Gnome-Software and GDebi can do exactly that for you. Download a deb, right click “open with X”, and they’ll install it for you using GUI. You can even change file associations so debs are opened by gdebi/gnome-software by simple double-clicking.

I used to work night shifts and sometimes had to function afterwards, sometimes for long periods of time. What helped me to stay awake and somewhat clear-minded is light physical activity. Don’t sit too much, move, walk around, do some squats, do push ups if you can. Get some fresh air. Cold water on the face helps. If your eyes tend to get tired get some eye drops (artificial tears). And of course coffee helps too.

Also be careful, it’s easy to lose balance in a sleep deprived state. So no dangerous surroundings if you can help it.

I don’t. I feel it takes a few hours (4-5) for my body to wake up enough to feel hunger, and if I force myself to eat breakfast I feel queasy. So I just eat black coffee and move on.

As a read-only SO user - thank you for your answers!

Fourth panel as well, with those bots collecting data for AI training that don’t respect your robots.txt, change user agents and overload your servers

You don’t. I don’t. We don’t. My comment could have been written by AI, just as your post. At some point I’m sure some of us, without knowing, had a discussion with an AI bot pushing some sort of propaganda or shilling something. I mean, it was happening even before AI - years before, and some political regimes have been flooding the internet with their shit and it was well documented. Now it’s just getting worse.

Even “vetted account run by a real person” can be later handed over to an AI bot farm.

Also, I have fun imagining a bunch of AI bots stuck in a discussion loop, endlessly shilling crap to each other, creating insanely long threads until the platform can’t handle it anymore or until a Mod AI comes along and slaps them out of it.

World of Warcraft plugins and Awesome WM configs. There are some decent 2d game engines that use Lua too, like Love2d!

Get a new IP that’s unrelated to your home and unrelated to a non-residential VPN service, and purge your browser’s data. Keeping the old laptop should be fine, I think.

if I make my account at a different location, but return home and sign onto it from there, will Reddit still pick that up?

No idea, but that wouldn’t surprise me.

A place where you can rent a PC. Any regular internet cafe or a public library should work too.

Reddit bans people for using a VPN, so you might have been banned for that and not tracked back to your original account. Get a residential VPN/Proxy, they are usually a bit pricier than the normal ones, or just go to a friend’s house and use their IP to register.

Not that it will help in the long run. Their AI is running rampant. If it doesn’t ban you for this, it will ban you for that, or for a myriad of other “reasons”.

Shadowbans by, what looks like, AI automation

Too risky. Who knows what’s hiding in their code. Might be some copylefted library or a piece of code that’s been copy-pasted into the project without fully complying with the copyleft requirements. Making sure this isn’t the case and/or cleaning up an abandoned project can be costly and complicated. Easier for them to just kill it.