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The Navy guy tried too hard to sell the upsides without telling me any of the downsides and I knew there were a lot of downsides. Said my asvab score could get me in nuke and great pay, that I could see the world. The Air Froce guy told me like it was. Guess who I trusted more?

I went into the armed forces recruiting office a year or two ago for Air Force Cyber and the adjacent Army and Navy recruiters were complaining that no one wanted to join while everyone was asking for Air Force when the Air Force recruiter was out for most of the year because he had met his quotas. Somehow I ended up in the Navy office and suffice to say I left the office with a big no to the Navy man no matter how much he tried to persuade me with promises of seeing the world. I have the internet for that thank you.

All my vet friends said to reconsider and I wisely followed their advice.

Thanks for the insights and great advice.

Mind giving some examples of works you've experienced as 'bad'? I've been looking into hobby writing myself and I know my beginning work is going to be atrocious but it would be helpful to have some examples of what not to do too to hasten the improvement process.

If making fun of Altman's nose will get your account deleted, will giving it a compliment help reinstate the account?

Serious question.

How is it the same? Apple runs a closed ecosystem and has shown it doesn’t care for gaming for a long time so its user should know that by now. Linux is an open platform and the results show. SteamDeck is running on Linux and can run most Steam games. Macs still can’t. Apple users should take responsibility on this one.

Wow, that many guarantees should persuade me to base my tech stack on Bun and Zig.

Seriously, I think this question is worth asking. Why was Zig chosen as the language when it’s not even stable, and what implications does this have for the long term viability of the project (besides the fact that its _fast_)? Zig’s head guy isn’t even sure when Zig will hit v.1.0, and Bun’s head guy hasn’t really responded either AFAIK.

> Why would you invest yourself in a space like that?

Low barrier to entry. Convenience. Ease of use. Sign-up and now you can talk to your friends from across the world!

Now, you have to be force-fed shit ads along the way.

I don’t think anyone who values their social life would like it if you put it like that, but inertia and the gravity of network effects are a bitch.

The real problem is these private platforms have the power of public utilities, and we treat them like public utilities until they pull the rug from under us, and siphon our data to profit psychopathic overlords.

Furthermore, these companies don’t just throw ads at you, they also aid the surveillance state which can compromise your basic rights to privacy and fair elections. Malicious foreign governments use it to influence elections with false information and propaganda. Malicious domestic government can use it as a easy spying tool by buying or scraping data.

No one will be safe on these things until we get proper government regulation. The EU’s GDPR is a step in the right direction but more work needs to be done.

The MacGyver military-industrial complex is something you just have to see to believe. Cheap Macguyver warfare makes a lot of sense economically for an economy like Ukraine’s.

Meanwhile in the US:

On top of the $22.4 billion it cost in research and development, the USS Zumwalt, one of three Zumwalt destroyer class ships, cost over $4 billion to create….Military Watch Magazine reported issues back in 2018, saying that the USS Zumwalt “suffered from poorly functioning weapons, stalling engines and an underperformance in their stealth capabilities, among other shortcomings.”

Sometimes, worse is better.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer#:~:t....

https://veteranlife.com/military-news/uss-zumwalt/

It would to me. Any employer who wouldn’t negotiate on something like this for a job that does not require being in-office is potentially toxic.

Commuting can be expensive and even potentially dangerous. Car, insurance, gas, dangerous traffic, time wasted driving at least 2x a day.

There’s also the potentially unproductive office environments: loud, annoying co-workers, constant interruptions, etc.

RTO has costs, WFH has benefits and employers who don’t recognize that should be shunned. If the reason they require you to come back is because they wisely rented office space and didn’t even consult the employees on whether the workers would return, that should tell you how much you can trust management and how much they value you as an employee.

I did actually, but it gave a massive amount of errors so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it seems like I don’t miss it that much.

I was getting sick of Window’s bloat and telemetry so I replaced Windows on every single one of my computers with PopOS! and have never looked back. The transition was rough ( I basically gave up gaming to learn programming) but I have no regrets, and this post just validates that decision. Micro$ cannot and should not ever be trusted.

I do miss Paint.NET though.

I've been using DDG for a few months for almost all my searches now. It gets me the results I want almost all the time. When I do switch to google when DDG isn't enough, google gives me SEO crap and I go back to DDG, rephrase and focus my search and get the results I want.

Why does google serve up so much irrelevant crap nowadays?

Q: Is life short?

A: It's actually quite long.

LOL. That's not the message I got from Life is Short.

OTOH, there's a chance I may be severely misinterpreting his essay.

Read my comment again. I made no mention of education systems implemented in communist states. I said educational communism, education where everyone is pulled towards the mean no matter their individual effort or talent.

Exactly. I have no idea how people can’t differentiate between educational communism and education systems that were implemented in communist states. Was my wording too confusing?

I don’t like those MBAs anymore than you but blaming this group is disingenuous and an oversimplification. Business schools train people to profit, and if that comes at the cost of secure supply chains and national security, who cares, it’s not their problem. Someone else mentioned that this is a coordination problem, and I think that’s more accurate. You need governments to help fund these capital intensive ventures and incentives like tax-breaks and the fear of supply chain destroying pandemics to urge them on.

Indeed. A disgrace for education but a win for educational communism. It’s a good thing the US can import talent because California’s students are being trained to be cognitively lazy. How will these children fare in a society that is getting more technologically advanced, dynamic and complex by the day without the problem solving tools to handle it? I can’t wait to find out.

This is exactly how I felt when trying to use my smartphone for ‘productivity’. The screen is so damn small and most apps zoom in so damn close there’s no space to do anything non-trivial. It feels like I’m operating in a workspace for ants. It’s impossible. So I concluded that experiment and now exclusively use the phone for stupid cat videos.

Can’t you already do this? Host your own social networks, I mean. Of course, the hard part is getting others to join it. Isn’t that why protocols like Matrix and decentralized social media platforms like Mastodon were made? So you could communicate with anyone you wanted to on any other platform as long as they implemented the open protocols.

Doing this is great marketing for them. Companies like Apple are insistent on locking down their hardware. Microsoft could use this as a marketing tactic to say how they’re environmentally friendly and shit on the other tech companies. It would generate goodwill, and allow them to push their proprietary services on their hardware more easily since people can maintain it longer.

Likely. It probaby wasn't the only thing though. The high amounts of sugar, weird fasting habits, drug use, extreme stress he put himself in, and his arrogance in ignoring sound medical advice might have all helped do him in from what I gleaned from his biography. His pancreas could only take so much apparently.

Globalization is not what happened during the last few decades. Investing your entire supply chain in China is not globalization. Corona is causing a push back against sinicization.

If the world actually did have globalized production, the pandemic, which originated in China, would probably have hurt relatively less.

Now you're taking my point out of context.

I countered with the implication that there may be more important factors than just time for those acting in time-constrained situations to make "good" decisions and that he was oversimplifying, not that we always think before we do everything.

AFAIK, most people don't eat their meals under duress. I could be wrong though.

Ironic isn’t it? The author complains about people not thinking enough but his articles don’t seem well thought out either. It’s full of reductionism and oversimplications.

Slowing down, concentrating, and having lots of time are definitely helpful for thinking but he implies that it is sufficient for thinking and that everyone has that luxury.

What about people operating under duress like in wars or pandemics? Can epidemiologists slow down while a pandemic spreads exponentially? Can soldiers slow down while they’re being shot at?

I’m pretty sure those people would like to have the space to make better decisions but more often then not, they don’t. Those are very wicked problems.

Riot is developing a MMO based on Runeterra. It will be interesting to see how that pans out.

So was $15. I tried out and bought the game before its v1.0 release and even then the game was exceptionally stable and polished.

As someone who’s gone deep down the rabbit hole of trying to learn this stuff, I’ll give this advice. Focus on learning computer science, computer architecture and networks as a foundation.

Learning all this technology without understanding the fundamentals is a waste of time.

Most certs are overrated. They don’t actually test your understanding that well. The people who care a lot about certs are people who you probably don’t want to work with. They’re just a way for the IT guys who run the cert programs to make extra cash. By all means, if your company is willing to pay for cert training get it but don’t waste too much time studying for them.

I think this is just a corollary of having your priorities straight. You'll likely prioritize the most important things first if you have a clear goal of what you want.

Long commutes are indeed the bane of my existence. One can never feel more helpless and outraged while stuck in heavy traffic.

Ironically, this pandemic has made me much happier as I don't have to drive everywhere. I finally have more time to think and pursue my curiosities instead of burning gas and yelling expletives. It's quite refreshing.