From your other replies it seems like you’re unsure you want kids in any case, but if you do there’s a simple thought experiment here: do you wish your father hadn’t had you? If not, it’s reasonable to think your children would be just as grateful to be alive as you are, sick dad or not.

If you’re a programmer rather than a professional typist, you probably can use it at work. It took a couple of weeks for me to adjust, a couple of months to be fluent, but it would have been longer if I didn’t use it all day every day.

The biggest hurdles for me personally were

1. I didn’t touch type properly before. I was a fast typist, but my hands roamed freely over the board. I realised that the finger I used to press a key depended on the word where it was used, and that took ages to re-learn.
2. I bound enter and space to mode shift holds for symbols etc. It works great, but it does mean I sometimes hit enter and send half a slack message instead of typing punctuation.

Respectfully, this is why we can’t have an actual conversation about healthcare in this country. What’s objectively a societal good? Medicine? Sure, but I’m not proposing that we stop practicing medicine. Universal access to healthcare, free at the point of delivery? Also good, and a feature of most healthcare systems in the developed world. The specific funding model where the government runs the entire healthcare system through taxation?

I dunno, seems like it gives good, but not great, results, terrible staff morale, and a permanent state of crisis.

Fair, but I don’t think they will, and I don’t think people will stop voting for them forever, as much as I’m looking forward to the next general election. Even under Labour, though, the NHS gave great value for money, but middling outcomes.

The British NHS should be replaced with a system of national insurance. I’m a staunch labour voter, but the current system is subject to endless tinkering by the party of the day, and it’s broken.

In the UK, the NHS is one of the only institutions that attracts broad unreserved support, though, so this is about as popular as “all college athletes should be locked in churches and those churches should be burned to the ground” would be in the US.

Write down on a bit of paper “I want to spend more time with my son, I can always find another job”, then flip it over and write “I’m going to spend my time on work, I can always have another kid” and see how you feel.

When I first started programming I used a text editor, UltraEdit32. When I moved into .Net, I initially used Ultraedit and wrote all my own build files, but switched to using Visual Studio with all the bells and whistles. When I moved to Python/Node I adopted Vim, and these days I tend to use Doom Emacs.

There’s a spectrum from visual studio or eclipse, with complex project structures, through vscode and rider which are simpler, to programmers editors like Emacs or neovim, to plain editors like nano.

I think the most important thing is that you’re comfortable with your tools. I could crunch out a lot of code with Visual Studio and Resharper, but I use Emacs as an IDE, note taking tool, and email client . The familiarity makes me productive.

It is super helpful to have syntax errors or warnings highlighted when working on code, and a decent editor will make it easier to navigate code - jump to the definition of a function, find the documentation for an API call etc.

As codebases get larger, you need all the help you can get. You may also find, when you work with others, that their opinionated tooling clashes with your opinionated hand crafting.

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It’s a hypnic jerk.

They’d no single agreed on cause, but they happen during the transition from wakefulness to sleep.