madiathomas

I keep on postponing the trip. I always tell myself that I will go next year. Been postponing for 20 years now. People who stay closer to something rarely values it. Most people closer to the national parks will pick Eiffel Tower over going to the national park anyday. Vice versa.

I hope you aren't assuming animals are roaming streets of Africa. I live 60km away from Kruger National Park but have never seen an elephant strolling down a street. Majority of us also go to the zoo to see elephants, just like everyone else.

One little correction -> Meat has zero carbs. All kinds of meat.

From the article:

"Then why 6502? Why not a useful assembly language, like x86? Well, I don’t think learning x86 is useful. I don’t think you’ll ever have to write assembly language in your day job - this is purely an academic exercise, something to expand your mind and your thinking. 6502 was originally written in a different age, a time when the majority of developers were writing assembly directly, rather than in these new-fangled high-level programming languages.

So, it was designed to be written by humans. More modern assembly languages are meant to written by compilers, so let’s leave it to them. Plus, 6502 is fun. Nobody ever called x86 fun".

ARM and AVR may be better and more recent options but they probably won't be good for introduction purposes.

That sounds like a very good plan. You get a Silicon Valley pay but a cheaper cost of living.

Silicon Valley. High pay compared to where I stay. Companies based at Silicon Valley are working on interesting products. Developers in South Africa with University degree and 10 years experience and higher, earn less than $100k per annum. No startups working on interesting products here in SA also. You are stuck with big banks if you want to make money.

I disabled Windows Update service on my laptop which is using Windows 10. Search for Services, scroll down to Windows Update, disable the service. I live in a country with very expensive data bundles. I simply can't afford to keep Windows Update service on.

I am much happier when I have cold hard cash at the bank than when I am owning shares. The moment I buy shares, I watch my portfolio like a hawk. My happiness starts to depend on how the portfolio is doing. When the numbers go down, my happiness level drops. Vice versa. It becomes an obsession.

Instead of thinking about coding and other things that occupies my thoughts on a normal day, I start to think about markets when showering, sleeping, eating, driving etc. When I am investing in index funds, I don't experience such. That's why I only invest in index funds these days.

In South Africa, elections day is always declared a public holiday. Only essential services workers like healthcare, military etc work on that day. Essential services workers vote before elections. Rest we get a day off. But then again, some people still abstain from elections.

Hahaha. You are so right. Majority of people have negative net worths. They owe more than they own.

Oracle already won a case that deemed APIs copyrightable. Which is bad for the industry at large. Except for Oracle and patent trolls off course. Google is now arguing whether it copied code in a fair way or not. They can't argue that they didn't copy anymore because they have already lost that case.

What is happening now is more like proving to your lecturer that you didn't copy your whole assignment from Wikipedia. You only extracted some information from it and majority are your own.

Bootcamps are filling a void which existed for a long time in the CS industry. Most of the time, A CS grad is hired to do a job that can be done by someone with little programming knowledge. I feel it is a waste of resources to hire a CS grad to do CRUD app with maximum 5 users on a very good day.

Now companies can use people from bootcamps for such kind of jobs and use CS grads for deep and high level stuff. Surely some top bootcampers will be able to do high level stuff too.

Thanks for the information. I didn't know that there is so much surveillance from our government. Snooping on journalists isn't on at all. Now I know my text messages aren't safe.

In South Africa, we had this kind of checks since 2003. Not only are you supposed to present an ID book, you are also required to bring a verifiable proof of residence.

While visiting Mozambique a month back, I used a passport to buy a SIM card. Seems like Germany is just catching up with the rest of the world.

In South Africa, we have had this kind of legislation since 2003. It is called RICA(Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information Act). Shops aren't allowed to sell a SIM card without proof of identification. Foreigners can use their passports to register a SIM card.

It takes few minutes. This was done to fight identity theft. We don't have terrorism problem here because people who used to be regarded as terrorists(freedom fighters) by former unjust, apartheid government are now in power. If your SIM card is registered under your name, no-one else will be allowed to do a SIM swap on it. Only you can do such after providing proof of identification.

I feel it makes it easy for the law enforcement agencies to track down criminals if they used the SIM card to commit crime. Our government doesn't have history of invading privacy of their citizens, which makes it easier to trust them.

I support the idea of dividing C++ into two. That way people can start by learning top C++, use it for some years and start to use features which are on bottom C++ after gaining some confidence.

After seeing your work, I can safely say I wouldn't mind paying you to teach me design.