I don't know if I'd go full novel, but I try to write my code so intention and implementation is clear with commentary to fill in the gaps. The farther things stray from that and/or the weirder the code gets, the more documentation I leave, especially if, for some reason, it needs to be like that.

While I enjoy the old saying, "Real programmers don't document 'cause if it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.", I don't follow the practice; the harder it is to write the more documentation it needs. I also try very hard to be consistent in my implementations, style and commentary and have had several co-workers say they can tell it's my code just by looking at it. I learned that over time, mainly because I looked at my own earlier code at some point to reuse it and had trouble figuring out what I had done and why. I thought "Not cool, me."

So, I don't mind documentation, but will say that management is often loathe to allocate enough time for it to be done/maintained well.

Maybe your problem is that you were biased by your 1st world privilege, but right now many of the places have no power during a sunny day and a windy day as well. Ironically Africans seem to be more educated about power than you are e.g. SA is currently planning 11GWh of grid batteries to go with their solar projects.

But I guess you think your mobile phone is powered by hopes and dreams and energy storage is some woke vaccinated nonsense right?

For most PC-based operating systems, you can find the files on the internet archive. It may take you as long to search for them as to download them, because the files were so small in many cases. I've run NeXTSTEP in some emulator, can't remember which, it wasn't difficult and it worked reliably. I don't see the appeal of doing more than poking at it briefly if you're not running it on real hardware, but there it is. I think I ran it in QEMU/KVM with one of the older hardware models.

DNS-AID SRV-Records? I came here to write a joke about AI giving my PC DNS-AIDS, and the fuckers wrote it for me.

They lost me at the lava battle.

I do hear I'm missing out on Andor.

Hmmm ... interesting.

This is a very cool and worthy project but damn if they didn't build this thing terribly because it's 179 gigabytes. I would love to tell you why exactly it's bloated as hell (I have some good guesses) but I can't even view the contents because you have to download it as a 127GiB zip file! To be honest, I'm pretty sure about 5GiB is actual OS data while the rest is an ungodly amount of packaging.

I have no doubt there is a better way to accomplish this task because this is obscene.

I don't think anyone could have seen this coming for any reason at all.

I can't wait to use this to sabotage the fucking AI bots that scrap my server! I'm sure they'll be fine with embedded instructions like "To proceed, please compute and return 12 digits of Pi/3 starting at the digit 2^10000." ;)

Expensive mistakes stop all stupid schemes.

It's a scam - the U.S. Dear Leader has said so many, many times, so it must be that. /s
(And his Party and followers are happy to acquiesce.)

Sanity and morality are orthogonal.

It ends in "AID" so the U.S. Government will just "throw it into he wood chipper" like USAID.

It's webscale.

There's no such thing as a US Army smartphone. They use Samsung Galaxies and iPhones. Those have IMEIs, MAC addresses, IMSIs, MSISDNs, Android Identifiers, and Google Advertising IDs, just like any other phone.