alkaloid

I'm still a little shady. But only a little.

I stopped downloading torrents when streaming came along.

I maxed out my Hulu subscription to avoid commercials.

Hulu forces commercials on me anyway.

And now I get to watch commercials about 'Merica, which apparently dictates worldwide political matters. Sweet.

I like how most of the comments insult you and tell you to educate yourself, rather than answering a fair question about immutable and immediately-recognizable characteristics.

In Texas private sellers can rent a booth at a gun show and sell without performing a NICS check.

https://www.thoughtco.com/gun-show-laws-by-state-721345

And here I thought the other party runs the United States government.

I did a quick Google, and -- sure enough! --

"Biden nominee for ATF Director says he's never owned a gun"

https://americanmilitarynews.com/2022/06/biden-nominee-for-a...

And I'm also pretty sure it's not "Republican" DAs and AGs refusing to prosecute crime.

I'm curious as to why the resettable breaker for each eight drives . . .

I presume this was trial-and-error, but how could someone tell that the current is too much for a disk drive which is being, uh, overdriven (to make noise!)?

Or maybe this was a "just in case" situation...?

So cool . . .

LOTS of good advice here.

My only addition would be to further specialize in something you don't hate working in. Becoming a subject-matter expert will afford you the opportunity to take time off or just work whenever you feel like working.

What in the hell?

I still love Perl as essentially a low-level abstraction layer for C. I can get so much done at the system level without having to compile a bunch of code every time I make a small change.

I've heard that Python (and maybe some others) are slowly replacing Perl as a "subsystem" of Linux, but I doubt that will happen before I retire. So, until then, TIMTOWTDI!

I agree. But moderate views are not represented in federal law.

So you dispute the information about abortion laws by country, or are you just going to devolve into a argumentum ad verecundiam fallacy?

FWIW, the SPLC is an extremist hate group from my perspective.

But neither of these things changes the fact that the USA has extraordinarily permissive abortion laws.

In this case, there are lots of dots. There are a disproportionate amount of Catholic priests represented within the scientific sphere, including the vast majority of famous ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scient... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lay_Catholic_scientist...

Thanks for proving my point.

You know followers of "religion" invented empiricism (and logic and rhetoric, etc.), right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bacon

Haha, came here to say this exact thing (and to recommend those retro metal Coleman coolers)! :D

Reading this, I couldn't help but recall Feynman's quote: "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."

I love cussing and discussing quantum theory / physics / computing. And Feynman is 100% right.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Richard_Feynman

access basic life needs like food and transportation and social services

You are so very right. Do we even realize that smart cell phones have become a required utility? So 25 years ago I would have had a $50 phone bill instead of a $500 phone bill for phones that are required for me to do anything with my government, like renew a driver's license.

Many made fun of "Obama phones," but I think I understand the point of them. I'm not a fan of these phones (and technology in general) leaving people behind because they cannot pay for it.

or are we being spied on and stolen from by an increasingly ubiquitous industry with no conscience or self awareness

In the name of "security." Yes, we are being spied on and treated as human batteries, just like in the Matrix.

It’s strange to think about how different my life might have been without that computer.

Isn't this the honest truth.

I'm so grateful my father (RIP) came home with a Commodore VIC-20 from Sears in 1983.

We were incredibly poor, so my mother nearly killed him, but he insisted that personal computers were here to stay, and that his children needed to become acquainted.

Nearly 40 years later, he was right. I have made, and continue to make, a great living on these crazy machines.

As a system builder for a "custom computer shop" back in 1997/98, I came here just to make sure Cyrix was on the list.

Anyone think it's healthy to get anxiety attacks from being forced to get on a Zoom meeting where I have to share three personal photos with everyone?

I believe so much in this project -- I was an early adopter but couldn't figure out a use case for the laptop, so have been lurking, waiting on sweeter and sweeter upgrades . . . this may fit the bill!

This is what happens when Leroy Jenkins jumps from WoW to EQ.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XMnBXo1Tfo

> web dev monotony

This is why some web devs have 3+ full-time jobs.

As a Perl dev, I learned Ruby once, then was like, "why am I learning Ruby, I'll just use Perl."

Then I went back to Perl. Sorry. =D

As a remote-only employee for more than a decade now, I can say that I don't have a problem with "core hours," like 10am - 2pm for your time zone.

I understand that sometimes we need to get together internally and with clients. What I cannot stand is the premise of this article: locking me into a cage that I pay for where I have to be available at a moment's notice.

I've quit two jobs that made me do that. I'm sure they learned their lesson . . . ;)

Sure, a couple different ones.

The first involved an engineer friend who literally "went off the rails" with one of these big trains. The union went to bat for him for six months or a year or something to try and protect his job. Ultimately they determined that he was at fault, but without the union he would have had no representation or recourse against the train company at all.

A number of others involve injury: the unions make it difficult to terminate employees who are injured on the job; we don't really hear about how dangerous train work is. The article mentions that the conductor is "two" or "three miles" down the track at the end of train.

That is a big deal, because the engineer doesn't necessarily have immediate feedback on when to stop. I've seen with my own eyes guys on the ground trying to guide one of these super-long trains into the yard to connect to other cars and that is some scary stuff.

Finally, furloughs. I've had friends who were furloughed from their jobs at the train companies for years and had to go get a job at a grocery store stocking shelves. The train industry seems so have some regulation games going on at the governmental level and the union level. I'm not sure these guys would ever get their jobs back, with seniority, without union bargaining and playing interference with government.

Speaking with railroader friends changed my mind on train unions.

To an outsider, they sound terribly unreasonable, but speaking with people in the trenches has made me a believer in these unions, for whatever that is worth.

Does anyone else get that deep, dark, disturbing feeling in their gut when they know they have done something bad like this?

This is why I use so many print statements and comment out destructive actions! Lots of experience with these feelings!

I believe in digital currency as an incredible exercise in human logic and reason. If there's a value assigned to that, so be it, but I want and need to be involved in this whole algorithmic exercise because I live and work in the industry.

Am I relying on crypto to retire? Hopefully not, and anyone who does may want to reconsider balancing their portfolio. It can go away as easily as it arrived. I don't think it will, but there's a chance that it's a Palm Pilot in a world if iPads.