Don’t mess with computers or AI or other distracting crap. Do ALL the exercises in your textbook. Then get another textbook covering similar material but with different exercises, and do those. The idea is not to do exercises on topic X until you can get it right. Rather it’s to do them until you can’t get it wrong.

Schaum’s Outlines used to be good for upper division college level math. IDK what they have for intro level like you’re describing.

For the factorization you mention, look at the roots of the polynomial, i.e. x^3+1=0. So the roots are the (complex) cube roots of -1. One of those cube roots is -1 itself, i.e. x+1=0. So that is one of the factors: x^3+1 = (x+1)(something). So then figure out what (something) is.

I don’t know of an all-in-one-place guide but there’s not a whole lot to it. Just look up how to do each of the parts you mentioned. I’d say that buying a domain and using LetsEncrypt is not really in the self-hosting spirit (i.e. you should run your own DNS and CA) but it’s up to you. Running a serious CA with real security is quite hard, but for your purposes you can just do whatever. There are various programs or scripts for it. I still use CA.pl from the openssl distro, but that’s very old school and people here hate it. Anyway, you will do a little head scratching to get everything working right, but it will be educational, so you’ll get something out of it in its own right.

The good news is that the guiding document for the AI robots will be called “How to Serve Man”. The bad news is it’s a cookbook. :)

reduced two-day work week

Lol, it will be more like “Soylent Green is people”.

If you’re self hosting Nextcloud, you don’t have to worry about the server operator (i.e. you) enshittifying it against you. There is still some concern towards the software supplier, as we keep seeing with Firefox, but users can react to that.

I’m not really familiar with the situation around Plex since I’ve heard some mixed things, but I don’t use it and have lost track of what is what.

I would consider Firefox to be a bad actor but it’s a bit more nuance than the situation with, say, Chrome. Firefox is involved in the server side as well (i.e. evolving standards that enshittify the web more and more). I would like to have had the web standards frozen some years ago. BIFL should apply to software as well as to physical products.

It’s not just the spam, there is other enshittification like the endless co-option with AI companies and private info disclosure (aka surveillance capitalism) under the self-serving excuse of being anonymized or aggregated.

Most of those are programs rather than services.

Oh crap I missed that. I’m going to delete the post. Sorry.

Brick is an evocative word for something happening to a waterbed.

You have to take that into consideration in your planning. Don’t go full prepper but do diversify your holdings. That’s just basic anyway.

Why is this programmer humor? Also, the site is in Spanish so I can’t read it easily.

Oh neat. I’ve been interested for a while in JS8CALL as a means of long range low power communications. That’s best with HF of course.

The classic UV-5R needs 7.2 volt power if that matters to anyone (not the usual 5V USB brick) but I’m sure users can deal with that.

This is interesting but FT8/JS8CALL on an FM transceiver sounds puzzling and I didn’t know anyone used those modes on those bands.

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You might like “The Cuckoo’s Egg” (1989) by Clifford Stoll, about chasing down a break-in. There was less of an Internet then, so the phone network was a bigger target.

Do you mean programming? Not that much different from a few years ago tbh. Vibe coding may have changed stuff since then. Otherwise, there was less emphasis on online services, so the upgrade cycle was slower and you had to test more before shipping. That was, perhaps, a good thing in terms of software reliability.

No idea what it is but it’s a bad sign that I’m already scared.

I guess better check latest version. But pdf is a pain, it places letters geometrically and loses information about stuff like text flow. You have to use heuristics to put the words and sentences back together.

Pandoc can do epub to PDF but not the other way.

I feel like lots of questions here are trying to elicit training data for AI, or else are disguised marketing surveys. Other people probably also notice and react to that.