As someone who has been dealing with flared hemorrhoids since I was a teenager, I improvised my post-2 work by simply washing with the shower pistol whose cord is long enough to reach behind me while I'm sitting on the toilet.
Since then, whenever I search for a new apartment to rent, this became one of the criteria I look for! I simply can't go back to just dry wiping, ever.
> I improvised my post-2 work by simply washing with the shower pistol whose cord is long enough to reach behind me while I'm sitting on the toilet.
> Since then, whenever I search for a new apartment to rent, this became one of the criteria I look for! I simply can't go back to just dry wiping, ever.
If the cord is not long enough you can step in the shower/bathtub (if you are abled ofc) to wash yourself.
As someone who had hemorrhoids since teenager (got it removed during a surgery), I'd recommend a portable bidet. Game changer. Can now comfortably do Nr2 even at my dad's summer place with old toilet, or any public toilet. They're often very cheap too (bought mine for <10$ in Japan) and last long enough
This article reminded of the days when building anything wasn't driven by neither the fear of being judged or the need to impress a future employer, but because I just felt like it.
I think there's a lack of kind of approach in general. There's a time and place when you build because the end goal is your client or boss, but it's ultimately the inner itch of experimentation that shapes your skillset and taste.
> This article reminded of the days when building anything wasn't driven by neither the fear of being judged or the need to impress a future employer, but because I just felt like it.
Those days are now! There are still plenty of us who create websites and small projects purely for the fun of it. I still maintain a personal wesite that began as a university dorm room intranet portal, and I do it for myself. I have a blog with a small audience, but I also have quirky, obscure pages that exist purely for my own amusement. If someone else happens to stumble upon them and enjoy them, that's just a bonus!
I know there are plenty of others who do the same. I often come across such websites and projects right here on this forum!
The mainstream web these days is full of walled gardens and loud and chaotic social media platforms, so this kind of quirky, creative web might seem like a small fraction by comparison. But it's still out there, and it's very much alive.
>I'm kind of shocked Microsoft didn't already do this as an alt version of their CoPilot UI.
I attribute this to the fact that big corporations like Microsoft have so much bureaucracy and moving cogs that even something as simple as a request to reuse a UI element like Clippy would be stuck between the cogs forever.
I will preface this by saying that, I decided to stop pursuing a job as a software developer because my 2 years of work experience mean nothing in the job market.
Now that I ended up finding a job as a waiter (of all things) I finally enjoy learning new things again. Before, I would get chronically stressed researching the job market, gathering keywords from job openings, consuming Udemy courses at 2x speed, using AI to plan the project and scaffold it. I was writing projects to save my life, because my finances are just that bad.
Surrendering and giving up the pursuit of work made all this mental load go away, and ironically made me progress in a personal skill level faster than anything else. I can now learn deeply. I can tinker with code to my heart's content. I can see all the warnings. I can research why this and that happen, without feeling like I have to "sigma grindset" every second.
Perhaps when the storm is gone with the whole "AI is gonna take our jobs" and the market demanding every keyword match, and I feel more confident in myself I'll try to get professional again. Or not. All I know is that I love programming.
This also depends heavily on the field, some sciences need particle accelerators and mass spectrometers, meanwhile we can get by on a $200 pc and free wifi. This means you can bypass a lot of traditional university/lab structures.
In all seriousness, being able to pinpoint what is causing the possible stress / load and making choices to get rid of that is pretty amazing, props!
Though as for the job market, I’m sure the AI hype will blow over but I don’t think it’ll remain silent for long, there’ll be another nonsensical trend within reach.
Tech needs to keep innovating to keep investors happy and keep investing. That’s why it’s going this AI bubble route. Cause they don’t have any groundbreaking innovations at the moment but want to keep the investors they got when the web was newer and was worthy of the real hype.
> Tech needs to keep innovating to keep investors happy and keep investing.
It's nice to think that this is just a "tech" problem but unfortunately this is a wider problem in the rich world - it just so happens that "tech" has been the answer for finding huge economic growth for the past few decades. The whole economy is addicted to tech growth at this point (including your 401k if you have one, those of your your friends and neighbors).
I am a firm believer that the brain has finite resources. It is fundamentally no different than a muscle, in that, the muscle has resources at its disposal, and using those resources causes them to deplete faster than they can recover. This means, that at best, you can optimize how you use your brain, similar to how you can optimize how you use your muscles. You can train, to get "more" out of your brain, similar to muscles. But at the end of the day, there is only so much your brain can do. I have found, through fairly good time keeping, that I can do ~6 hours of deep work in a 9 hour period. Maybe 7 in a 12 hour period. This is the amount that puts me at the edge of burnout, and requires no other commitments in my life. 4-5hours in a 7.5 hour day is sustainable. Others may be able to do more, or less than this, but many people are fooling themselves if they think they are doing good work that is also deep for more than this, for more than say 4 weeks at a time.
That said, if you can find ways to use very different parts of your brain... well, then you can squeeze out more performance. In the same way that in the gym, if you find exercises that isolate different muscle groups, you can squeeze more sets in throughout your workout.
I have seen this with people who can produce a lot of output, they tend to not do the same thing all day, but find ways to work on unrelated projects. So, I'm not terribly surprised that you have an urge to code now that your brain is focused on non code related things for a large part of your day.
>I have seen this with people who can produce a lot of output, they tend to not do the same thing all day, but find ways to work on unrelated projects. So, I'm not terribly surprised that you have an urge to code now that your brain is focused on non code related things for a large part of your day.
Funnily enough, I do still code for the largest part of my day (10am-10pm, with lunch/dinner breaks + 1 hour of gaming/Reddit), simply because I'm starting my hotel job in 2 weeks, making me technically still unemployed.
I went through this exact thing. I became so depressed and stressed out during my last real software development job, after making it to a pretty respectable senior software engineer. I quit as a life saving decision, and now it seems that those 5+ years I put in just don’t matter, as I had been getting to the final hiring stages and then getting passed up constantly. In the other hand, I have been able to get into graphics programming, painting, 3d modeling, etc, because I don't have to come home and force myself to learn the new frontend/backend framework, I have a lot less stress and I have no desire to get back into the hamster wheel of the tech world. I love creating and building, it gives me a reason to live, I now know that I was preventing myself from this very important life satisfaction, which led me to my huge career impasse/quitting my job. I think some of us are just not built for the hyper optimization and materialism of the modern corporate tech world. I err personally more toward the artistic side, and that quality is not appreciated by the vast majority of recruiters and hiring managers. Like you, I am hopeful for the future, but I also no longer hold the delusion that I can find life satisfaction through the job alone, as I so naively pursued before. It’s so much harder to measure success when its not based on those simplistic metrics like company status or income, but maybe that’s because it never should have been the concern. :)
To play devil's advocate: Free will not existing doesn't mean that your environment doesn't affect your outcomes. On the contrary, in fact. So convincing you means that I am the environment that affects you.
I had a similar train of thought like the author has, but it happened while I was playing Expedition 33, which is a game made by former Ubisoft developers who decided to go indie, and made something that is really cool.
It made me realize that there's an innumerable amount of talented people out there, who are most definitely capable enough or willing to grow enough, that can produce something that makes you think that Ubisoft could have made it, because those people were always right there!
And if they weren't motivated enough to risk it all, because you're only starting from a mere idea, we would never have seen the fruits of their labor.
I'm not claiming that they're comparable with the greatest artists of our time but, the probability of someone out there becoming great will be silenced and squashed before it even has a chance to show up, either because they must conform to the job market to survive day to day, or because of office politics, or out of their own temperament avoiding risks. Especially if that risk is unemployment and homelessness.
As a fan of John Carmack, for example, I have to wonder if he would've ever hit the status he achieved if Doom wasn't this fun to play, or if he kept shipping monthly video games by mail instead. I'm not talking about whether he would be this intelligent or not, but whether he would be known.
I know this post is for Facebook, but I've noticed my mood improving when I decided to leave LinkedIn.
Even though I am rationally aware that people work in better environments and get paid while I'm job searching for the past 6 months, it feels like seeing any sort of announcement regarding other people's successes hits a subconscious chord my brain hates. It felt like I'm being actively intimidated, making my already depressed and sad state of job searching worse. The "highlights reel effect" on LinkedIn is deliberate and I'd argue inevitable, because everyone is trying their best to show how good they are as candidates and workers.
Now that I closed it, and I'm sticking to the usual communities (Discord, etc.) may be running into better engineers than me but I see it either as a neutral event or a positive one, because they share their code and insights which I can learn from.
As someone who grew up with an Atari, the difficulty was coming from you having to rotate the turret for target priority. Turning it into a touch and shoot (I only tested it on my phone) removes that portion of the game.
>The typing part is an inconvenience that I'd happily give up if I could get my thoughts into the computer directly somehow
I understand what you mean, but for some reason I cannot imagine my younger self getting into his first programming practice, going "ugh, why do I have to type this? Why can't I just think and let the computer do it for me". I don't think I would've reached where I am if I saw the act of practice as a tedium that I wish to get it removed.
You probably see it like that because you're not that kid anymore, and for today's "you" code is just a means to provide and nothing more.
Since then, whenever I search for a new apartment to rent, this became one of the criteria I look for! I simply can't go back to just dry wiping, ever.
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