I left tumbleweed for alpine and artix because even if you always use --no-recommends for package installation it seems to ship just too much bloat and I left it after it shipped some broken software I didn't need anyway but must've affected system stability too severely, iSCSI iirc
fuck any website that requires an account to just READ it's stupid content and at the same time blocks guerrillamail/10minutemail (looking at you, Glassdoor,I don't want to get fucking spam just so that I can check approximate salary in a company)
CS is also what most problems on leetcode and the like are about. Programming is just application of CS concepts, usually wrapped in several layers of abstraction, to domain specific problems. But I've never seen a job posting for a computer scientist specifically, yet we all know how it often looks like.
depends. Desktop code, sure, reverse engineering from assembly takes some time but some good dissasemblers might be able to produce some C skeleton to start from. Though you might get lucky just exploiting the supply chain of bloated open source with a hellton of vulnerabilities deps/infra like glibc, apache or sudo.
But web code? Sure, minifiers exist but not every website uses them and even if their do, thanks to all the new stuff since ES5 you can for example spend way less time doing something like finding a Math.random() based, ergo cryptographically utterly broken PRNG.
Or for example you can easily rule out whether the website uses header-to-cookie based CSRF protection by just checking the console on any authenticated write-like request. The rest could be automated with things like zaproxy or selenium/curl-impersonate/puppeteer scripts.
only if the definition of success excludes having a stable, well paying position working for someone. I wrote some websites for fun at the age of 13, got into Linux at 12 but does anyone care? No, because that's not commercial experience and that's what matters in the world of job postings written mostly by non-technical people.
also just plain readability. Indentation-based scoping is horrible for larger codebases. Maybe if it was a purely-functional language like Haskell where this sort of scoping works better and all effects are tightly contained. But most larger codebases tend to use python in OO way and that can get messy pretty quickly. Damn, if python had a piping operator like elixir that'd be of a lot of help, actually. Plus there is so much legacy code in a language that had e.g. ternaries long before adding something seemingly so fundamental as switch-case.
Yeah take for instance ransomware. That is easy since a lot of your targets might distrust regular user input but be much less cautious about stuff that should presumably be only accessible internally but isn't actually even properly locked behind a VPN gate so a simple credential stuffing would do and from then onwards it is actually easier than a physical kidnapping since you don't need to worry about using physical force to ensure your victim submits, doesn't escape or recognize you. But then you need to actually be smart to make sure you don't de-anonymize yourself in the process, don't render your operation just some temporary disturbance by ensuring your victim doesn't just restore their backups if your goal is a denial of service until you get paid and not expecting ransom for not releasing breach data.
Or take carding. Not technically super difficult, especially with the whole illusion of security that many non-technical users have (ie the infamous padlock when I can literally set up a phishing site with letsencrypt that'd log all the form data in minutes), but then good luck cashing out on that with all the KYC on virtually every crypto exchange out there and all that granted 3DS doesn't stop you.
tbh the biggest upside of competitive programming sites was when I finally learned some Scala so that I can feel smug about my elegant one-line solutions dabs in a very specific way that makes my arms resemble a lambda /s
also microservices in my experience worsen this sort of bitrot where the amount of usual duplication it involves means that even if you manage not to have poorly documented spaghetti magic that gets updated once in an eon in one service or two it still might be elsewhere and this
discourages refactoring due to the duplication
harms consistency
encourages lousiness because your stuff might mostly work on a surface level with the rest of your system because you only expose APIs and don't need to worry that much about how your methods will be called. Which might seem convenient to use and implement in an ideal scenario, but could easily become troublesome to debug if anything goes wrong.
it had some stability issues, alternatively, also weechat's quite decent since it has quite long history of development