I have zero experience with networking hardware. How hard is it to recable an apartment for a newb like me? How does that even work, do I gotta pull wires out of the walls?

It’s such an echo chamber that you’ve gotten a number of downvotes just for providing your perspective here

Ditto on pushback coming from private citizens rather than big corporations. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, NIMBYs in my neighborhood killing a proposed denser construction project. The “greedy” development firm wanted to build, the NIMBYs killed it. The article itself even mentions this, this is democracy doing its thing:

Homeowners wielded huge political influence to block any changes they believed could hurt their property values.

Blaming corporate greed is a stupid take. If only we relax NIMBY zoning laws, then the “corporate greed” of developers would automatically incentivize them to build all the dense housing we need (they are in fact very happy to build denser smaller lots if allowed to, contrary to what fire retardant claims), and finally start increasing the supply of housing in order to lower market price.

The whole comment literally just explained how this benefits employees too, but you chose to ignore all that and say something completely irrelevant.

No, there shouldn’t because that would imply restricting what I can do with the information I have access to. I am in favor of maintaining the sort of unrestricted general computing that we already have access to.

Confident incompetence. What a sight to behold!

What was “stolen” from you and how?

I think it would be much worse if artists, writers, scientists, open source developers and so on were forced to stop making their works freely available because they don’t want their creations to be used by others for commercial purposes.

None of them are forced to stop making their works freely available. If they want to voluntarily stop making their works freely available to prevent commercial interests from using them, that’s on them.

Besides, that’s not so bad to me. The rest of us who want to share with humanity will keep sharing with humanity. The worst case imo is that artists, writers, scientists, and open source developers cannot take full advantage of the latest advancements in tech to make more and better art, writing, science, and software. We cannot let humanity’s creative potential be held hostage by anyone.

That could really mean that large parts of humanity would be cut off from knowledge.

On the contrary, AI is making knowledge more accessible than ever before to large parts of humanity. The only comparible other technologies that have done this in recent times are the internet and search engines. Thank goodness the internet enables piracy that allows anyone to download troves of ebooks for free. I look forward to AI doing the same on an even greater scale.

Oh wow, yeah ducking wouldn’t help so much if you’re ducking to be at face level with glass 😬

Hopefully we’ll never have to find out. Chilling in an interior room is probably a good call, the closest survivors to the Hiroshima ground zero were cocooned inside a bank vault.

It’s in case you’re sufficiently far from the blast radius that your greatest danger is flying glass shards and other debris. The people at ground zero are fucked no matter what of course, but a lot of people live in suburbs outside the city that could have their lives saved, or at the very least could avoid more serious injuries by ducking and covering.

This sort of education actually already happened in Japan during WWII. There were multiple survivors from Hiroshima who saw sights such as this:

He would recall passing a woman who seemed to have bluish leaves growing out of her flesh. She must have been standing near a stained glass window when the sky opened up, and the strange plants were in fact leaves of glass deeply rooted in one whole side of her body. She walked by without uttering a word or a sound, like a ghost; but with each step, the leaves chimed with what seemed, to a boy of six, like a strange jingle-jangle tune.

That’s why you duck and cover, because in case you find yourself still alive after the blast, you do not want to want to be someone with so much glass embedded in them that they look like jingling vegetation. Depending on your distance from the blast, there will be a few seconds between the flash of the atomic bomb and when the blast wave hits, and those few seconds are an opportunity to save yourself from a lot of unnecessary pain afterwards.

Some of these Hiroshima survivors went on to Nagasaki, where they would educate everyone they came across on their experiences in Hiroshima. This is just one such account:

Almost from the moment Tsutomu Yamaguchi and Hisako arrived home with their child, neighbors started arriving at the door, wanting to know what Mr. Yamaguchi had seen in Hiroshima. He was nauseous and fatigued and his fever felt as if it were still climbing; but he decided to answer every question, and offer advice: “Wear white clothes—which will reflect the heat rays. Black clothes tend to catch fire easily. Keep all of the windows open, because if glass shards are stuck in the body, treatment is very difficult. And if you see the pika, you must at that very moment hide yourself behind a sturdy object.”

He hoped that his advice to his neighbors was unnecessary. He prayed that the white flash and the black cloud would not follow him to Nagasaki. He hoped so, but he really did not believe so.

That all happened within 3 days, man. Just 3 days after the first atomic bombing, humanity was already learning how to adapt to atomic bombs. They teach you “duck and cover” because that’s literally what Hiroshima survivors had taught Nagasaki survivors 78 years ago. But of course they should’ve explained the historical context to you so that it was clear why such knowledge is useful.

In case anyone reading this is interested, the quotes are from the book “To Hell and Back: The Last Train From Hiroshima.” It’s a fantastic book with many more vivid accounts than the two I just picked out.

My biggest problem is figuring out what I want to do with any coding skills.

Honestly, why learn programming then?

I’m asking this as a programmer myself. I’m not trying to discourage you from learning it by any means, if that’s what you want to do. I’m just asking because it doesn’t sound as if you actually want to do it.

You’ve already tried learning it, and it’s a slog (whereas for me, I was immediately fascinated by it when I was introduced to it as a teenager, even though I was horrible at it). You don’t have any burning desires to create apps (whereas for me, there are so many ideas I want to explore, so many things I want to create that don’t exist yet, but alas I don’t have enough time or energy to work on it all). You don’t even have the desire to do it for purely career-related purposes, which is what I’d imagine drives most of the rest of people learning programming without enjoying it at all.

So why bother with learning something you neither enjoy nor have strong motivations to do?

I see, thank you for letting me know! I see this is indeed more nuanced than I had thought.

Can you provide any proof of the “tied to lampposts” claim? I’m fine with seeing video proof if you have it