0xmattf

Had this happened to any solo person, they'd surely be thrown in jail immediately with a heavy bond. Rules are for poor people.

but my hair did thin out but only after I was lazier on my work outs.

How old are you?

Also, working out helps reduce stress. Does it seem more plausible that getting lazier on your workouts, rather than the creatine, increased stress in your life, thus the hair thinning?

I have never heard of creatine causing thinning hair.

Because the moment you stop taking, wouldn’t you notice a big drop?

No. They're not steroids.

I'm sorry, but if you're making over half a million in TC a year, you can have an emergency fund set aside

Seriously. It boggles my mind how people can earn this much money, yet face difficulties when they lose their job. I guess they're people who didn't grow up poor and/or are too hungry for material things.

There's very little I want or need in this world; if I were making $500k, I'd be able to somewhat retire within 2-3 years.

I've had a brilliant product built for a specific niche. I personally know a few business owners in the niche, so I reached out to them and offered it to them for free.

"That's awesome! I'll try it out."

Not a single person tried it out. I also emailed every other business owner within a 30 mile radius to give it a go, for free. Nothing.

This wasn't my first rodeo, either. I've built so many projects since 2015 in the hopes of having a SaaS business.

I've completely given up on "SaaS", especially in the current year, with the rise of LLMs and perhaps hundreds of thousands of new projects released daily. It's completely draining, and I've burned through so much money trying to "make it". Never again.

If I wanted to grow my company's LinkedIn following count, I would just post a few fake jobs.

When people apply for jobs on LinkedIn, there's a "Follow <company>" checkbox near the submit button that's checked by default. Candidates who are spamming applications most likely wont uncheck the box. Candidates who really want the job will probably leave it checked as well (looks good if the company decides to check them out).

I think this is the real problem. LinkedIn made it easy to get followers by posting jobs. Follower count looks good.

I remember when folks had to have skills to enter the "profession" of software developer. Nowadays all you need to be a "programmer" is a degree.

Ah, good point. I didn't look too deep. You're right, though. It looks pretty successful. Although looks can be deceiving.

I recently heard some advice from someone during a tech meetup. He said, in a Ukrainian accent - always have two careers. In the Ukraine, he was a police officer and an appsec developer. Now, in the US, he's an appsec developer, and a car mechanic.

For me, I'm a developer, but I used to paint houses and do other construction-type work (tiling, framing, etc.). I'm slowly building a business on the side, as I fear for the day I'm fired.

I'm writing this as advice to others that may find themselves in OP's position (I sure fear for it). Do not ever let yourself get comfortable at your job. Plot your way out. Build other skills that aren't anything like your job. Do not let your job become your identity.

Where on OP's profile did you see ProFullStack.com?

This reminds me of a mermaid "documentary"* I watched as a gullible 15 (?) year old. It aired on Animal Planet, if I'm not mistaken. I thought it was absolutely real. _Mermaids are real_. I used to tell everyone to watch it...

Years later, I found out it was completely fake; the end credits even tell you it's fake (I missed that). I had a hard time believing anything after that realization.

* - Mermaids: The Body Found

Sure is! It's a bit cringe to think about myself from back then.

We got pretty heavily downvoted here, lol. Really, I don't understand why.

I had an atheist phase when I was like 15. Probably lasted until my early 20s. I blame that on Carl Sagen, Richard Dawkins, et al. I obsessively read science books, and all of these smart people were telling me there isn't a God. They made sense; I believed them.

I think around age 20-21, I read Descartes' Meditations on Philosophy, which forced me to evaluate all of my beliefs about existence. Digging further into other philosophers (and religions), I realized there's not a whole lot I really know... about anything.

Eventually, I came to the belief of there being a creator, although who or what this creator is, I have no idea.

Now do Anthropic, OpenAI, et al.

I built leetchess, a browser extension (works in Chrome/Brave) that makes your new tab pages full of chess tactics.

As a chess fan, I love it. It's something I wanted to exist. Although I haven't gotten any good feedback yet from other chess players. If you're a chess fan, please give it a try and let me know what you think!

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/LeetChess/hogbcffpf...

You reminded me of one of the first interviews I ever had in tech. I took 2 phone screens, and a take home assignment. Last step: Zoom interview with some of the IT team (3 people). It started well, but I slowly started panicking. All three of them were shooting questions at me, which I answered them all correctly, as far as I know, but I was so... cold. Started stammering my words and speaking like a terrified child at the principals office.

I could observe myself and knew what I looked like, but couldn't break it. The CTO stopped me as I was speaking and said "this isn't going to work". As soon as he said that, I ended the call. I had some major imposter syndrome during that time, I think that played a huge role in my fumble. Still massively cringe when I think about that, though.

When I said landing page, I had contact forms and more in mind, not documentation sites.

But that is news to me. Interesting. Although for static sites, I always use Netlify or even GitHub pages.

Static pages, sure. But what do you do if you want a contact form or something? Yeah, you can use services like formspree, but then you may end up paying $20/month for that alone. Perhaps I'm just ignorant.

It could be $0 on Render too, but then there's going to be a 3 minute load time for a landing page to become visible, lol. So if you don't want your server to sleep, you're going to have to pay $20/month.

Does Vercel do the same?

Personal projects/MVPs/small projects? Absolutely. For what I'm running, there's no reason to need anything beyond that.

The point is, I used to just throw everything up on a PaaS. Heroku/Render, etc. and pay way more than I needed to, even if I had 0 users, lol.

The only reason to dramatically overpay for the hosting resources they provide is because you expect them to expertly manage security and stability.

This and because it's so convenient to click some buttons and have your application running. I've stopped being lazy, though. Moved everything from Render to linode. I was paying render $50+/month. Now I'm paying $3-5.

I would never use one of those hosting providers again.

Some of them, yes. It seemed like they'd use it. I don't know. Maybe bad execution, or something. Although, maybe I should try again. Perhaps they were busy. I also didn't market beyond reaching out to people (which involved the people I know + cold email outreach).

I don't think it's impossible, but absolutely incredibly difficult. I tried everything.

Shopify stores, blogs (even owned a #1 tech blog), local job boards, global job boards, dating sites (which were shut down due to payment providers refusing to service these types of sites), various SaaS sites, etc.

Nothing made any real money. I don't know if it's just me - perhaps I'm just not meant to succeed here - but I'm still trying. Still building.

I think the biggest downer was when I built the coolest SaaS for martial arts academies. I thought it was guaranteed success, as I am involved in these communities, know a ton of owners. I reached out to all of them. Offered a free setup/trial. None of them cared, or even attempted to use it.

Likewise, I just built the coolest browser extension for chess players (in my opinion). I run a local chess club. Thought everyone would want to at least try it out. Maybe 2 users installed it. Lol.

I just stopped caring, and I look at it in a new way. Yeah, I may not have paying customers for projects, but I am expanding my portfolio. These are real assets that I own. The process is fun. Abandon the idea of making money, and it becomes more enjoyable.

One of my all-time favorites. Almost every time I'm involved in a conversation about books, I always mention this. It amazes me how many people have never heard of it.

I just built a Google Chrome chess extension. It is a new tab page full of chess puzzles. It has various difficulties, and a speed run game (solve as many puzzles as you can in 60 seconds). I personally think it's the coolest browser extension I have ever seen (being objective as possible).

It works on Chrome and Brave for now. Planning a Firefox release soon.

If you're a chess fan, you'll probably love it, but if not, let me know why (I'll try to improve it).

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/leetchess/hogbcffpf...

Thank you! I think so as well, haha. it's something I personally wanted.

And oh no! really hate to hear that. I thought it was responsive, but didn't fully test on smaller devices. Sorry for that. I will work on a fix as soon as possible!

I'm at work, on a work computer, so can't fully test, but yes.

I saved this as test.md, opened it in notepad, clicked the link, and it popped open a command line:

[Click me](C:/Windows/System32/cmd.exe)

Can definitely go further than this; just a quick test.

To be fair, though, it's not just a click -> open/run. The user has to `ctrl+click` and will see the source of the link (at least I do).

Honestly, most modern books on Stoicism read like that; I tend to avoid them altogether. Although I will say that Donald Robertson has done a great job with the two books I've read of his (Stoicism and the Art of Happiness, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor).

The best modern book, in my opinion, is Pierre Hadot's The Inner Citadel. It's primarily about Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, but does a really good deep-dive into Stoicism (and frequently mentions other Stoics).

I've been working through the pwn.college curriculum, as well as building https://stoacentral.com. It's meant to be a place to chill, discuss philosophy (Stoicism), and improve yourself. I built it after becoming annoyed with Facebook groups, really.

If you're interested in Stoicism, feel free to join and start some discussions.

Yeah, because, as you said, those are the most widely-known. There's not much literature existing beyond them.

However, I did mention Zeno...

I'll probably write an update to at least mention the others. That's a good point, thank you.