Death is inevitable. Nothing I do will avoid it, I can’t escape it, and it will get me eventually. Thus, there’s no point worrying about it. If I live my life in fear of death, I’ll be just as dead as if I didn’t.

I’m not religious, so as far as I know this is the only existence I’ll ever have. I didn’t exist for billions of years, I exist now, and then I won’t exist for billions of years. In this brief window of consciousness, all I can do is live my life and try to experience it as much as possible. When I die, all I can hope for is that I was a good person who left the world in a better state than how I found it.

I won’t lie and say death doesn’t scare me. As I get closer, I’m sure it’ll scare me even more. I don’t want to die, so I’ll take whatever steps I can to avoid it. But to allow it to preoccupy my thoughts does me no good.

11 of me could probably take a buffalo. We might lose one or two of us, but come out on top.

BS looks better than AAS, but honestly that’ll only really apply for your first couple jobs. Once you’ve got a few years of experience, your specific education matters less and less. I will say that a BS is “better” in terms of teaching you more, but your Associate’s credits will transfer if you ever decide to go that route.

Also, once you pick up one language, you basically know them all (with some obvious exceptions). If you know PowerShell, you can pick up Bash pretty easy. If you know JavaScript, you can pick up Python. If you know Python, Java is pretty easy. If you know Java, you pretty much know C#. Learning a language becomes just figuring out how that languages does things. Picking up a new language goes from being a process that takes a year or two and schooling to taking maybe a week and watching some videos. There are some exceptions (Python doesn’t tell you much about SQL, and systems languages like C/C++ are their own animal).

Star Trek: The Next Generation. Watching that is the TV version of getting comfy under a warm blanket.

It’s tricky. Depending on what direction you take, CS can be very math heavy or not. If you get into algorithmic stuff, deep learning, data analysis, etc., that has a lot of math. But if you focus on, for example, front end development, there’s not that much.

I won’t lie and say CS has no math. At my university, you were able to avoid higher level calculus by doing a bachelor’s of arts instead of a bachelor’s of science. Calculus 2 is usually the highest level you have to take, which focuses primarily on integration. I was kinda in your boat of being hesitant to do CS because of the math, but I ended up minoring in it. The CS-focused math is mostly logic stuff and discrete math, which I feel is way easier than calculus. And honestly, calculus isn’t nearly as bad as its reputation would have you think (until Vector Calculus, that almost broke me).

Look into it, but I’ll say that while the math is there, it’s not as bad as you’re probably thinking. And if you know you’re not going into heavy algorithmic stuff, see if there’s a path that avoids most of it. And once you’re out of school, you’ll never touch calculus again (unless you do a lot of physics, maybe? Game dev, perhaps?)

I think better advice would be “invest/save” in general. You could just throw money into a mutual fund, index fund, savings account, whatever. If you get a job with an employer matched 401k, max that out. I don’t think you need to worry about trying to play the stock market by buying individual stocks. You’ll end up spending way too much time doing it for minimal gains over an index fund, and a lot of the time you’re just basically gambling on what companies you think are going to do well.

For IT you could do Computer Science, Information Technology, Computer Engineering, etc. There’s a whole lot of angles you could come at it from too. Would you want to maintain systems or develop them?

If databases interest you, you could be a DBA. If networking interests you, a network engineer. If you want to do development, you can focus on front-end development, back-end development, full-stack, embedded systems, and more. Maybe hardware interests you, so you’d like to be a computer engineer. Computers/IT has a lot of components to it, and even if you find yourself a person that likes to bounce between different things, there’s a lot here that you can bounce between. School will have you touch a little bit of everything, and you can find that part you want to specialize in.

My advice for picking a degree: pick something that you want to do, but also something marketable. The degree is useless if you can’t get a job in it.

If you’re worried about college being difficult, it can be, but 95% of your success is going to be based on motivation. I was a TA in college, and the best students were the ones that asked questions, came to office hours, and participated. I saw many a “smart kid” bomb a test due to overconfidence.

If you’re not sure what to do, you can start with general education credits or even do the first part of your degree at a community college to save money. A lot of times a 2 year associates degree will serve as the first 2 years of a bachelor’s.

Now that I’m in my thirties, I can answer this. Two things come to mind.

First, really should have just done college after high school. I really wasn’t looking forward to more school after graduation and wasted about 5 years before going back for my CS degree. I’m in a good place now, but could have had a 5 year head start on life if I’d just gone straight in.

Second, please take better care of your health while you have it. I was skinny as a rail in my early 20s and sort of took that for granted. I’m not obese or anything right now, but as you get older keeping in shape takes conscious upkeep. Get in the habit now and it’ll be easier to maintain later. It’s harder to lose the weight once you have it rather than keep it off.

Several years ago for April Fools Day, Reddit launched /r/place, which created a canvas where users could place individual pixels every few minutes. Communities would get together to carve out their own little corner of the canvas for a piece of art, and overall the whole thing was pretty well received.

Last year for April Fools Day, they did it again. Overall, once again pretty well received.

Now, since Reddit has pissed everyone off, they’re doing it again again, likely in a desperate move to try and generate some positive community interactions. /r/place has always been pretty popular when they’ve done it before, so this is probably a ‘push in case of emergency’ attempt to placate users. Predictably, everyone’s still mad so they’ve littered the whole canvas with ‘fuck spez’ posts.

Here’s an oldy. J. Bruce Ismay.

J. Bruce Ismay was chairman of the White Star Line and passenger aboard the Titanic on the night it sank. He’s been given a lot of shit throughout history for cheaping out on safety features of the ship, such as not carrying enough lifeboats, using cheap parts and manufacturing that contributed to the sinking, and insisting the ship move at full speed through ice fields to break records. He also took a seat on a lifeboat, saving himself at the cost of another passenger.

Except it’s all bullshit.

Titanic did not cheap out on parts. It was a top of the line ship with industry leading safety features. There is no evidence that Ismay was pushing the ship to break any records. It wasn’t even a ship built for speed, focusing more on oppulance and luxury. While Titanic didn’t have enough lifeboats, it did carry more than it was legally required to. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, as they didn’t have enough time to launch the lifeboats they had. And Ismay didn’t “steal” a lifeboat spot. Most early lifeboats were being launched way below capacity, as people didn’t want to get on them (believing that the ship wouldn’t sink, or wouldn’t sink before a rescue ship would arrive to save them). Ismay took a lifeboat seat because one was available. He didn’t steal it. The only thing Ismay really did wrong is not die that night as the public felt he ought to have.

Most social networks have this “growth at all costs” mentality that is usually the root cause of enshittification. When I say ‘smaller’, I mean it more in terms of fostering a healthy community of dedicated contributors rather than trying to make the fediverse grow as much as possible as fast as possible. This is why I mostly support the notion of preemptively defederating from Threads. While it would help the fediverse ‘grow’, that’s not necessarily what I want out of it. I don’t want us to win, I want us to be good.

I think this has done damage to Reddit, but it’ll be death by a thousand cuts rather than a big instantaneous failure.

To be honest, I really don’t care what happens to Reddit at this point. I’d rather have Kbin be a smaller, more dedicated community than have it “kill Reddit”.

Another thought is that they’re not trying to kill Mastodon, they’re trying to kill Twitter.

Mastodon has a bit of a community already, so by implementing ActivityPub, Meta can make its platform seem bigger than it is by pulling in Mastodon content. Gives it another edge over Twitter.

Best case scenario is Threads sees ActivityPub as just the cost of doing business. That way, even people who won’t use your platform are still interacting with it. Downside, people on your platform can leave for a federated alternative and not miss out on any content. Not sure if that downside makes up for the potential gains.

I think the default approach needs to be defederate first unless Meta shows actual interest in developing the fediverse with good intentions. If Threads become the majority provider of content to the fediverse and then we defederate, we lose all that content. It could lead to Mastodon, Lemmy, and Kbin withering and dying as everyone goes where the content is.

Works on contingency? No, money down!

Obviously Facebook took off once it dropped the ‘college student’ requirement and opened up to the general population. But once that first generation aged up, the younger generation didn’t follow and Facebook became the place your grandma posts Biden conspiracy theories. Widening your target audience can get you an initial boost of users, but you end up competing with every other platform doing the same thing. Then some new platform opens up, all the cool kids go there, and the old platforms gradually get dumber, withers away, and dies.

Or Reddifugies.

You could do it per email address, at least on platforms where your account is tied to one. Doesn’t stop it, but if you’re only allowed to mod 5 communities, you’d need a lot of sock puppet emails to mod 1000+.

No, we’re all about pooping right now, not farts.

Yeah it’s support a platform, make that platform dependent on you, then abandon the platform. The users who remain are left with the option of abandoning the platform as well, or sit in a graveyard.