I like our European rules, when we are guaranteed PTO by law and employers would often force you to take it when you accumulated too much unused off days. The system cares even for those who would not care for themselves.

Sounds like what happened to Kerbal Space Program 2… it didn't end well

Slightly off-topic rant:

I hate how the 'VPN' term has been took over by companies selling services using VPN technology.

VPN was initially 'Virtual Private Network' – used to securely connect own (as belonging to an organization or person) devices over a public network. Like securely connecting bank branches. Or allowing employee connect to a company network. And VPN are still used that way. They are secure and provide the privacy needed.

Now when people say 'VPN' they often mean a service where they use VPN software (initially designed for the use case mentioned above) to connect to the public interned via some third-party. This is not a 'private network' any more. It just changes who you need to trust with you network activity. And changes how others may see you (breaking other trust).

When you cannot trust your ISP and your local authorities those 'VPNs' can be useful. But I have more trust to my ISP I have a contract with and my country legal system than in some exotic company in some tax haven or other country that our consumer protections or GDPR obligations won't reach.

Back to the topic:
I do not believe that all VPN services are owned/funded by governments, but some may be. I don't have much reason to trust them, they are doing it for money and not necessarily only the money their customers pay them. In fact I trust my government more that some random very foreign company.

It probably seems extra complexity for you, if your language does not use it. For native speakers it is just natural and not using it would be at least weird.

We could ask the same question about articles . Those 'the' and 'a', why use them? It only makes English language harder to use! 'Apple is apple' why add another meaningless word?

Of course after learning and using English for years I see the meaning of 'a' and 'the' and thy feel quite natural for me to (though sometimes they still make little sense to me – all the fights whether 'The' can be used with some proper name or not). The point is: a lot of features of a foreign language will fill alien and unnecessary.

Maybe more on topic, that is how/why gendered words work in Polish: noun gender is usually linked to how it ends (but do not confuse that with suffixes of grammatical cases). Virtually all Polish women names end with 'a', so any other noun ending in 'a' sounds feminine and would be used in similar way. And sometimes it just 'rhymes' – like in 'to jabkło' ('this apple' – neuter), 'ta gruszka' ('this pear' – feminine), 'ten banan' ('this banana' – masculine). Of course thing get much more complicated than that (like in every language, just in different parts of the language).

People were just talking in the way that it was convenient for them. And thousands years later scholars called this feature of particular set of languages 'gender' because words used seem to be related to genders.

Well behaving programs give control back to the kernel as soon as they are done with what they are doing. If they don't the control is forcefully taken away after some assigned time.

It looks something like this:

Something happens – e.g. a key is pressed – a process waiting for this event is woken up and gets e.g. 100ms to do it stuff. If it can handle the key press in 50ms, kernel notes it used 50 ms of CPU time and can give control to another process waiting for an event or busy with other work. If the key press triggered long computation the process won't be done in 100ms, the kernel notes it used 100ms of CPU time and gives control to other processes with pending events or busy with other work.
After one second the kernel may have noted:

Process A: used 50ms, then nothing, then 100ms, another 100ms and another 100ms
Process B: was constantly busy doing something, so it got allocated 6 * 100ms in that one second
Process C: just got one event and handled it in 50ms
Process D: was not waken at all

So total of 1000ms was used – the CPU was 100% busy
Of that 60% was process B, 35% process A and 5% process C.

And then that information is read from the kernel by top and displayed.

How does the OS even yank the CPU away from the currently running process?

Interrupts. CPU has means triggering and interrupt at a specific time. Interrupt means that CPU stops what it is doing and runs selected piece of kernel code. This piece of kernel code can save the current state of user process execution and do something else or restore saved execution of another process.

Have you ever worked with a computer with modern general-purpose OS like Linux and no RTC? It sucks. It is not strictly necessary, you can live without it, but you need workarounds for basic stuff timestamps in log files or in the file system. At least for a minute until NTP connection is established, but may be longer when internet connection is not available. And when routers are rebooted most often? When troubleshooting broken internet connection. This is also the time when properly timestamped logs could be useful.

And battery backed RTC is cheap. It doesn't fit on a Raspberry Pi board, but can easily fit into a router case. No excuse for omitting it.

Because 3.5mm jacks suck. 6.3mm jacks are much more sturdy and can be easily mounted on 6mm or even thicker cable, which can also handle much more use.

Flimsy jack and thin cheap cable cable is asking for trouble during performance.

The only plus of 3.5mm and smaller 'phone jacks' is their size and in many applications it is much less important than reliability.

Europe used to laugh at American big cars, but recently the cars on our roads get bigger and bigger too :-(

The old business model could not last forever… and even if it could it was not good for anyone.

Think about it

Hosting videos is expensive, someone has to pay for it. It was mostly paid by ads. Ads which many (most people) would block and many people would not ever click even when not blocked. But it still made money… The money come only from ads which 1) where not blocked 2) where at least clicked. The business relied on that.

So YT relied on ads targeting people who did not know how to block ads and people easy to manipulate by the ads (eager to buy whatever they are trying to sell). Probably not the brightest. Or just easy to be taken advantage of. So the incentive would be to promote content for those people. Not good content, not true content, just content that makes ads viewed and clicked.

People using ad-blocks were still affected by those who do not. And whole site was optimized for advertises not viewers or content creators. And that is bad.

I am all in favour of any direct form of payments instead of ads powering the internet. Sites get very little money for each view anyway – so the prices for users should also be quite small.

Unfortunately as long as ads are supposed to be normal part of internet, they may get forced even onto paying customers. We need regulations.

Doesn't sound like the 'cheap small computer you can run your hobby electronics project on' that the original Pi used to be. It is not as cheap and a power hungry beast, still small, though. More and more like a PC and less and less a small cheap embedded platform. For some people it is a plus (I guess for most people here), for some not so much.

I tend to build my projects on Raspberry Pi Pico now, but sometimes I would need something more powerful and Raspberry Pi 5 will be too much.

Sulfur polution actually has cooling effect, so it is kind of opposite of greenhouse gases. It sucks in different ways, though.

Will you change your bank when it refuses to work with Firefox? What if most other banks do the same?

This is how things are in Android now – online banking, online games and even subscription media services are mostly unavailable to those who would like to use non-official OS.

website authors will want to limit their own audience for the benefit of some company?

Many websites already refuse to work with anything not-chrome-based – so website authors often don't care.

Banks see that as 'security', so they are ok with 'losing' a small percentage of customers who want 'insecure' devices. In fact they would hardly lose anything, as their customers usually depend more on the bank, than the bank on any particular customer.

For media providers, that is another 'anti-piracy' measure (DRM) – they will also happily sacrifice Linux users, as insignificant fraction of users, probably less then 'actual pirates' on Windows or Mac. Netflix already won't stream in high quality to Firefox on Linux.

For online game providers this will be easy anti-cheat measure – they will also not care about that insignificant fraction of user.

Each of those service providers would loose maybe 5% of their user base (probably less… as most users would eventually accommodate), but the affected users would use major number of services they care about.