I find Bluesky better but I've had to be pretty aggressive about blocking centre-left types. I don't even disagree with most of what they're complaining about, after being away from twitter for years that whole style of discourse is just extremely unpalatable.
Def get the impression they're driving people away who were enjoying bluesky previously, there's just so much of them on the feeds atm.
Do you ever have any trouble at airports? The one time I ever had grief at an airport was a few years ago travelling with an X230 with the larger battery pack. Security seemed extremely suspicious of such an old laptop and I got stopped again later by a plain clothes security guy.
I've never had any problems! I'm surprised airport security would be so concerned about an old laptop. I'm sure they see way strange things on a daily basis.
Identical setup here, and yes, checkpoint security at an airport in Germany pulled me to the side and made me turn it on to show it was a functioning laptop
Bought an X220 years back and it unintentionally became my main laptop for a few years. Sold it on in much worse condition (I kept the keyboard) at a profit and got an i7 X230T instead, which has also somehow gone up in price since.
the X230 didn't last as long, the efficiencies of the M1 macbooks were too good to ignore. Gave it to my mother since because she wanted "an old laptop that just works"
My company's IT department is using the Windows 11 migration to move everyone to new laptops, and I am going to miss that amazingly firm-but-sqiushy keyboard so hard.
I can't stand Windows, but writing long-form reports on that machine is a joy.
I've often wondered why there aren't devices that have all network operations bundled into a removable module; that way you could get both people who want some level of disconnect and those who want a more thorough level of disconnect.
Not sure why they fail in the marketplace. Maybe look at other similar market failures like power tools with different interchangable heads? I suspect the sticker price of the individual modules scares consumers.
Don't know how school funding operates in the US so this is a guess:
Parents cover the fees and give the kids an allowance for the rest; either the kids budget poorly or the allowance fails to really account for just how expensive the first few weeks are with all the books you're expected to buy?
The average parent in the US can't afford an extra $12000 per year in expenses. College students take out loans to pay for their education. I'm not sure what the average debt load is currently, but people I personally know who got away with a "small" student loan debt owed around $30000, and I've known people with >$100k student loan debt just from an undergraduate education.
Parents covering school mostly went away in the 90's outside of the particularly wealthy segments of society. Mostly student loans since then, which people hope to have paid off by the time they retire to avoid having their social security payments garnished. Joking of course; nobody assumes social security will still be there.
Pearson make great money charging obscene amounts for books. In many subjects they'll have some online component so if you thought you could get away with using a second hand copy of last year's edition they'll make you have to pay for the online access section separately regardless.
> At least for me, it's not that reading bores me - there just isn't enough time and benefit to it, especially for novels and literature. Literary books aren't going in my CV, nor providing any insight into how to write better code. When 1200 people compete for 1 open internship position, can I really afford to waste my time like this?
This reads as though the goal of reading is to bolster your career opportunities as a developer?
If it's not connected to your career then it shouldn't be viewed that way, it should be viewed as a kind of leisure and the challenges/rewards involved should be compared to the alternatives there (i.e. is the investment in time of being able to understand more complex novels returning a level of personal fulfilment that makes it potentially a more rewarding focus than some more immediately gratifying leisure activity)
It may still be of very low value but viewing the prospect specifically as being damaging to your career opportunities seems like an incorrect perspective to be starting from.
Seeing everything in an utilitarian pov frightens me. I'm a university student, I love reading, I love acting, I love spending my afternoons riding my bike to the seaside or to the tuscanian hills. Nothing of this is going to make me a better developer. But I can't imagine a world in which I don't read, in which I don't get to know people acting or working at the venue meeting other performers, or feeling connected to the Earth with flowers blooming and birds chirping
I would love to do that. In fact my first year was way more relaxed and closer to your experience. I would spend hours wandering the countryside on foot and traveling the country.
Now that graduation is inching closer with no financial backing, it's just not feasible to spend time on anything other than maximizing employability
It makes me so sad how correct this is. I don’t know what the proper term for it is, but it’s the dynamic where everyone works 9 - 5, and then someone wants to get ahead so works an hour later, and then in 2 months everyone is working 9 - 6…until someone else wants to get ahead and starts working until 7. The competition is so stark and the perceived penalties for not meeting a base level of success are so unpleasant, we all need to descend to the most boring and lifeless versions of ourselves to match those who are naturally boring and lifeless.
Sounds like a version of the tragedy of the commons. Or maybe even the prisoner's dilemma, as in every individual chasing their narrow self-interest and making the matter worse for everyone instead of collaborating and making it better for everybody.
Just don’t do that? I’ve never had a problem leaving at 5. Been doing this for 2 decades now.
Live below your means, save enough money so that a year of unemployment won’t kill you, try to work on interesting problems, try to stay in the top quartile for output (You can definitely do this without staying past 5. At most companies you can do this working something closer to 9-1 if you really focus during that time), don’t be a dick, and don’t worry about the rest.
I think POVs in forums are often much more about framing a thing to justify your beliefs than actually hitting at your own personal implicit values (it's plausible the poster believes leisure is a waste of time and lives by that belief but I doubt it) so I wanted to stick with the original POV approach to highlight the ways it seemed incorrect.
What I wanted to say, it is that it might happen in the future to not have time or will to do those things. Due to stress or long job hours (...) but the guy says that as a uni student he doesn't have the time because he prefers to focus on being a better developer. I read for pleasure especially at evening or at night. in those moments, especially when in the bed, I definitely wouldn't be coding
I'm a bit mixed on all these kind of tirades. I imagine a big chunk of most literature undergraduate degrees are people who like the idea of being into literature much more than the kind of work it involves.
At the same time, as someone who was very addicted to the internet but only got a smartphone/broadband (previously having a 40 hour monthly limit) in my late teens I do look back at just how much I read then compared to ever since mournfully. I didn't grow up in a house that valued reading much so it was a lot of work to even get started regularly reading stuff with no knowledge base of what I might even like to start from.
I'm still able to read a few semi-challenging novels a year but it's an insane amount of work to get into the zone now and I can't picture teenage me with a smartphone and constant internet access ever managing to build up any kind of habit at all.
As far as writing is concerned, I think how aggressively LLMs want to rephrase everything is a big issue and I'm not sure how it can be resolved. As autoprompts get more and more florid it's probably unsurprising people are going to get lazier and lazier at precisely phrasing anything. I tried using them building out my CV earlier this year and it was a great sounding board but the actual text it was giving me was atrocious.
Wasn't Build Back Better meant to be roughly the same kind of objectives, maybe the stated means were different (and less vague) but roughly the same? I haven't paid that much attention to either, mind.
This whole thing feels more like its about getting a snappy word out there than anything achievable.
The sheer amount of regulations is an incredibly tangled mess. For housing, for example, typically every city has its own standards, so your talking thousands of different sets of standards. They usually won't be all that different from the next city over, but nevertheless they're functionally separate, you can't directly change the whole state or country at once.
You can get state laws that push cities to change, of course, and the feds can incentivize change through requirements for funding/grants, but overall there's just a lot of momentum behind the existing web of regulation.
Some of that is for good reason. Take for instance in North Carolina; a house built in the mountains in the west will have quite different standards from one built on the Outer Banks.
Yeah, some local standards are reasonable and necessary, but most are just about "character", not actual building standards to adopt to local geography or anything like that.
I mean, no, not at all. BBB was a massive tax-and-spend proposal that included all kinds of cost-inflationary stuff; it was not focused on cutting red tape and increasing the supply of housing / energy.
I'm not too keen on the Stanley Parable and enjoyed the Beginners Guide. It's definitely something that could be called pretentious but I feel like it's a lot more interesting with how it does it. There's less of a fixation on humour too which is a plus for me because The Stanley Parable's humour grated on me a lot of the time.
It's a walking simulator though, if you're not into those kind of things in general then you're probably not gonna be into it.
Def get the impression they're driving people away who were enjoying bluesky previously, there's just so much of them on the feeds atm.
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