Dutchie987

No. I like cats and having them around is a joy.

If you want to minimize health risks avoid driving, bad food and drugs including alcohol and nicotine. Those will get you, not the absolutely minuscule risk of living with a pet.

We still do Agile Scrum, and our velocity has gone up significantly. Experienced team, mature code base, no real external forces to skew these figures.

Goodhart's Law does not apply, as we have done this for many years and are happy [1] with the way we do things.

[1] for some value of happy

In our company the _measured_ productivity is higher since we WFH.

Oh come of it. Do you think causing major disruption to the life of 'normal' people will change anything at all? Because newsflash: it won't.

These protests of leftist radical psychopaths [1] should be dealt with forthwith.

There is no "global state of emergency", that only exists in your head. Yes, climate change is something we should look into and deal with, but sitting your ass on a highway does not help. At all.

Did Greta walk to the protest? Or did she fly in one of those polluting planes? Ah, thought so.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...

Relax. I started in IT in the early nineties, which in Europe weren't all that great. Not a lot of jobs for developers. Then it got crazy with the millennium bug hype. The sky was the limit! Companies had interviews at car dealerships and if you spelled your name mostly right, you had a well-paying job and rode out in a free brand new car.

Then the dot-com bust happened. Oh no, everybody got laid off, there certainly was no future in IT. Until the market picked up like never before and every developer hopped to greener pastures every few months. Happy days!

Then the financial crisis in 2008 made a lot of frowny faces. After which the growth in the IT market was frankly insane again.

And now, well, it's all on a downwards trajectory again. The days of getting half a million dollars for playing with a two weeks old framework at a startup that bleeds money and never has, or will, turn a profit are over.

The AI hype is just starting, and perhaps it will have to get worse before it all gets better again. But it will get better. Still, the market isn't all that bad now, if you accepts a job at a smaller company that isn't FAANG-level.

Ups and downs. It's never been different.

People have been shouting "the end is near" for millennia. So far, we're still going. Now the singularity is supposedly near. Yeah, just like fusion energy is always ten, twenty, thirty years in the future. But for real now, really!

Just live your life as you see fit. Predicting the future is nigh on impossible anyway and certainly for the big life changing events. The only thing you can be certain of is that resources are getting scarcer and wealth is getting more concentrated by the few rich individuals and multinationals that are doing that already.

Live and worry not for what may be.

When I was in school in the mid-80's flowcharts were already a bit outdated, and I've never seen them since in my 40 years of programming.

The problem with flowcharts is that a real program has so many conditional paths you can't possibly fit it on paper. One solution is to have a very high level flowchart and have separate flowcharts to "zoom in" on parts. I doubt (and the industry seems to think so too) that flowcharts help in any way in modern programming.

I remember this from many years ago. Some truly wonderful little games, all calm and relaxing. Thanks for submitting this!

I've had a few fillings without anesthetic. My dentist told me that most of the pain of drilling is because the drill bit and tooth heat up through friction. Modern drills have water cooling and don't heat up at all. So for shallow fillings there is no pain.

My two root canal procedures did have local anesthetic though. Didn't hurt either.

I got an Acorn A3010 to replace my Amiga 2000. It was a massive improvement! Not for games as there weren't all that many but the more serious software was amazingly good.

Impression Publisher ran rings around every DTP package on the Amiga. It was an all around better machine, for those kind of tasks. I still miss the Draw program that was included in the ROM (!) of RiscOS.

But alas, the PC made it all history. And while I'm happy with my current hardware, it sure isn't as exiting as the older era...

My rules for printers:

1) Buy a printer if you need one, it's way cheaper than renting one.

2) Get a laser printer if you don't need color. Cheap to buy, very cheap to run. Toner is water resistant, ink is not. Might be important if you print mailing labels. Color lasers exist but color fidelity isn't quite there yet. Sufficient for business needs, not for printing photographs.

3) Don't buy an inkjet printer if you don't use it often as the print head clogs up and getting it going again uses up an astounding amount of ink.

4) If you do use it often get one that has refillable ink bottles instead of cartridges.

5) Don't buy anything from HP. This rule is not specific about printers but a general guideline.

My solution for the backup problem is simple.

1) Remove as much data as possible: you don't have to worry about data you don't have

2) Print important documents and store in fireproof safe or bank box

3) What remains fits on a USB stick, just make a monthly copy.

TL;DR: declutter first, only then think about backups.

No screenshots or other information? Is this an email harvesting site?

I'm partial to Waterman inks. Cheap and reliable. That said, Lamy Blue is one of the best blues I've tried.

Why would I need a phone to have a bank account?

Of course I have a bank account, and I can do online banking on my laptop if needed.

Take a look at SFML. Very easy to get started, and quite capable.

https://www.sfml-dev.org/

I haven't had a personal phone for a couple of years now. My employer gave me a phone for work related tasks and this phone is on during business hours and switched off otherwise. My 'digital life' is contained in my laptop and pretty minimal. There are a few blogs I read and I use the internet to search for information and for interacting with companies and the government. I try to minimize my online time. And I'm certainly no luddite. I develop software for a living. I just don't find even more screen time all that attractive anymore.

Nobody has experience in a field until they worked in it for some time. You'll be fine.

Right around the corner, just like it has been for the past five decades. I remain very skeptical about AI replacing programmers. Every revelation in software methodologies has lead to more complexity and replacing one kind of drudgery with more of another. Will AI change our profession? Sure, maybe, probably. Replace us? I don't see it happening anytime soon.

Au contraire, most jobs I see are remote-only or "sparse-hybrid" where the company has no fixed office anymore and teams come together once a month in hired conference rooms.

It seems a lot of office space leases ended and companies did the math.

I thought it would be about the 2009 crash of Turkish Airlines.

- Lose 100 pounds through keto and exercise.

In Europe it's way cheaper to buy mobile data than paying for fuel to drive to an open access point...

The danger from high water doesn't come from rising sea-level. Most of the country is already below sea level and our coastal defenses are ready to withstand the sea for the coming centuries.

What might become a problem though, is flooding of rivers. The Netherlands is a river delta for a large part of Europe. Melting snow in other countries gets transported to the North Sea by several large rivers. If (when) sea level rises it gets harder to get rid of al that water fast enough. Perhaps we have to dam up rivers until low tide and let it all out at once, for example.

Still, we are on top of it and there is still enough time to build higher dams and dikes. We'll survive.

From the help page:

    E-value - Controls the elitism tendency of the generation algorithm. An elitist maze has a short solution relative to the size of the maze, while a non-elitist has a solution going through a larger portion of the maze.
    R-value - Controls the river tendency of the generation algorithm. A maze with a high river factor has few but long dead ends, while one with a low river factor will have many short dead ends.

As I'm far past my student years I don't _have_ to read certain books. So nowadays I read non-fiction the same as fiction: I read until the book doesn't hold my interest anymore. I don't feel compelled to have to finish a book. As you said, not reading bad books (or good books that are just not for me in that moment) leaves more time for reading other books.

I buy enough books, but I mostly read books from the library. Wonderful institutions, those are. Don't like a book? Just return it and get a few others.

Fiction: Blindsight by Peter Watts

Non-Fiction: Classical Music for Dummies by David Pogue

Well done! Bookmarked and I'll be back once the other boxes are unlocked :-)

There was a port of TeX for the Amiga. It even ran from (a lot of) diskettes but a hard drive gave a much better experience, otherwise you kept swapping disks for all the fonts. There is a demo version of it on Fred Fish disk 083.

I find the italic cursive very pleasing and not hard to read at all. It looks exactly like the worksheets I had in elementary school when learning how to write. My handwriting was never that neat but many people in my class had exactly this 'font' when writing. That was a long time ago...