iguanayou

At least they stopped putting "My" in front of everything.

Where's the data behind that infographic about the leaf blower vs driving a pickup from Texas to Alaska?

Awesome!

My theory: workers are capable of performing focused work for only a fixed number of hours per week.

If productivity is essentially: work done divided by hours worked, then a lot of the things the article mentioned changes the denominator, not the numerator.

Productivity goes up, but the amount of work being done doesn't change. Might as well let people have that other non-working time to themselves.

I taught high school for five years but have been a software engineer for the past ten.

I'd love to teach again - but sadly that would mean going back to a one bedroom apartment in a not-great part of town. Where I'm at now, I have a nice place in the country and the means to pursue hobbies that I couldn't before.

Hear, hear. There's a lot of us in this same boat. These asocial, sedentary IT jobs + hectic lifestyles are out of sync with our biology and psychology.

I like Windows 11!

I've got the same type of deal here. I just worry about skills getting outdated since I'm only working on an in-house system and doing mostly maintenance. But perhaps that fear is overblown.

I could easily hop to a gig with more responsibility and more opportunity for increasing my skills - but also more stress.

Taking longer to get up to speed and setting up a development environment: I'm not sure that's a function of age. It's more likely because development environments truly have gotten larger and more complicated over time.

I've been programming for 20 years - the amount of environment / config / tooling stuff to deal with just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Exactly. Making the whole "I don't trust the government to do something smart with my money" argument moot. It has been proposed, voters have seen the proposal, and it has been voted down.

1. Carbon tax 2. Cap and trade

The problem is NOT that there have been no good proposed policy solutions. The problem is that voters don't want them. This is why I'm pessimistic on the environment.

Very, very common.

Agree

Or you could build actual things in an actual shed? This is the same impulse that drives people to build furniture, boats, and model train layouts. To me, the real physical objects are much more fulfilling.

This is a great book! Just finished reading it.

See also: Elton John

I'm reading Sapiens right now. I wouldn't say "mind blown" as I was at least a little familiar with a lot of it before, but the way that Harari writes really makes you think about things differently.

Here are a couple of other books that have been pretty influential for me:

Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

"Main Street" by Sinclair Lewis

Right out of the Michael Scott playbook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAxtVMuDYD8

Practicing bluegrass mandolin, adjunct teaching, and running online classes for my commercial drone school. NOT programming.

Briefly, VFR = Visual Flight Rules. You control the aircraft by looking outside. IFR = Instrument Flight Rules. You control the aircraft strictly by reference to instruments (you need to do this in clouds, for example, when you can't see the horizon).

The resolution is good enough to read all of the gauges easily. It won't look as nice as a good monitor, but the immersion more than makes up for it. I do notice a screen door with the Reverb. Not bad, but it's there.

You don't get any of the "seat of the pants" feeling of course, and the graphics, while super impressive, don't compare to real-life low and slow VFR flying (although hopefully MS Flight Sim 2020 changes that). It doesn't replace the real thing.

BUT I enjoy flying VFR in busy airspace with the PilotEdge network, and also IFR flying. For the communications and IFR flying, the mental tasks you do in the sim are identical to what you do for real. After an ILS approach to minimums in the sim, I feel like I got a workout. It definitely keeps my head in the game.

The controls become second nature very quickly.

Sure, it's a scratch-built PC (i7 / 2070 Super) with an HP Reverb, which is a lightweight VR headset. I use a physical yoke (Honeycomb), rudder pedals (Thrustmaster), and throttle quandrant (Saitek), but everything else in the cockpit can be manipulated with the VR controllers that come with the headset.

You just interact with the cockpit as you normally would, pressing buttons, pulling levers, and twisting knobs.

In the virtual cockpit, there is a tablet app that displays all of your maps/charts/checklists/reference materials. Works pretty slick.

As a pilot, I use VR with the XPlane flight simulator and it seriously feels like I'm in a real Cessna. True, the flight controls are a little off (for example, stalls and landings don't feel like a real plane), but other than that, everything is absolutely spot on.

It's a great way to scratch my aviation itch and is also great for practicing procedures, especially when paired with a live air traffic control network like PilotEdge. My brain seriously forgets that it's a simulation when I'm in it.

This could be a way to revolutionize flight training, and make it more accessible. The entire cost of my PC build including VR gear and software is a fraction of what real-life flight training costs.

Pet peeve: Software companies that name their product after the noun that their project is a giant database of. "People" is the stupidest example I've seen yet.

This is me exactly. Started in the tech field, burnt out and became a teacher, returned to tech for the money, and I'm currently in another burnout period. I agree with everything you said about learning being exciting when you're new, but not after you've been doing it for a while. Also agree with the bit about corporate bullshit and just not being a career-oriented person.

I really think this time I'm out for good. I'm approaching that age where it's hard to get programming jobs anyway. I've got some side businesses doing OK; I'm working on ramping them up, and trying to get some teaching gigs to fill the gap in the meantime. And if all that fails I'm considering getting back into the lawn care business like I did when I was a student.

I used to be very passionate about programming: I started in 4th grade, started my first software business in college, and was always doing side projects.

I use the "change color scheme" trick and it does work.

Agree with most of this, but would like to add that you don't need to "self" medicate; if there's an underlying diagnosable mental health concern (depression, anxiety), proper medical treatment might do a world of good.

All of the symptoms can also be caused by panic disorder. Advice like "IF YOU FEEL ANY DISCOMFORT AT ALL GO TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM ASAP" is bad advice for people with anxiety disorders.

Go to a doctor and get checked out to rule out any heart issues. If it's panic disorder, there are safe drugs that are great at making these symptoms go away.

Yes.