twoquestions

For getting out of the "just follow instructions" rut and for the joy of exploration, I can't recommend Outer Wilds enough. Go in absolutely blind, don't look anything up if you can help it. You'll have to piece together the story from (sometimes pretty obtuse) clues, and you'll have to fly your ship through a quasi-realistic physics simulation. There's no real permanent failure states, and no real dead ends.

I'd be truly shocked if anyone here on this website didn't enjoy this game, if not love it.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/

What I'm really worried about is the people who think this kind of damage is good per se, either out of general misanthropy or some sort of tribal hatred. Meeting these kind of challenges are well within our technical capability, but I fear not within our moral/financial/political capability.

Looks like baby boomers retiring is what's fueled this decline for the last 20 years or so, and the pandemic has forced people to reevaluate their situation.

I'd be shocked if we got back up to pre-pandemic participation barring a WWII style extreme scenario.

This is extremely painful to debug and troubleshoot compared to normal code.

> a good IDE will provide type-checking and even data-source checking to raw SQL anyways

I've never in my life heard of this, which IDE are you talking about? I'd love to use something like that! I'm in C# land where I can use Management Studio to write queries which works well enough, but going between that and Visual Studio does have some friction.

Even though we use Entity Framework here, I mostly use it to manage migrations than to work with data. Most of the time unless a query is really trivial, I'll just write some SQL and use Dapper for object mapping, I find it a lot easier once the query gets to be over three or four lines or so.

"Blizzard is being ransacked by the Woke Mob that doesn't actually care about any alleged abuses towards any employees", "Real wealth is actually shrinking" (while not mentioning climate change), "The Elite are fabricating a casus belli against Regular Working People" (after blowing trillions to help them)?

I'm sorry, I try to be charitable, but this guy reads like a well-written National Review comments section nutter.

I'm in the pessimistic camp too, but the quasi-Stalinist revolution this guy sees coming seems profoundly unlikely.

In addition to this, OP should also prove that these people have others' best interest in mind. Without some sort of accountability, increasing most people's standard of living is irrational. I've read enough early US industrial history and the history of the East India Company to see how this can get horrifying with a quickness.

> applies himself constantly (works after hours, weekends, during vacations). He writes at least 5x more code than me

These are not good things. Ideally you should want to ship as many features with as little code as possible, more parts mean more ways it can break. Working nights and weekends isn't good either, the schedule or scope need changed if people feel that's necessary. Please don't work during vacations barring emergencies, there's nothing good that comes out of that.

I worked with someone like that too, and even though I'm pretty sure we made about the same, I made a lot more hour-for-hour, and my boss found my work perfectly satisfactory. He got more accolades, but I got more time with my family and friends. He also took more time than he thought to get things done, which deteriorated the situation further for him. I hope he's happy at the role he moved on to.

In the face of something like this, I'd maximize my reliability. Sure you'll ship fewer features, but make sure you finish the stuff you start when you say you will, and make sure it absolutely is tested, documented, and functional.

Hope that helped!

> As a recent grad, so many of my friends are heavily invested in TikTok and have been since quarantine began, some of them for a bit before. The amount of time they spend there is absurd. Consuming 30 second content for three hours can't be good for concentration, right? It helps add to the 'always online' mindset that has grown more popular with social media and smart phones.

How do they keep on it for 3 hours?! I've doomscrolled FB quite a bit, but I find even the less doomy stuff on TikTok much more exhausting to watch, like one of those Japanese game shows or shouty YouTube video game meme channels. I can maybe do 10 minutes at most until I need to put the phone down.

Maybe I'm just getting old.

That software is Microsoft Access. Trouble is it's not updated much anymore, and it comes with Excel and doesn't need Corporate Approval, so it has a gigantic moat compared to other competitors.

There's tons of room for improvement, but it will be extremely hard to break in.

To learn yourself, also go over the execution plan when running a query and Google absolutely everything it tells you, and look through the MSSQL documentation at what it all means. It won't lead you to what you don't know, but it will fill in everything you're a bit cloudy on.

One of my favorites to get the very basics is Select Star, especially because you work with real and meaningful data: https://selectstarsql.com/

Use the Index, Luke has also really helped me make queries that don't waste a ton of time: https://use-the-index-luke.com/

Microsoft also has a bunch of paid training classes for MSSQL, if you or your boss don't mind ponying up some $$$. MSSQL is an amazing tool, and it's worth it to really learn how to use it well.

Good luck!

Most of the things in this article are deliberately avoided in cities these days. Sufficient seating, public transport, and walkable streets make things easier for poor/homeless/other untouchables, and making their lives worse is prioritized above making the space better.

If we can fix that, we'd be well on our way to realizing better living spaces like the artist (among many others, myself included) dreams of.

The bigger trouble is going to be convincing people who want to deliberately accelerate climate change, either because it will hurt the people they hate, or can be used as casus belli for the next resource war. "The problem is too many people, luckily we have a solution!" and other horrifying shit like that.

A bunch of people here are getting into the technological solutions to this problem, but I really think the even bigger challenge is the social/cultural barriers to implementing even a proven technology.

Hey, if you had fun building the thing your time was not wasted.

> That said, I've seen many really solid developers be motivated by solving complex technical challenges instead of work that actually creates business/product value.

Complex technical challenges create value for the developer, as it's fun solving problems like that. If management doesn't communicate the end-user's needs/wants and how the product helps them, even valuable work can feel like pushing up Sisyphus's boulder, so working on fun stuff at least creates value for you rather than work that appears to be purely for the leadership's vanity.

What Amazon (among other corporate titans) can do to others, they can do to us eventually, and it won't be the first time even well-off white working men have been screwed over by those who own for a living rather than work for a living.

This shit won't stop until we stand up to them.

I've heard good things about Path of Exile, if you're into Diablo type games: https://www.pathofexile.com/

If you're willing to shell out $6, I can't recommend Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri enough, especially if you're into turn-based civ games. GoG has a ton of older stuff for less than a Hamilton. https://www.gog.com/game/sid_meiers_alpha_centauri

You may also be thinking of Snow Crash. Creepy stuff!

I'm in a small company in that position, what's also helped is wrapping UPDATE statements in a transaction with a verification SELECT statement to make sure everything worked ok, then committing the transaction.

Saved my bacon more than once!

I'll stand by most of the other recommendations here that I've read, here are some books I liked that I haven't seen here yet:

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) is a pretty good and campy series.

The Dresden Files series is also good, I tried to get into it but I hated the mumbly voice actor on Audible unfortunately.

Iain Banks is good, especially Player of Games, Consider Phlebas and The Algebraist. Use of Weapons put a bad taste in my mouth.

Good luck!

EDIT: Forgot to mention Isaac Asimov, I've yet to see anything bad by him. Still trying to get through the Foundation series.

I've been looking for that essay for years, but apparently my google-fu is weak. Thanks for posting it!

A social casual game that's not a giant hairball of money-grabbing dark patterns, that's a tall order.

You might find something here, I've found some pretty good games on Android at least: https://nobsgames.stavros.io/ios/?s=reviews&page=1

Would Among Us be a possibility, or some other Mafia game? Town of Salem might fit the bill: https://store.steampowered.com/app/334230/Town_of_Salem/

I'm going to follow this thread, please comment if and when you find something, I'd really like to know what does and doesn't work for situations like this.

I don't mind the punctuation noise, but I might just have bad taste.

I'm stealing the "had a one night stand in the middle of Chernobyl", that's hilarious!

Can personally confirm. I had to stop lifting when I got a mild COVID case, and a couple weeks in I kept getting the random aches and pains everyone always complains about. At least for me, lifting weights makes them go away (at the cost of some DOMS for a few days, but once you're over that hump you're home free).

One of the devs runs a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pippin

GIMP also has sponsors, though I don't know how much they contribute: https://www.gimp.org/donating/sponsors.html

That still isn't much at all for a program trying to compete with Photoshop though.

Between remote work becoming much more of A Thing and mortgage interest rates being six feet under, this is not surprising at all.

I share everyone else's concerns about what happens if the economy keeps going on it's downward trend, and foreclosures start to happen again. I'm really hesitant to speculate on that.

Driving a decently long way after the lockdown was definitely a bit of a trip, took a minute to get back in the swing of things, but it came back fast.

What is really tiring and overstimulating was going to an outdoor party of about 12 people. Keeping track of the whole social situation was really tiring, when before it was no problem at all.

One thing I really liked about their show, even when I disagreed with their conclusions, they explained how they came to them rather than call people stupid for not believing as they did.

> I actually enjoy working in modern C++ much more than I did in Java

What do you like about working in C++ more than Java?

Generally, I hear from people working in C++ that it's the only tool for their job, and only use it because no other tool measures up (in a despairing tone). If you don't mind my asking, what do you use it for?

I'll try to put this in a nonjudgemental way, and after a few revisions I'm still not happy with the tone of this comment. Sorry about that.

I find it really tough to harmonize the ideas that: 1) If you can't sell your labor to provide for yourself, you deserve to die. 2) You should have kids, and not only cost yourself $100,000 at least, and increase competition for resources.

The cynic in me thinks people want to see others fail so they can feel better about themselves, and more people competing for labor and capital decreasing the demand for labor will increase the number of people who society will deem unworthy of existence. By the odds, any random kid isn't going to change the world, they're just going to be another mouth to feed, and more than likely going to make things somewhat worse for everyone else. This is a blood-soaked all-against-all kill-and-die world, and what is a kid other than another knife pointed at you?

As far as I can tell, this seems about as rational as being proud to put out your own eyes with a red-hot grapefruit spoon.

As far as the "Kids give your life meaning" idea goes, giving one's parents meaning is a lot to put on a baby who can't even lift their own head, or anyone else for that matter. We're told all our lives that we're on our own, that anyone who needs anything from anyone else is weak and doesn't deserve existence (which is both morally wrong and incorrect). At the same time, it's supposedly okay to force a child to emotionally support you? That doesn't make any sense.

I can at least comprehend the racist argument, that it's one's responsibility to have kids to outcompete outsiders. I disagree with it for numerous reasons, but I can at least fit that idea in my head. Maybe that's a reason having kids squicks me out so much, is the only comprehensible argument to me I find repulsive and I've only heard it out of repulsive people.

Is the desire to have kids completely ruled by biological/hormonal factors, or a fear of ostracism for not "doing one's duty"? A lot of people I know and respect are good parents and don't regret having kids, but can't articulate why they did, so I'm not under the impression that parents are all cruel, broken assholes (though in my hometown there were numerous examples of this).

What is it about parenthood that isn't a curse on yourself and everyone else?