To be fair, making a device wifi connected is stupid cheap nowadays. That being said, you bet your ass they're harvesting data.
My parents got a fridge with a similar feature and no screen (they didn't know it had that) but I was curious and hooked it to the IOT network. Literally the only smart feature it exposed was a door open sensor...
This consternation is definitely common. It's hard to apply skills to something with no long term impact of benefit. I've improved my skills by finding stuff I can help on in the communities I participate in.
It's natural to be overwhelmed, so deciding on a project does scope what you can learn, but a hard part is architecting the foundation of that project.
Introducing new features to an existing project is a great way to get your feet wet - it has multiple benefits, for one of you do take a position as a developer in the future, you likely won't be architecting anything initially, primarily improving on existing projects. So participating in OSS projects is a similar mechanism to that - you have to learn their codebase to a degree, you have to learn their style and requirements, etc.
Even if you don't ultimately contribute, it's still a learning experience.
I'd rather just write it out. I've never used snippets or macros per say, but I do make liberal use of regex replace and multiline cursors lol. Writing out a bunch of getters and setters? Regex!
I did try LLM tab auto complete and while sure, it did suggest some stuff that was useful (after refactoring it), the amount of time I spent WTF'ing some suggestions it made wasn't worth it.
I find more benefit from asking an LLM about something I'm undecided or confused about, and while it's never given me a good enough answer, it has stirred enough creative juices in my brain to help me along lol.
Edit: sorry for the dupes. When Eternity said it failed the send I took that at face value.
I run Silverblue on my work laptop. I haven't really used Distrobox, I just use podman because I'm more familiar with it - under the hood though I believe they're more or less the same though. But in either case, both work just fine on it.
Police and animal control officers used a crowbar to hit the snake on the head until it released its grip and slithered away before it could be captured.
I love the imagery this produces.
I specifically avoided saying they did because I wasn't knowledgeable on the topic. But I agree, I could equally be accused of being disingenuous by phrasing it in a way that could lead people to assume they use closed loops.
I did look those up, and while evaporation cooling isn't the only method used, it also doesn't evaporate all the water each pass, only a portion of it (granted "a portion" is all I found at a quick look, which isn't actually useful).
I do agree though, the water usage is excessive, and when though that water only "changes forms", it's still removes it from a water source and only some of it may make its way back in.
It's the first thing I thought of when the articles about the generative AI polluting itself started coming out.
I've had bad tinkering break my system before, but never had an update break it irreversibly. The closest would actually be on Silverblue itself, when an update to the kernel was using different signing keys that cause the system not to boot. Fortunately it was simple, I selected the previous deployment and I was in (on a non versioned OS I would have selected the previous kernel which most are configured to retain the last few). A quick Google revealed Ublue had a whole kerfuffle and after verifying it was legit, I enrolled the new certs into my MOK.
Although one time on Arch I had installed an experimental version of Gnome from one of their repos, and was pleasantly surprised when that version finally released and I removed the experiment repo and did an update absolutely nothing at all broke. Nothing.