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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • It’s usually a place where you’re not bombarding your brain with stimulation all the time, so your brain tries to use the downtime to work with all the information you’ve been putting into it.

    This is actually a big part of learning anything, called diffused learning. Think of how you suddenly get something after a period of rest or not doing anything, some time after you’ve initially focused on a thing for some time - your brain has actually been using the downtime to structure the data and make better sense of it.

    This is also why a lot of people that know how a human brain works suggest mediation and walks, especially without listening to music or podcasts, as well as spending little to no time reading, watching or stimulating your brain in any other way before bed. It needs that time, it’s crucial for development. Journaling helps here, too, because it’s both reflection and somewhat of a downtime.

    Doing chores and not listening to anything counts, too.

    But it’s all easier said than done in this age of constant hunt for one’s attention so they spend more time on your app, giving you more data to sell and more metrics to make the line go up (gotta keep the investors and stakeholders happy, can’t afford to not show constant growth).





  • I’m self-taught as well, and I’d say look through the current job market and offerings, but don’t worry all that much - teaching yourself IT usually nets you a considerable amount of transferable skills that you build upon if things don’t work out in one field; you also learn to learn and get much more comfortable with switching branches.

    The less volatile your branch is, the less likely it is to turn out to be a fad that you’ll have to drop several years down the line at best. Crypto and blockchain, for example, were probably often recommended when the thing was on the rise, but that’s nowhere near as popular and safe now; I believe the current AI hype to follow the same fate. Basically, look at the news and trends and be careful with whatever big and stupid corporations push for, praise, or massively invest in: that’s usually nothing but good marketing successfully baiting the suits.

    Web develoment is probably going to stay simultaneously volatile and relevant for decades more, so that’s a good option. Embedded development shouldn’t be going anywhere either, although that’s more low-level and intimidating, but it can be fun and stable and pay relatively well. I hate the smartphones industry and can’t really say much about Android or iOS development, but I doubt it’s doomed or anything.

    So far, it seems like not following whatever Elon Musk or other billionaires tell you is the future is a good bet.






  • What phones would you consider worthwhile in terms of price, i.e. those you can cheap out on, but not suffer the consequences of it being slow even in the simplest tasks?

    One Android phone I had, Nokia 5.1, had to be replaced in less than 5 years because it often froze and lagged when I had to make or receive a phone call, open a single tab in some light-weight browser, etc.

    I’m not a big fan of the smartphone industry and especially the reviewers because they seem to have a very twisted idea of a budget device. Or maybe I’m a cheapskate.



  • The lower amount of content on Lemmy is balanced by the increased quality and the fact I can’t spend all day on here

    This is easily one of the greatest aspects of the fediverse for me so far; Reddit seemed great at first, when all of its content and communities were new to me, and as it gradually got more familiar and filtered and fine-tuned through my own activity, I noticed that I’d been just scrolling the thing mindlessly, aimlessly, hoping to experience something good, have a nice laugh, a nice read, just anything - ultimately wasting dozens of minutes, sometimes hours, with nothing but a sad sigh as a result.

    Browsing Lemmy is a genuinely fun activity for a relatively short amount of time a couple of times a day max, always having a good time thanks to its quality and always having nice conversations because it’s the culture so far, and never scrolling through endless equally poorly-thought-out posts or comments because even if there are any, they’re few and far between.

    I think I say the same things whenever I get to praise the fediverse in general and Lemmy in particular, but I just can’t help myself.



  • I had a friend doing mobile gamedev, making near unheard-of money for their then city of residence, had everything going well for them… except the job was soul-crushing and draining, eventually giving them severe depression.

    When I was getting my first dev job, they said I’d be really sorry about doing outsource, and I just thought that out of us two, I’d be the really happy one, even making much less than them.


  • I like your theory and wanna agree.

    In 00s and 10s, my friends and I used to engage with the Internet and each other in a very different way than in the more recent years: We basically were the content generators for ourselves, making conversations based on our ideas fueled by movies, books, or pure imagination, with a lot of jokes and other content that, compared to today, probably took much more effort; we made ambient music with a shitty mic, gathered together, somewhere away from our homes, to talk and watch shit on some weak-ass laptops, maybe game and talk on said laptops, maybe game online, share stupid proposals for our art projects like making music or writing stories or drawing, sharing results.

    Of course, we recited some jokes, rein reenacted some, and ironically enough, the most repeated were the ones coming from short-term content, like the z0r.de flashes or skits from collection-type videos like the GMOD Idiot Box. Back then such short-form content was more of a rarity, it seems, so we still had a lot room for creativity and something more meaningful and such, while now this type of content has filled way too many spaces, with much lower quality, too - we’ve seemed to have stopped creating, despite having arguably much more fuel for it thanks to the many changes our lives brought.

    Thinking about this makes me browse the Internet a little less and focus on writing or reading, two things I’ve been most creatively engaged with since I was a kid, hoping that can bring creating stuff back to my life and the lives of my friends and family, at least to some degree, as opposed to just consuming lazy content and having even lazier, meaningless, dull conversations with people I care about.