It is important to know that these are books for computer scientists more than for software engineers. They are basically mathematics textbooks, about the mathematics of algorithms. They focus on proving theorems rather than implementing useful algorithms.

There is a book called concrete mathematics that is sort of an introduction to TAOCP. If you’re interested in the basics that may be a good place to start. It has a better title than TAOCP in that it explicitly mentions mathematics, but also an equally bad one because it’s very much theoretical rather than concrete.

Ah the eternal arms race between parents and children. For me it was lights out so I couldn’t read, circumvented with a flashlight under the blanket.

My 80+ year old parents don’t care about ads or AI. They just want a working PC, and W11 won’t install on the cheap machine they got a few years ago. They’re not going to buy a new one because this works perfectly fine.

And yes they tried Linux for several years, but went back to Windows because it was just too much hassle and not compatible with too many things.

It absolutely is a hardware problem.

I wish they would ban me. I haven’t logged in in over 15 years and even block several of their servers, and yet I still get mails that someone in there commented on something.