scrapcode

I've never been much fiction reader but I recently picked up The Gunslinger by Stephen King and it has been tough to put down.

I'm going to get left behind as a developer I guess because I still haven't seen output in my niche that's done well enough to just let it go and develop entire projects. I essentially just still talk to it like it's a rockstar dev and it gives me good suggestions and technical talking points on why one paradigm might be better than another.

I feel like I recall this being a thing from close to the very beginning?

I've used one of these delivery services directly only once since they've all existed. They have been pretty blatant scum since the rip.

I had terrible brain zaps on Strattera and didn't notice anything at all in regard to benefits. Probably because I just could not get through taking it long enough.

I'm nearing my 40s. In my mid-twenties I was diagnosed and over the next couple of years tried all of the usual ADHD meds and none of them were short of terrible in regard to side effects. I guess I've just learned to live with it in a way that outweighs the side effects I get from the drugs.

I was diagnosed with Shiftwork Disorder at one point in time and was prescribed Modafinil and it was incredible for the most part and had zero side-effects, but my doctor wont prescribe it for ADHD. One down-side to Modafinil is that I could get stuck on an unproductive task and would realize in hindsight that I had just been hyper-attentative to this unimportant task for hours.

I still can't figure out what the appeal of WoW was, but I'm guessing it was the insanely large community?

I absolutely drop quite a bit of guard if PP G&S is an option. A lot of that being because I have been on the other side (seller, selling digital goods such as dev and design) and have seen how quick PP is to yank those funds back.

Is that a good thing, or is it crazy that such a simple concept (if consumer claims they don't get a product, you provide proof of delivery or we take the money back) has been almost unique to PP for so long?

That's great to hear. I guess what was in the forefront of my mind were how those relationships carry over after your time with that organization is through. There are a group of us that "started together" ~15 years ago that have had each others backs throughout the years in regard to opportunities and plenty of other life events outside of our starting organization. I was also in the military as well and it seems like those early relationships where we were peons (basic training, A-school, first deployment) are the ones that really stick. Maybe there's no correlation and that's just how it worked out for me. I have only worked for 2 organizations completely remotely. The first myself and my group worked very well together and got along great. After leaving, however, the only time I hear from them is when I reach out to see how everyone is doing.

I have been remote working for the past ~5 years or so. I had to RTO briefly for 3-4 weeks, which was about as long as it took me to find a position with a new org. I love the benefits at this stage in my life (young children, etc.) but I'm not sure the networking relationships I developed early on in my career "in the trenches" would be nearly as strong or beneficial as they have been had I started remote. I'm curious to see how that plays out over the long-term for folks that may start remote and attempt to stay that way throughout their entire careers.

The GUI builder was more powerful than the one provided by VS, from what I remember (20+ years ago since I've dabbled in it). I really miss that era. In certain circles you could open an application and almost get a sense as to who built it due to the craftsmanship / UI / attention to detail in the placement of the elements in the application, etc.

When I got interested in flying I took to flight simulators and the VATSIM network[0], as I had seen mentioned multiple times that the radio work can be a difficult aspect of flying to pick up on when flying out of a towered/busy field. By the time I started, I was comfortable on the radio and pre-flight checks, and this seemed to gained quite a bit of favor from my CFI.

I'm not saying it made me a well-versed pilot, but simulating these situations can do a lot to get one going.

[0] https://vatsim.net/

As stated in voxic11's comment, that is not what it did. It did more like a 34DTM.

Is that what it was asked to do? If it was, sure - the onus of accountability should be shifted to the law enforcement agency that decided to act in the way it did on potentially* matching information, as by asking in that way they would explicitly know it was only a potential match.

> as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here.

34DTM != 34DTM10

I am absolutely biased, but there is a lot of attempt to shift or at least share the blame here and not a lot of accountability. Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple, and should not be being used in production for alerting authorities on very serious matters.

We are already very aware that the police overreact and make plenty of mistakes. The obvious here being that even if this was the exact plate criminals can very easily, and do, swap plates - so you shouldn't just aggressively be knocking down vehicles because of the standard screwed in license plate that is displayed on the back. When was the last time you checked your license plate and made sure it was still yours? Would you even know it is yours? It has happened to me.

I understand contributing at least the amount an employer will match, and almost always much more than that. But to "max" it would be $24,500/yr which for many if feasible at all would leave little go into different investment vehicles meaning all of your money is tied behind the rules of a 401k until you can access it, or take that 10% penalty.

Maybe I'm missing something here but diversification is a pretty fundamental investment rule and I'm not sure why the advice doesn't usually follow it here. Putting everything into a "you can't touch this until you're ~55+" bucket seems like quite a risk.

Right, so you max your 401k instead of diversifying a portion into something more liquid, and when something happens before 55 you have to take a major bite out of it just to access that money?

I never personally liked the blanket advice to "Max your 401k." For most, if achievable at all, that would be the most they can invest at all. Even though it is often recommended alongside a proper "emergency fund," that advice leaves little liquidity without major penalties.

> So it is possible, for example, for a teenager to become known as an obsessive proof-checker even though that teenager has no formal credentials.

Hard to cry this as a benefit after locking papers down behind a costly wall for decades.

It basically ended up with me learning that what is mostly pursued is the sharing part of piracy, and not doing that.

I got in a bit of trouble by my parents at the time and probably just stopped pirating stuff for a bit. No more issues from the ISP as we complied with the C&D and I stopped seeding stuff or uploading to shared FTPs (I can't really recall which was the issue at the time)

I feel like there's a responsibility to go into VPNs a bit more. My parents got a mean sounding legal letter from our ISP when I was younger for seeding Scooby Doo. It was both terrifying for me and my parents thought it was much more serious than it was, so I got in quite a bit of trouble.

Also a lot of those are common words that take on a different persona and depth within the field, which can add to confusion.

Ah, I didn't realize (nor that it was possible) they made a shittier version of the Ranger.

Even before SO most of the forums were the same way. You had grumpy ass holier-than-thou guys with 10,000 posts shutting down your questions before anyone else could answer.

The whole damn business model of a forum was to provide a solution to people that didn't want to / didn't know how to RTFM, but everyone was toxic as hell toward one for not wanting to do that.

Similar competition (Nissan Frontier, Ford Ranger, etc.) would start at around $35k these days.

Tale as old as time. When I was coming up it took a $20-40/m investment to get a "dedicated" server that you could start tinkering around on. When you couldn't afford that, you bricked the family PC trying to figure out how to configure your own LAMP stack.

Nowadays you just have to risk accidentally billing your parents CC the tune of multi-generation wealth to get that real-world experience.

I think this is the natural path of things...

I never made it to any hackercons, and haven't kept up with many of the folks I "ran" with back in the day (before social media). And I'm not really sure if I would even remember their handles and such if I saw them today. I remember a fella that went by "proph3t," I believe he was in a band or at least helped with George Smith's website End Effect (looks like it is still up). That guy was a bit older than I was but I remember him being extremely patient and gracious with his time helping me when I was learning PHP.

> out-of-town vacation for the 4th to some location with firework restrictions.

You have quite the faith in code enforcement.

I guess I'm just an old man pumping my fist and yelling at the clouds at this point, but I think compartmentalizing every possible aspect of development and then making each one of those as complex as possible lead AI in the bureaucratic deterioration of the trade.

> The layer of builders and hackers is still there.

Further underground indeed. It's obvious dev for a career and dev as historical dev are already two wildly different things. My fire was certainly extinguished quite a while ago.