If it’s ONLY the resistors and you magically know which ones: add solder to one of the pads, hold resistor with tweezers, melt solder with iron, push resistor into molten blob and position so it touches the second pad, remove heat so it’s frozen in place, then solder second pad.

Who pays for their servers?

NixOS is for people who have accidentally uninstalled 90% of their system because they didn’t pay attention to what other packages depend on the thing they were uninstalling and were desperately looking for a an undo button.

Yes normal password but it happens super early on mine, and once you log in there is a boot progress bar afterwards. This is an Intel Mac, might be different on apple chips.

Mac will ask you to “log in” very early in the boot process to decrypt the disk, I assume it keeps the drive key encrypted with your password somewhere.