Right, for example, your email address so they can harass the hell out of you (if you stumble onto the site and see the “FREE SAMPLE PACKS” link). Or the free packs are just partial and they’re supposed to entice you to buy the whole pack (where the actual good samples are). Or the packs lead you to their not-free VSTs (which I’m also not terribly interested in, but I’m not their target for that stuff).

Of course - Cymatics entire business model is harassing the hell out of people via email to either look at their new sample packs or buy them on discount.

If you pay attention, they give away free packs + will have promos where they give you credits for free packs and then put a bunch of packs up for discount. I’m not particularly fond of their samples, but free is free and I’ve found stuff I like in their collection.

I can’t remember what it was specifically, but friend basically ruined a major plot point in Witcher 3 for me fully knowing I was a good ways out from discovering it on my own. As a kneejerk reaction and knowing he was about 20 or 30 hours into Fallout 4, I told him who runs the Institute and what relation that individual has to the protagonist.

He was angrier than I was because I had assumed Witcher 3 turned out the way he revealed, but my spoiler absolutely blindsided him. He never ruined anything for me again.

PSA: At every Exxon Mobil I’ve been to, when the screen on the pump starts vomiting up ads as you’re pumping your gas, if you tap the 2nd button from the top on the right side of the screen, it mutes it.

Enjoy your peaceful gas station visit.

Instant red flag. Double red flag if it seems like they’re getting something out of it

See, that’s a common mistake for novice whittlers. Had he been paying attention, he could have made it into a decorative spoon or even a nice little squirrel.

My background is not on STEM and I was always passed the notion that without roots in hard math I can’t go far in programming.

I swear this is some BS repeated by people who have no idea what they’re talking about. I got told pretty much the same when I was younger - don’t believe it. It may have been true to some degree at some point in the distant past, but it’s outdated advice at best.

Your main general skills when it comes to writing code are the ability to think logically and to think about abstract concepts. Creativity and imagination can definitely help. The ability to keep organized in your thoughts can also go a long way. Just about everything else comes in the form of knowing the language you’re working in, exposure to common coding and software design principles, and knowing your coding environment.

Math can figure into a lot of different types of programming careers… Shit like writing video game engines and other complicated things that model physics and stuff come to mind. But it’s not so much that math is intrinsic to programming, but rather that those types of software just require a lot of advanced math.

For example, I’m an automation engineer. It’s just a sysadmin who writes a decent amount of code. Most of my programming work revolves around sending requests over our company’s local network to servers or internal websites to do shit like remotely power up or shutdown machines or trigger a task or open up work orders. There is very little actual math, if any, in the entirety of my work.

At it’s core, programming is just the storing, moving around, manipulating, and keeping track of bits of information. Especially in a language like Python (which is my primary language).

EDIT: I should probably add my background isn’t STEM either. I’m a two time college dropout who got a break 14 years ago and left the restaurant industry to go into the tech sector instead.

This is a very interesting point and I can see it throughout zoomer culture when it comes to the down and dirty technical stuff, but I think there’s a distinction to be made between being technically apt and being able to grok whatever the hot shit consumer-grade tech paradigm is right now.

In the former context, a lot of zoomers have already “failed” but that context is the territory of people who reach out to learn it - in other words, the nitty gritty tech stuff will always be for the technical types. In the latter context, I imagine millennials will probably mostly be fine and zoomers will, too. I say “mostly” because we’re already seeing millennials start to kind of skip the latest trends (TikTok comes to mind immediately). Zoomers are already coming to grips with not being able to understand Alphas sense of humor via memes. Whatever the next social media platform is, I imagine it’ll be primarily a home for Alphas, leaving zoomers and millennials where they are.

Will there be spillover across the board, with members of different generations populating the other platforms? Sure, there are always exceptions.

As far as physical tech goes, like how millennials got the smartphone and zoomers grew up with it? It’s highly dependent on how ingrained it becomes in society. Hard to exist without a smartphone these days, so everybody has to know how to use one. Boomers have more trouble because they got it later, but there are plenty of them who are just fine with current phone tech precisely because they need to be for professional AND personal use.

Shrek is love, Shrek is life, Shrek is high fashion.

I think i have the 13-year badge. I visit maybe a few times a week when there’s nothing left to doomscroll on Lemmy. I was never really a huge contributor, in posts or comments, but now I’m purely a lurker and I spend maybe 15 or 30 minutes in a single sitting on the site instead of a few hours cumulatively throughout a given day.

With that said, the overall quality of content and discussion had been going downhill for years at this point, I just didn’t have anywhere else to go that provided the same dopamine hit. Lemmy doesn’t do it quite as well, but once the Reddit API controversy kicked up and a ton of people started actually using Lemmy, that helped give me a good reason to spend time with it since there was activity. I’m honestly not sure if Lemmy is the future but I’m willing to stay if it’s a road to the future… and I’m willing to try out new platforms and communities before I find something that I feel fits me as well as Reddit did for so long.

I kind of miss 2010-2013ish era Reddit (minus the bacon/narwahls stuff which kind of felt forced to me), but hoping something like that comes along would probably be along the same lines as wishing I could get the same near magical feel and interaction out of IRC as I did in the mid to late 90s/early 2000s. These are one-and-done things. The next thing that elicits that kind of homey feeling will probably be something entirely new and not a clone of the OG thing.

My desktop rig is looking a little long in the tooth (i7 8700k, EVGA 1070 FTW Edition) but it can still keep up since I don’t rush to every brand new triple-A release. My problem is that I filled it to the brim with samples and music software a while back and actually had to start uninstalling games to make more space. Steam Deck solved that problem! lol

If you’ve got the cash to burn and you’re comfortable with the idea of having to play with settings (sometimes, most games I have played work out of the box), it’s an outstanding device. I went with the 512GB but you could get away with the 256GB model - 1TB micro SD cards are dirt cheap now.

I have zero regrets… well, maybe the fact that the Deck has made it a lot easier to slack off. But that’s a me problem lol

My Steam Deck. I regularly refer to it as the single greatest video gaming purchase I’ve ever made. I got spoiled for a while by a Switch so i stopped playing PC games because there was no handheld option I liked. The SD gave me convenient access to almost my entire Steam library.

My iPad Pro. I’m normally not an Apple person because I’m so rooted in the Android ecosystem but for my purposes, it’s an excellent little toolbox for sketching up writing ideas and as a little music production machine.

Andaseat Kaiser 2. I spend all day working out of my chair and a considerable amount of my free time there, too. Really sturdy, large, comfortable chair. I’d estimate I’ve got at least 5-7 years before I start thinking about a replacement. The fake leather will probably start to go well before that but I don’t care.

Yeah, I used to configure vim with syntax highlighting and auto-suggestions and whatever else. I just like… don’t anymore. I’ve been feeling less burned out over the last few months and it seems, at least, like its still lifting slowly. Maybe when I get the energy back, I’ll take another crack at vscode.

Yeah, for sure - I don’t deny that at all. For me, it’s a confluence of general burnout, laziness, and comfort with what I already know… and likely not a really urgent need to move to a proper IDE. The majority of my coding is small, one-off Python scripts where I can :wq and run it and then open it back up to refine, fix bugs, add debugging prints, etc.

I stick with vim because every time I try to use vscode, I get so bogged down trying to set things up and figure out how to use it that I end up just being like, “eh, fuck it - I’ll do this later.”

Younger admins and engineers look upon me with awe, but really I’m just secretly a really lazy bastard. I don’t even pack plugins into vim anymore to make my life easier. Just plain old vanilla vim.

Not sure about the entirety of available options but one thing I think instances are able to do is block other instances… so I guess if an instance became flooded with illegal material, another instance could block it - though I’m not yet sure what that means exactly in this context.

it needs time and more users, but I think it’s alright so far.

I had looked into a couple other decentralized or federated services in the past and they seemed like kind of a pain or they were poorly explained. until now, all of it also seemed too obscure to have any kind of notable traffic. if this isn’t temporary and the reddit api controversy actually did something meaningful, then I look forward to seeing how the federated service ecosystem grows and changes.

reddit’s dethroning was a long time coming in my eyes. it’s just not going to be as smooth as the digg -> reddit pipeline years ago.

I think there may be room for another couple million users spread across a ton of communities. wishful thinking, but maybe that would keeps thing toned down with the bots and other shady shit.

lots of polish and QoL needed both on the main site(s) and the mobile offerings out so far. all in all, pretty good start.