npsimons

I don't want to be unfriendly, but I'm at work to get shit done because I'm getting paid. If someone wants to talk hobbies, we can do that another time.

There are a lot of bad companies out there, and it's all well and good to say "find another job", but not everyone has that luxury.

But management doesn't care. They don't even care about productivity. It's all about keeping up appearances, having butts in seats, and I'm so, so sick of it.

I learned VI on some UNIX tools my father installed on our DOS computer in the 90's. Then I learned Emacs in 2000 and have been tweaking my setup ever since. Sure, it's not perfect, every few years when I have some down time I will spend a day fiddling with things heretofore unlearned, but the general setup has worked well (and gotten better) for two decades.

How many other editors have come and gone in that time?

Even without autocorrect (say, with Hacker's Keyboard on Termux), I still get frustrated by mistyped keys. "Up arrow" instead of space in bash, "o" instead of "p" in org-mode (with speed-commands).

I miss my N900 physical keyboard.

That said, I agree with GP that environment variables are super useful and super simple. But I've also been burned more than a couple of times by setting something in the past and then having it caused unexpected bugs that are hard to trace down as they aren't in my working memory. They're a double-edged sword, to be sure.

It's three things! Just write them down somewhere. Heck, put them in a text file and check it into git.

I ran into a similar mindset with someone asking about BMI on another forum I frequent and someone suggested a website. It's two math operations! Just open the calculator on your phone (yes, even flip phones have one), or on the computer you're reading this on.

ETA: For those wondering, here's the three things as I heard them:

  1. Something that made you smile or happy:
  2. Something you are grateful for:
  3. Something you did well:

I'm not sure when you started using PDFs (I remember mid-90s when my Dad told me about this cool new document format that would standardize formats across platforms, screen and paper!), but hardly anything is static any more.

Empathy is a vastly underrated (and underdeveloped) skill.

1. Get book recommendations and research topics from being online (expand your "surface area").

2. Step away from the computer.

3. Read books from step one.

Granted, I need to take this advice myself, but the problem is I've been conditioned by variable rewards (akin to gambling) to keep scouring online for "more content", but it really pays to do deep dives on a regular basis, it's just the reward is usually far off and spread out over time.

Perspectives from the past are super interesting. In "Teton Tales" by Paul Petzoldt, he describes chopping down a tree and tying it with rope to a car to use it as a brake going downhill, back in the early days of cars where brakes weren't so good. Crazy stuff! I need to finish that book someday.

OTOH, I really need to get back into a habit of reading books, every day. I used to go through a goodly number of non-fiction books on a regular basis (another good book, "The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master" says you should read at least one non-fiction book in your field a quarter), but recently I've just lacked the discipline and habit to do so. I find myself reading a lot online, but so much of it is so low information and not in-depth enough.

That said, I also try to partake of fiction, although in that regard I'm not doing great either, as I opt for a lot of passive fiction in the form of video. Fiction can be just as good for expanding the mind, even exercising empathy. Just reading speculative fiction (to give a broader term to science fiction) can exercise one's mind in visualizing things or give one new ideas. Heck, Google Earth was supposedly inspired by a technology in "Snow Crash".

ETA: There's some great "forgotten" fiction out there, which hasn't been turned into other formats yet. "The Stars my Destination" and "Lord of Light" are excellent. Which reminds me, another good source I've found for books is /usr/games/fortune

Oh, he's one of that kind of cunts. Someone with an axe to grind against FLOSS because he obviously hasn't studied history of copyright in addition to his misunderstanding of FLOSS.

JFC. I'm sorry, but this "article" can be dismissed on that alone. Software vendors already are inserting spyware into their "wares." Did the author do any research?

But I do try to exercise my empathy and recognize for some endeavors it's is useful to collaborate. I just wish that people wouldn't attribute intrinsic necessity of physically close collaboration where it is not warranted.

My purpose or activity, even after I'm financially independent will be writing software, something I can do without having to be in close contact with people I am working with, and I in fact am much more productive when I'm not.

And honestly, even at 40 hours a week, I still have a lot of time in which I've formed my best social relationships. My coworkers are nice people, I just have shockingly little in common with them outside of work.

As with complaints against "working from home", I get the feeling that proponents of work socializing recognize there's a problem, but they have mis-identified the root cause.

Judging from how academics across the world, and even across decades if not centuries create new knowledge all the time, I'd say it's not a barrier to work remotely, whether that's in time or space.

To try and empathize with a lot of the people bemoaning WFH, I believe they are just suffering from quarantines in general. I truly believe many of them would do fine if they could WFH 100%, but be able to go out with friends on weeknights and weekends.

You are absolutely right that the office is a pisspoor substitute for real comraderie, and I wish people would stop conflating the two.

We can quibble about the semantics of "parallel" programming all day, but I think that either too broad or too narrow a scope for the term misses the point: that data coherency is what makes parallel programming hard.

In the ultimate reductio ad absurdum, you can just say it falls into one of the two classes of hard computer science problems, that being "cache invalidation", where the "cache" is some form of shared data. In this sense, I agree with you: it's not the parallelism per se that's hard, but I think anyone talking about the difficulty of it quite clearly is referring to the shared data problems.

I'm pretty sure that anyone who's come into even vague contact with parallel programming understands that the hardest part is communication and synchronization.

Your post feels incredibly pedantic.

I've got tons of ideas and cool projects I want to work on (some I've even made decent progress on in my spare time), but I don't know if they'd be profitable, nor do I want to worry about that. I just want to code on stuff I like.

This is exactly why I'm pursuing leanFIRE. Even if I hit the jackpot, I would still be toodling on personal software projects for the rest of my life. Not saying I'm any Michelangelo, but I would have to be trained not to write software. I'm just aiming to set my own priorities instead of working on things I'm not passionate about because I simply need the money.

I keep wondering if I shouldn't quit the day job and start a software shop, but even that sounds an awful lot like work where you trade one relentless taskmaster for another. I sure as shit don't want to have to worry about market share, I just want to make cool (to me) software.

[0] - https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/