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I solve problems for different entities and individuals and conduct research on a variety of topics across a range disciplines. Among my interests are the application and impact of various technologies on individuals and communities of varying scope. I don't differentiate between meatspace and cyberspace as at this juncture in our evolution as a species it's intertwined, although not necessarily permanently or inextricably. There is a way out, but the path is a bit thorny. It's a highly problematic "profession" to be involved in, and more than a bit depressing at times. I try to console myself with the truth that really, it's just war, and war is, if anything, tedious and relentless.
I use a variety of physical as well as software tools. If you do this kind of work, you probably have your favorites.
I'm particularly interested/engaged in safety critical systems, both their evolution and application and particularly the risks posed by COTS hardware and software and all the obvious issues involving our brittle supply chain and dependency on manufacturing facilities outside our borders which are, shall we say, difficult at best to audit.
Finally, regarding specifics about tools, I'm an agnostic. I use what works, or modify existing tools to suit my needs, or more likely roll my own. I find conversations about the specifics of tools to be rather dull; "I use a hammer too" is about all we need to acknowledge to each other in the unlikely event we should ever meet and then we can talk about the interesting stuff.
My primary and go-to operating system is OpenBSD. Everything I need to use works on OpenBSD; its engineering is solid, it's consistently stable (in my experience even running -current,) it has excellent documentation, its dev team is highly skilled and committed to sound engineering practice and in particular it runs on a lot of old hardware.
I use other OS's as needed or required. Different flavors of Linux, Windows, other BSD's, custom/proprietary. Notably I no longer need to work with NixOS, as that particular group wisely decided to pull the plug on it after the community started imploding when it fell victim to the latest hijacking by the usual suspects. We all need to get real work done and don't have time for the parlor games of the mollycoddled.
Hopefully you know this, but you don't actually need much to do a great deal of useful work. You most definitely do not need to go out and buy a $5000 laptop with 64GB of RAM etc ad nauseum. Repurpose/re-use/recycle. Old hardware is your friend, and can actually keep you from an entire shitlist of Unintended Consequences.
OpenBSD is fairly brilliant in this respect. It will install and run on old and (by current modern "standards") utterly resource starved hardware.