Cheapest? Use someone else's hrdware (or "borrow" it) and set it up at work/school/friend's house/cafe. Free hardware, free connectivity, free electricity.
More seriously, set everithing up on whatever spare old computer you have at hand (or use a vm running on you pc). You should not start with buying hardware.
beware fish shell syntax works drastically differently from other POSIX shells
Come on, that's scaremongering :)
On interactive, day-to-day use, fish syntax is basically the same as bash or any other shell: you type your commands, hit enter and the command is run. Only when it comes to scripting (or writing complex one-liners, or copy-pasting stuff from the web) are there appreciable differences. In those cases, until one is accustomed to fish, running the command/script in bash is still an option.
Let me be 100% clear: yes, fish will complain if a wildcard doesn't expand to anything, and there are other minor things that may impact typical interactive use. I'm just saying there is basically zero learning curve if you want to try fish and that you can just fire up bash if you hit a wall in a moment when you can't afford to investigate because you need stuff done.
If I had to say, the most hassle with fish is that people assume you are running POSIX shell and so you have to know how to adapt instructions to your shell. For example, someone may say "add expor SOME_VAR=some_value to your .bashrc" and you need to be able to translate that to fish. Also, there is very specific software (in my system, it's just sdkman, an utility that manages which java development tools are installed/available in a shell session) that only works in POSIX shells and needs some adapter for fish.
It may not be a scam per se, but it certainly is a misnomer at this point... it's one of those words (like "enterprise" or "pro") that have been appropriated by marketing and devoided of any meaning. AI as a word will gradually die while people gradually realize it doesn't mean anything. Marketing consumes words (and people too).
To put an even finer point on it, Musk’s tweet today announcing that “all core systems are now on X.com” featured the logo of the company he founded 25 years ago.
That's the news... is it newsworthy?
To be fair: previous generations of police officers, back when most people used phones, have made extensive use of wiretapping (and current policemen still do, of course).
Makes perfect sense to me (not a lawyer, not a US person)... what doesn't make sense is how many people still think biometric is high security (maybe because of how cool they make it look in the movies?)
linux rules because it's the only os built for its users rather than some company stocks
Move to the EU :)
your pro-consumer laws
Don't those actually come from the EU?
Don't you mean a markdown editor?
Chances are, your favorite text editor can handle markdown well enough... unless you want WYSIWYG, in which case your text editor would still be good enough for the job and you would be wrong :-)
"mesh" is a buzzword that doesn't make much sense (to me at least) if we are talking about wired and routers... what do you mean by it? can you describe your setup?
edit:
Let me clarify :)
Unless I'm mistaken, mesh means that one a bunch of devices, usually wireless access points, connected with each other (in a mesh) with possibly low-quality connections that automatically switch traffic for each other.
If you have ethernet running from the router to the APs, you always want to use that and so you don't want a mesh at all.