raintrees

Agency is a reason for me to arise each day and work at my goals. Without goals, or agency, I may head for depression (been there, done that).

If I do not see progress being made, I know that if I do not change what I am doing (or measure in smaller increments) again, I may head for depression.

Even crappy odds are an acceptable challenge, when I compare to what I imagine is an NPC/don't give a hoot outlook.

And from what I have read/heard, not just the internet's collective memory, as real world books are being scanned and then destroyed - Allegedly including rare books :(

I wonder where avocado oil lands?

caught in java garbage collection (no slight intended :) )

Congratulations on your continued existence!

to me, ai seems likely to become a new user interface, just like gui did from cli.

abstract away a lot of the mechanics of working with data/information.

helpful, when literacy seems to be trending in a downward direction.

I learned early on not to trust anything with a sticker that claimed warranty supported by Fry's (that meant it was a return and tested No Problem Found and sold as is).

Too many return trips eats up any profit reselling parts to my clients.

But it was a blast back in the day when I could get shrinkwrap tubing, RAM modules, individual electronics components (resistors, capacitors, etc.) personal care items like combs, brushes, snacks, etc.

And then there were the books... With a cafe built into the store. I spent a lot of time and money at a number of the Silicon Valley Frys locations.

I hope Synology gets its act together, it has been a convenient product to resell for clients who down-size. Very simple, very low maintenance. And very simple to set up, versus all of the home-grown *nix boxes I have built over the decades.

"There ought to be a law" is why we have nanny-state government. I imagine that is why there have been "no spitting" and "no chewing gum" laws on the books.

People going to lord it over others in the pursuit of what they think is proper.

Society is over-rated, once it gets beyond a certain size.

Along the same lines, I am currently starting my morning with blocking ranges of IP addresses to get Internet service back, due to someone's current desire to SYN Flood my webserver, which being hosted in my office, affects my office Internet.

It may soon come to a point where I choose to block all IP addresses except a few to get work done.

People gonna be people.

sigh.

Having constraints may also make something more achievable. It helps avoid issues like analysis-paralysis, and helps me focus on the path through the obstacles towards the destination I desire.

So for me, still goals, but made more efficient by constraints?

and an oldie: https://www.zerohedge.com/

An interesting collection: https://thedukereport.substack.com/

I think that just shows our different perceptions - I, too, see many HN posts as very left. Frequently seen in assumptions about values/ethics/morals...

Thanks for posting this. While craziness may reign in various places, parts of the world go on healing itself, one human effort at a time, and faster when more than one do so together...

This is also a good argument to me to continue working at being a generalist. The more disciplines I am aware of, even if not expert in, the faster I may come up with an "outside the box" solution that might work.

Details observance, combined with the facility to abstract, is probably what makes me a programmer of the caliber I am. Not that I am great (far from it, when I see and compare others' work) but I have products being used by clients successfully, so good enough, I figure...

Ah, another thought: Also conversations with others about a problem I am facing. My wife has an uncanny ability to suggest things that sometimes cause me to reconsider some of my assumptions, and have the blinding flash of insight that allows me to successfully navigate through whatever my current obstacle might be. And she does not try to keep up with my area of technical knowledge anymore, yet still so valuable!

"Developers choose Rails today because, 20 years later, it remains the most simple and abstracted way to build a web application."

Well, then there are those of us who use Django for similar reasons :)

I chose to use a flip phone over a previous Android phone around 10 years ago when ISPs/Phone providers showed that security lapse issues for them was just a cost of doing business. I used to store private client info in Exchange and sync it, but I could not, in good conscience, continue to do so with the knowledge of that information's exposure.

I recently worked with NetGear support to have a new router replaced after we determined the firmware was known to be problematic, and the only way the level 2 support person had of correcting it required their app.

So fortunately, there may still be ways around working with IT without a "smart" phone, and I will continue to blaze that trail as needed.

Both, for me. Memory not as sharp as it used to be, and more to be organized.

For me, that is the value of tags. No need to have duplicates to have items represented in multiple categories, yet each appropriate category gets a nod about the particular item.

Same, although I have been on a Linux distro (different over the years) for the last 18 years, I keep a virtual Win7 machine just to run Outlook.

I have been able to do pretty much everything I need to workflow-wise with LibreOffice.

And any office basic dev work, I just do on the client machine or a virtual machine now.

FWIW: I am switching from Fedora to Debian. Fedora has what amounts to almost daily updates, I prefer more stability/less changes. My work flow is usually being up for weeks in between boots, multiple projects open at the same time.

"We may wonder also what fun a determined hacker could have with Microsoft running random bits of JavaScript on their servers and allowing these to talk to the world (or to Microsoft itself even)."

So maybe there might be a way to disincentivize this behavior?

For those who are not happy with the current state of social systems:

“We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.”

- Voddie T. Baucham Jr. (possibly among others)

One of the tenants of collectivism seems to be to replace the parent-child relationship with a society-child relationship "for the good of society"

Richard Grove offers an online course called Autonomy that teaches these skills and more. Good course, I took it a few years ago. One of the topics is how to sell without being cringy, in my words.

One of the original predictions that might be entertaining(?) to see would be the US having its first President "run" the country from prison... And the follow-up situation to witness, how different would that look, in the end?

For those who think rather than just react, I guess it would not be as entertaining...?

"The messaging IS the program"

(Apologies to Marshall McLuhan)

Logical and critical thinking would be a challenge to those in power, apparently the Trivium had been removed from a classical liberal education some time ago. I learned about the Trivium in an online school long after I left college...

Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt's "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America" may be a case in point.

https://deliberatedumbingdown.com/ddd/

Conspiracy surrounds us, "conspiracy theory" seems to be a tactic first used by an "intelligence" agency to discourage those who question the "authorized" narrative.

Free thinking is a gift, that can also be a challenge when it goes counter to main stream culture.

If I recall correctly, we used a Formaster protection scheme (Copy-Lock? CopyGuard? I no longer remember precisely) to protect the mass copies of Rogue we manufactured, as well.

And for personal use, I edited a number of the labels in the data portion of the Rogue executable with a raw disk data editor to make the game have teenage-humor suggestions, frequently referring to anatomy in crude ways.

Ah, the late 80's :)

IT service, sales and support business, and private cash-flowing multi-family real estate business (we provide nice places for people to live without the headache of owning/maintaining/repairing your own home).

My experience has been "any time." There are always pros and cons, things will always arise, time passes. Best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, next best is now.

Now a specific product or service may be much more impacted by the market it will be in, so that requires forethought.

And a business can be "a job" or it can be an entity one plans to eventually sell, with or without others being part of it (partners, employees, etc.).

Financing has also changed quite a bit, my ventures have been frugal, so that is my experience.