1. Sadness and depression are chemical events in your brain that you have no conscious control over
2. You can consciously control some of the common triggers that lead to negative thoughts but most people can’t completely turn off given thoughts
3. Your brain is like the earth and thoughts are like rivers, the more you think certain ways the more you will continue to think those ways, neural pathways are strengthened by their activations

Learn to redirect, wear a bracelet or similar physical reminder of a specific thing you like, when you experience the thoughts you want to avoid, redirect and focus on the things you like

Change your environment, identify triggers that push you toward depression and avoid them. Some literally cannot be avoided, and some situations are impossible to escape, in those cases accept the associated negativity and redirect

Find people who have the attitudes and feelings you want to emulate and spend time with them, we are social and learn much from our peers

Ingest media that aligns with your desired world view, avoid tragedies, horror movies, gore, popular doom news media, etc. This will force you into an echo chamber but it is a popular coping technique

Most important you are your own person, write down how you feel and what triggered those emotions every day. You can’t really know if you’re improving if you don’t have a record

Just talking about the map editor if it’s an executable

I’d be cautious about running any “leaked” software directly, great way to identify the modding community if it dials home, maybe run it in a vm, behind a vpn? Unless it’s just source code in which case carry on

Leetcode is a great way to polish your skills. When I was your age, I read programming books and made projects I cared about, it’s turned out very well.

I’ve helped a few others learn programming, practice and working on any project at all always help more than anything.

Llama3 local is pretty good

I still remember flipboard being forcefully installed as the action button app for an old phone. My rage continues to smolder a decade later.

An app that couldn’t be uninstalled and took up precious resources. That’s all they’ll ever be to me.

Just collect your tears and pour them over the tree, plenty of salt coming out of you

I explained a little about buffer overflows, but in essence programming is the act of making a fancy list of commands for your computer to run one after the other.

One concept in programming is an “array” or list of things, sometimes in languages like C the developer is responsible for keeping track of how many items are in a list. When that program accepts info from other programs (like a chat message, video call, website to render, etx) in the form of an array sometimes the sender can send more info than the developer expected to receive.

When that extra info is received it can actually modify the fancy list of commands in such a way that the data itself is run directly on the computer instead of what the developer originally intended.

Bad guy sends too much data, at the end of the data are secret instructions to install a new program that watches every key you type on your keyboard and send that info to the bad guy.

There is a ton of literature out there, but in a few words:

Rust is built from the ground up with the intention of being safe, and fast. There are a bunch of things you can do when programming that are technically fine but often cause errors. Rust builds on decades of understanding of best practices and forces the developer to follow them. It can be frustrating at first but being forced to use best practices is actually a huge boon to the whole community.

C is a language that lets the developer do whatever the heck they want as long as it’s technically possible. “Dereferencing pointer 0?” No problem boss. C is fast but there are many many pitfalls and mildly incorrect code can cause significant problems, buffer overflows for example can open your system to bad actors sending information packets to the program and cause your computer to do whatever the bad actor wants. You can technically write code with that problem in both c and rust, but rust has guardrails that keep you out of trouble.

Nice to have a fulltime friend

It tends to change what you’re free to do every day

A MONTH?! Jfc I pay like $50/month for one vehicle

I think you may mean eidetic

Who’s taking fish oil supplements? People who are concerned for their health or people who are generally healthy? Observational studies like this seem much less useful than a dedicated study with properly allocated controls

Rocket chat I think checks those boxes

Plenty of anecdotes out there, you’ll find people with every kind of experience. Don’t stress too much, the job itself depends entirely on the team, product, and industry.

I work in a tucked away industry highly specialized in some random sector of manufacturing and service. I’ve worked at three different companies in the same sector and each was wildly different. In general programming in a professional setting causes a tremendous shift in the way you program no matter where you go.

The things you focus on in a team are: how can I make this code resilient so none of my teammates can screw it up, readable so anyone can understand, and runnable so after every iteration it will function.

Your style conventions and preferred way of programming may have to shift to accommodate working with others. No more super cool but impossible to read functions, no more 70 layer deep polymorphic chains, no more random spacing and inconsistent brackets.

Programming professionally comes in different flavors. Young startups need hard hitting fast develpers who type 150wpm and munch through requests like nothing, leaving a trail of tech debt and bugs behind but getting the product to mvp status. Established companies need methodical, measured programmers who think through the consequences of their actions and write code that will stand the test of time, programmers who don’t say “we should just remake the whole thing” every tuesday.

I’ve been programming professionally for about a decade and can confidently say I would be pleased to stay in the career for the rest of my life. I am not confident that the precise job I have today will even be available in that timeframe because there have been amazing leaps in technology that convert business logic into code, see copilot’s new workspace product.

Go for it, if you find a business that feels like a bad fit move on. Plenty of businesses are itching for competent developers.

At the start of the study, we asked participants to take a visual sensitivity test. For the test, they had to press a button as soon as they saw a triangle forming in a field of moving dots. People who would develop dementia were much slower to see this triangle on the screen than people who would remain without dementia

Guy shoulda tried emacs instead, wife is probably an elitist

You can indeed have a virtual monitor from a mac mini, I have to initiate it from the mini though, no option comes up like it does on an m1 laptop

Haven’t tried steam link yet

Barbara Streisand effect in full force

You have copilot? You’ll be fine if so, just throw down comments for what you want it to do and tweak it when it doesn’t compile.