Firefox a few years ago would kill my Mac battery in a couple hours, now it’s as good as safari for energy management. No reason not to use it as a daily driver now.

This is solid advice. Learn the fundamentals, and maintain conversational knowledge of more cutting edge tech. As you get stronger in the fundamentals you’ll be able to speak intelligently about why you might choose to use some new fangled thing.

No idea where they’re coming from, but people have been exchanging files on IRC files for year, why stop now? The obscurity of it is probably the only reason it’s still around, it will never get enough attention for traffic to overload the servers, and nobody will bother trying to hit them with lawsuits.

Libgen is great for popular books, but the above guide is amazing for finding basically anything else. I’ve often needed to load up IRC to find more obscure books.