot of lay offs in the industry so you may be competing with mid levels for junior positions still, but many employers know that investing in passionate people at entry level is often a good investment.

Biggest interview tip I know is not to pretend you don’t know about something, try to relate it to something you do “Do you know JS/React?” “No but I have worked with python and made [x], and I am excited to transfer that experience to your environment.” The positions you should be looking for shouldn’t care much about what you already know, they should care about how long in seat before you know what you need to. Show that you’re trainable, definitely talk about stuff you do at home (training they won’t be paying you for).

Most people will have to work help desk a couple of years before any of this, but if you look hard/long enough (and probably get fairly lucky), you can jump right into the industry. I would look for small-medium businesses if you want to skip helpdesk hell- if you’re going to be the second of two employees in IT, yes you will do helpdesk, but you won’t be a phone slave 8 hours a day, you’ll get the opportunity to work on new things and learn.

Hope that helps. I’ve only been professionally in networking/security for about 6 months, and definitely got my current job in part from networking from my repair tech, so you may have a different experience. I was 24 when I started, I don’t have a college degeee or any certs yet, though, so I would honestly say the soft skills of interviewing, social networking, and presentation are what will help you get the job the most.

Hope that helps and you can get what you want. Job hunting will crush your soul, but if you enjoy computers, the other side of that tunnel is a great place to be.

You prefer gcp to aws? I’ve only worked with public cloud a little bit but AWS has felt far ahead of its competition.

Clunky, but featureful.

You’re never too old to start learning that stuff.

For networking, there’s a ton of resources on selfhosting and homelabbing, and big communities here on lemmy and elsewhere. It can be as expensive a hobby as you want, you can stretch an old laptop pretty far, get really cheap stuff from the cloud, or build a data closet in your house/apartment.

If you wanted to learn more about software, Rust has a ton of high quality official documentation available and would be really valuable knowledge for a career.

For the raw hardware tinkering getting the $30 essentials set from ifixit will get you into 90% of consumer devices, and even as a professional I’m usually watching a 5 minute youtube video before dissassembling anything, and that’s really all you need.

I set this up with proxmox on a lark over a weekend It would have been perfectly fine for desktop usage, but I had terrible performance, like sub 30 fps in vanilla Minecraft. (i3-8100, 1060 6gb) It may be possible to optimize it further, but I think you need some much better hardware than I have. It was surprisingly simple though, there are guides on the proxmox website.

homework, presumably

I did a bit of research and came to a similar “they will pay for themselves” so I got a higher end (afaik) device called a Mighty. It is fantastic, still going strong years later. Heats up quickly, smooth pulls from it, battery life has gone down a little but still plenty to not be deskbound.

Am I the only one who crashes every other cutscene and every 30 minutes of gameplay?

I’ve been diagramming/documenting my network at work using draw.io, it is a little clunky but it works well for me, has good features and preloaded art for different types of devices.

I usually haven’t, but I installed Clam about a month ago on my desktop, ran a full and complete scan, then left it running scheduled scans. Hasn’t found anything, and I get a lot of software from outside of my package manager, and use wine for a lot of it, so I’d say my risk/exposure is higher than most.

I think it’s fine to go without AV on a linux desktop, but I like the peace of mind. There will definitely be more things targeting linux sytems as/if more market share is acquired, but in terms of security it’s more important that you harden the system than run an AV.

Hot news, linux is incredibly compatible with printers. CUPS is very well designed. With relatively little technical knowledge you could probably plug a raspberry pi into virtually any old printer and get it running with the Pi as a print server sharing it with the network.

aka i don’t either and i need help at my new job 🥲

A virtual local area network, or vlan, is a logically defined subset of a computer network that are used to control, from an administrator/system level, which computers are ‘connected’ to others. There can be an unbroken, physical connection between two devices, but they won’t be able to communicate because network hardware is stepping in and segregating the network.

This is good because it can increase security- rather than having your sensitive information on your company network with a password, which can be cracked or stolen, being the only thing controlling access to it, with a vlan you can limit access to even attempt to use a password to only the parts of your network that actually require it. It also controls traffic and congestion on the network, because some data is ‘broadcast’, effectively addressed “to whom it may concern,”. A vlan places a wall around parts of the network that keeps these broadcasts inside, i.e. splits broadcast domains. Ordinarily, this would require different hardware and physical design, which can increase cost and complexity.

But on the other hand, the physical network structure encouraged by this design is very flat, with all devices physically connected to each other. It is only inside configuration on the network hardware that things are broken up and divided, which means if whoever set it up didn’t document it, you are required to not only figure out where all the cables go, but also how the network systems are controlling the data. It’s also another “thing” that can break. If there were physical segmentation, you could follow a cable and see where its gone wrong, and if something were plugged into the wrong port, it would be plugged into the wrong device entirely, and you would just move the connection to the correct device. With a vlan, you’ll have a switch with dozens of ports, each having its own independent configuration defined on a table, which means it can be plugged into the correct device, but the wrong individual port out of dozens. The configuration could also become corrupt, or be broken by an accidental change or hardware failure, and you would now need to rebuild the table, going through each individual port and configuring which vlan was supposed to be on it.