Timpy

I think you would probably find a lot of naive programming and other amateur mistakes. Maybe there's a sweet spot where you want to be just smart enough to solve the problem in an elegant way but too lazy to abstract and overcomplicate things.

I don't know at which level of detail this line of thinking stops, but it's certainly somewhere after "we don't know the pitch or rhythm for any of the notes in this piece, we can only make educated guesses." Just because we don't have a clear line where the pedantry starts doesn't mean every discussion on the topic is pedantic.

I got into this habit long before I got into tech, I wasn't even conscious of the reason why. You're right, it's extremely frustrating when a website breaks middle-click to open in new tab behavior.

I was once the sole report of a "senior developer", and the article nails every pain point that caused me to leave. His code had tons and tons of serious problems. The database was a mess; he insisted on storing multiple data points in a single column, querying the entire table, then regexing out the information he wanted in php foreach loops. This was because the database was so bad you couldn't join more than two tables without crashing it. He vetoed everything I tried to do to improve the codebase, really normal best practices. I read books and books and tried coming to him with sources on why we ought to normalize our data, or use prepared statements instead of the unreliable homemade sanitizer function he brewed up. He had been insisting for years that long load times were unavoidable. I was so frustrated with the situation that I didn't bother to help him save face when I fixed everything with a couple of indexes.

I spoke my grievances to the owner who listened with open ears, but he told me directly that it was hard for him to know what to do because it was outside his field of specialty and the senior dev had more experience and a long tenure at the company. I appreciated his honesty, and started job hunting immediately. I only worked under that senior dev for 7 months.

I did Anki religiously every day for 2 years, I managed to internalize a bunch of facts about Japanese and no skills. I knew tons of vocab words and grammar points but I couldn't make a sentence in the heat of the moment to save my life. I know memorization is a part of the game, but it's not the whole game. It's like learning a bunch of music theory without actually touching an instrument.

I am learning Mandarin now and my approach is completely different. Speaking and listening are the most important, I'm letting muscle memory of mouth (and sometimes gesturing tones with my hand) be my memorization technique. Six months-ish in and I can already express myself in rudimentary ways, it's way better than my Japanese was in that time frame. I have some Mandarin Anki decks that I do in the cracks of my day but I never finish my daily cards anymore and I don't spend a lot of time on it. I'll schedule an italki lesson or listen some speak-and-repeat courses instead.

Memorizing the notes in a song isn't learning to play music, memorizing a bunch of vocabulary isn't learning a foreign language.

The sad thing is, this is the same problem TV has had for a long time that YouTube was solving. TV programming will take 10 minutes of content and stretch it into 40 minutes of filler with 20 minutes of commercials. YouTube used to have a much better content to filler ratio in general. "It was said that you would destroy the TV producers, not join them."

>China says Taiwan is a part of them, Taiwan says no, fair enough.

This is the part you're oversimplifying, the CCP does not say "fair enough." Taiwan has the highest democracy index in Asia, and the 8th highest in the world trailing only Scandinavia, NZ, and Ireland right now. It's not arbitrary or silly to the people of Taiwan if the CCP wants to take that away from them.

When I left my last job the owner asked about a counter offer. My new wage was so much higher that I told him even if he offered me that much I would resent him for valuing me that highly and intentionally underpaying me.

I know these heat waves are affecting Europe compared to the US because they don't have AC to deal with it. I don't understand why this isn't an issue for parts of the world where they also don't have AC but reach these temperatures all the time? I'm not criticizing the people affected, I'm genuinely curious what's different in Europe compared to equatorial populations without AC? Or do people die from heat all the time in less wealthy countries and we just don't hear about it? I'm really sorry to see a headline like this, I'm not skeptical or critical, I just want to understand the world better.

More realistic example: The contractors in charge of the dam cut corners to pocket some extra money, but they'll be dead before the dam breaks anyway so they move into the valley. Land developers paid off the government to open the land for construction despite it being unsafe. Bankers gave predatory loans to those who would not otherwise be able to afford a house in the valley. The public has been misled and everybody is under the assumption that their society has reached a new age of prosperity where everyone can now live in the valley. At the last minute, the politicians, bankers, dam contractors, and land developers use their private helicopters to leave the valley before the flood crashes down.

>no brownie points for just building random things

That's kind of what hackers do though isn't it?

A Japanese woman explained to me that they blast the AC really hard in the summer and she keeps a blanket in her office because it gets so cold. Japanese summers are hot and humid but men still wear suits to the office. I heard about some campaigns to change this behavior while I was studying Japanese, it does seem kind of wasteful when you think about having to toss on a jacket to stay warm during the hottest part of the summer.

If I unknowingly named my command the same as some system command and the custom command ends up earlier in my path it doesn't really cause any problems does it? I wasn't using that system command anyways, and my custom command is only going to take priority if my .bashrc file was run first.

>The trick is to rely on decades of acquired arcane knowledge

I hate windows as much as the next person, but to be fair that's kind of how command-line life works on Linux too isn't it?

I see where you're coming from but this kind of ends up being the worst of both worlds in some ways. I think the invaluable family support happens when you're down the street from grandma and grandpa and you've got a sick kid that needs somewhere to go while you're at work. It would be most ideal if the in-laws moved to Munich as well, although I realize that may not be a reasonable ask.

It's seagrass, if you want to save a click.

If I had a voluntary gap like this and I put something like "Sabbatical" on my resume and made a few notes of how I spent my time I wonder how that would go over. The last time I was in the interview process I saw my interviewer as a kind of interviewing pro, it wasn't until I got hired that I realized he was just a guy and he had really only interviewed and on-boarded a handful of people before.

Having a walkable city makes frequent grocery shopping much more comfortable. When I lived in Osaka there was a grocery store between my apartment and my nearest station. I only had to meal plan a day at a time, my food was always fresh, I never bought more than I needed and ended up tossing out food that I didn't get around to cooking. Every grocery store was walking distance to another grocery store, all the way from my place to the downtown Namba. Grocery shopping in the states is such a pain in the ass that I don't want to do it more than once a week, and my friends have trouble understanding why I hate car culture.

Wow this was definitely a pessimistic click for me, I was thinking "trying to replace SQL? How stupid!" But it just looks like SQL with all the stuff you wish SQL had, and some more stuff you didn't even know you wanted.

I started with a career related to my free time hobby but I ended up hating my job and hating my hobby, my life is much better now.

I'm sure you had an array of considerations when buying an electronic safebox, but this is the bottom line as to why I would never buy one.

As a programmer my day job is "this isn't working the way it's supposed to, lets figure out why and fix it." I can't fathom ever wanting to deal with that stuff when I get off work. A lock and key have been working just fine since the Roman times, it's relatively easy to conceptualize how it works, the things you can troubleshoot on it is a relatively short list, the UX surface area is small and predictable (it's just a lock and a key). I could go on for a long time. If something got along just fine before bluetooth and wifi existed then I never want to own a version that requires bluetooth or wifi.

I wrote a bash script for this and binded it to some key commands in Linux Mint. Winkey+T will launch a terminal if nothing is open, or cycle through terminals if there are any open. I have other keys for other programs. I'm relatively new to Mac, looks like I need to check out Alfred.

I don't think 1000mg is a small dose, I'm not a doctor but that seems like an extra-strength portion to me

In the music department at my university the vocalists had to take two different foreign language classes for this reason, and they were _supposed_ to learn the meaning of everything they sang so they could capture the feeling of the song. Bullshitting your way through those kinds of inflections is the voice undergrad's version of slapping a paper together the night before a deadline.

Massive social media sites are affecting public discourse, elections, international politics. I don't have a Twitter account, but I don't have any choice but to participate in a society that has polarizing hot takes boiled down to 280 characters.

None of the games I play these days are CPU intensive so while I understand FPS is important to a large group of gamers I have never paid attention to it. Before clicking I thought "does frame rate really matter for Mario 64? How big of a difference can it make?" I'm absolutely blown away, I can't believe how smooth this looks. I don't know what else to say, I'm speechless. Stellar job. Vroom vroom.

I decided a while ago that I'm going to live my life as if this were true despite not having scientific evidence to support it. When people retire they're in danger of rapid decline if they stop living a rich and active life, exactly as you said. You need physical, mental, and social stimulation. My grandmother is in her 90s and doing really well considering her age, and I can see that she walks, read books, and meets friends all the time. I pursue physical and mental stimulation constantly; running, yoga, lifting weights, practice music, learn new languages, programming, reading books, etc. (I admit I have a bad habit of neglecting social needs.) If I am lucky enough to "retire young" from software I plan on pursuing a new career in some passion field. I've chosen to believe that slowing down is my choice and right now I plan to choose not to.

I know all of this is anecdotal, you can go ahead and preface every sentence I wrote with "I think/In my opinion..." but in this case n really does equal 1, I only have 1 life to live. Even if there is absolutely no correlation between my observations and reality, with this strategy I'm only at risk of a life well lived.

A lot of comments are about the organization, I have a few actionable tips for you to work on by yourself. I joined a remote company a year ago and there are some things I did that helped a lot.

I made a Trello board with a default card that was a "Todo list" that I copied for every ticket. The checklist was an overly detailed how-to for our company workflow. Like "1. Pull main, 2. Branch off of main." And later when the dev work is complete, things like "run tests, write merge request, deploy to qa server". The process wasnt hard but it was long, and keeping it on a Trello board with a checklist for every ticket I did helped me offload the mental load and keep me consistent so I made fewer beginner mistakes in that regard. Just having a progress bar was invaluable, being able to log in on Monday and answer the question, "where was I with this ticket?"

The other thing I did that was really helpful (and unfortunately probably only applicable if you are working remote) was that I screen recorded all of my meetings. Most meetings were massive information dumps that I had no context for, it was like trying to collect rain water with my bare hands. So if I got help on how to work on a ticket I would have a video I could refer back to of a senior dev screen sharing with me, explaining how things work, which files I should be looking in, and answers to whatever questions I was asking along the way. I still had to bother people for clarification later, but I didn't have to ask them to repeat themselves.

The final thing I would recommend is to start taking notes as if you were going to give them to the next new hire. It helps you distill your own knowledge and it helps future-you when you have to come back to a thing you haven't done in a few months and you nearly forgot everything. I was dumping notes in the slack channel to myself at first, I recently downloaded Obsidian and I just started playing with that. Find what works for you.

I've been at this job for 14 ish months now and I only recently felt like I got over the beginner's hump, and I still have bad days. It's okay, you'll get there.

Actually you were right, I am talking about NKY/Cincinnati

I don't feel like this is lying ir false speech or anything. I am from the suburbs of a medium sized city but distinctly not from that city, as my home is across across the river and in a different state. Still when I travel and people ask "where are you from?" answering that I'm from that city is the easiest way to give the correct picture. Someone making polite conversation doesn't want to hear this explanation, if I'm chatting with an Uber driver I'll just say the city because it's easier, if I'm making new friends I would explain. I don't think there is any lie in either explanation it's just different shades of a communication in a world full of non-binary situations.