I speak standing on a hill if my own dead projects. Just remember personal projects are supposed to be fun and educational, maybe with a little resume padding for good measure. Scratch that itch you can’t get to at work. It’s great when other people enjoy them, but as soon as they become a commitment, they start feeling like work. To me, at least.

That’s why I think games or little tools are great. They small enough so you can throw them out and start over. People won’t get (too) mad if you stop maintaining them (if you open source them) because it’s easy for someone else to take over.

December: when all the deadlines for end of month, end of quarter, and end of year conspire against you with holidays and unspent PTO – just in time to prepare for the retrospective reports in January.

I don’t have a concrete idea for you, but I suggest starting with something really simple. I think simple games are a good place to start. Or create a front-end for some command line tool to make it easier on beginners. That way you can focus on the UI development you’re interested in without getting bogged down in the rest of it.

They don’t, unless it is sufficiently controlled by medication. A doctor has to sign off that they think you can drive safely. Regulations vary by jurisdiction. Here in Ohio, USA you get a two-part license that says you need a doctor’s permit every time you renew your license to say you can continue to drive. Then you carry a piece of the paper (the second part) with your DL.

For the doctor (neurologist) to be confident that you aren’t going to have seizure while driving, you have to have been seizure free for some time, plus maybe have regular EEG scans to confirm that you are not susceptible to seizures while being exposed to blinking lights. The blinking lights are part of the EEG scan. You basically hyperventilate (on purpose) while they flash lights at different frequencies and measure your brain waves. If the response is too severe, you fail.

Like any condition, epilepsy comes in many forms and many levels of severity. Some epileptics can barely function and can have brain damage from too many seizures. Some people have no effects at all as long as they are on medication.

True open source products are your best bet. TruNAS and Proxmox are popular options, but you can absolutely set up a vanilla Debian server with Samba and call it a NAS. Back in the old days we just called those “file servers”.

Most importantly, just keep good backups. If you have to choose between investing in a raid or a primary + backup drive, choose the latter every time. Raid will save you time to recover, but it’s not a backup.

This is a qualified truth. In theory what you’re saying is true but for example with Synology they use their own raid format and while they ostensibly use btrfs they overlay their own metadata system on top.

Gotcha. I face similar issues with Synology. Their hyper backup format doesn’t seem to be standard. I’m considering setting up Borg Backup for offsite so I can restore it onto non Synology devices later.

Was this Synology by chance?

My thought as well. At what point do international flights refuse to land on US airports because it’s too dangerous?

That’s basically what Musk and DOGE were trying to do earlier this year. So yeah that doesn’t seem very far fetched.

Remote, because my commute would be 140 miles round-trip again. Otherwise I mostly enjoy working in an office with people and I don’t mind going in every few months or so.

Remote is also nice because it actually makes it easier to collaborate with other developers when we can both be at our own keyboards and share screens.

I work well alone, but I spend a lot in time in calls, either work meetings or collaborating on code. I do enjoy the social aspect of that as well.

I use AI pretty much every day, but mostly as a search engine/SO replacement. I rarely let it write my code for me, since I’ve had overall poor results with that. Besides, I have to verify the code anyway. I do use it for simple refactoring or code generation like “create a c# class mapped to this table with entity framework”.

Does that include services like health care, insurance, etc?

This is one of the reasons I prefer using ctrl-insert/shift-insert when it’s available. Unfortunately the Insert key seems to have disappeared from a lot of keyboards. Scroll lock sometimes works instead of ctrl-s and ctrl-q. I would be ok remapping ctrl-c to ctrl-break, but I still use ctrl-z to background a job. Would be great if terminals had a quick easy way to select your preference of Microsoft, unix, or CUA shortcuts.

I don’t mind that fishing exists and I understand many people enjoy it as a kind of zen. I personally would enjoy it more if it were more engaging.

You’re right, I could just choose to ignore it if it has nothing of value to me.

However, at least in ESO, tons of achievements and rewards are locked behind fishing activities. I could ignore their as well, but I would prefer if I could enjoy a more engaging fishing mini game (like their scrying is tedious but at least you’re actively doing something).

Good point! I suggest fishing spears if only to grief the players who are begging for spears as a melee weapon in ESO.

But more seriously: a spear mechanic at least would have an element of skill to aim at the fish and account for refraction - or something. Not just pure chance.

Anything that is 100% chance and just wasting time, with no meaningful way for the player to influence the odds. For example, how fishing is implemented in some MMOs like ESO: you can eat a buff food and use the correct bait for the water, but beyond that you’re just waiting in agony until the random timer dings. Then you do that 12 times before moving to the next hole, etc. “Waiting” isn’t an enjoyable mechanic.

• see if there’s literally anything else you can do to improve or polish what you just worked on
• set if there’s anyone else that might need help with their work or who you can mentor
• learn new things you can put on your resume it that will help you in your job
• learn stuff in general that isn’t directly work related, but maybe related to your next job/what you would like to work with

It’s not a matter of software choice, in my opinion. It’s the network effect. Everybody is on Facebook.

Despite its falling out of favor of the younger generation, it still has massive inertia. There’s also the issue of (I think) the overall weariness of being on social media. The halcyon days of that is over; it has become a utility at best.

I think part of the reason I enjoy the fediverse is that it reminds me of the old Internet: loosely connected, federated but independent. We had irc for chat, usenet, and mailing lists. We had like half a dozen IM platforms and tons of bulletin boards.

With that in mind, the solution may be to just let the fediverse evolve: let people find the media that works for them, whether they are into photography, music, politics, whatever. Use the software that makes sense. You don’t have to declare a victor.

The real threat isn’t Facebook: it’s centralization and censorship. The more distributed and heterogenous your ecosystem is, the safer you will be.

Maybe, but imo it will be a short-lived niche until people learn to use AI properly.

When I use AI for coding I try to catch its mistakes as I go along. I rarely use the agent mode and just let it loose. I’ve done that as an experiment a couple of times, with hilariously bad results each time.

People will adapt and learn when you need to babysit the AI and the problem will eventually diminish.

Just my take.

Yep. Blew my mind when I learned about it, too. Unfortunately it’s not unusual or even difficult for these people to hold two completely incompatible opinions at the same time. I should add that female genital mutilation is not commonplace in the US. It doesn’t make it better, just less horrible.