SO posts aren't really proprietary. They're CC licensed. Many years ago there used to be lots of actual interesting questions there. When I didn't know the answer and was curious about it, so I researched it. Ended up learning lots of stuff that way. Not any different than posing interesting questions to hackers. The problem with the site is the inclusiveness. Too many dumb questions that I just don't care to answer. It's not like I want to compete with pajeet to see who can post a snippet the fastest.
Points/rep are all meaningless and will naturally increase over time if you're even the slightest bit active. If I log into SO right now, I expect to have like +200 rep since my last visit despite doing nothing, all from random people reading and upvoting my old answers. Sure, you won't get 500k rep that way, but 10k rep is pretty much automatic and just a matter of time. It works similarly to how post count did in forums.
Yeah. Identity management is a real pain in the ass. Besides a couple of discords I haven't interacted with people outside chans. Recently I made an account on romhacking.net to try and help out with one particular project and also write my own game hacking program.
Nolan Nguyen
Then I stand corrected..
Anthony James
...
Easton Gray
Fun thing is: BIOS password resetting is not illegal at all if the system is not stolen. Then again, NBR is full of corpcucks, you post something and you want it removed, not even a DMCA request will get it taken down.
Isaiah Campbell
I'm guessing it is not even illegal if the computer is stolen. It is the stealing part that's illegal.
Even though I can't sign off on your firm refusal of SO I do agree with your approach to solving problems. SO flips the burden, where you lookup your "human" problem and gets a bunch of examples and explanations of how and why and that's not useless, but it's not as fun as solving problems on your own.
I often search error messages and end up on SO and someone will have discovered what that non-sensical error message means.
I'm talking about on an engineering level. If the manual didn't say how to do X with the system you're using, you cannot do X, it's as simple as that. If you decide to do X regardless, it will have bugs and portability problems. But yeah, in practice a lot of systems are so shit that there's no other way than to do a bunch of undocumented stuff and in that case you could just look up to see if someone's already gone there. Then again some of these systems have easy to read source code so you can just look at the source.
