These are the things I can do without: =±*/

Some people seem to define themselves by the things they don’t like. That kind of negativity is worth working on to push out of your life, for your own happiness.

I have one you should love. And by that I mean hate.

Over a decade ago I was installing some equipment I designed, training the operators, etc. There were electrical and software components to the system, and it was used to test products coming out of final assembly.

The very first thing that happened was the operator taking the stapled-together stack of detailed instructions I gave them, dropping it on the work bench, and using it as a mouse pad to start aimlessly clicking around.

The engineer in the joke should have ordered some Bobby Tables for dessert.

If there was documentation all over the place it would shatter my suspension of disbelief. It would ruin my dinosaur movie!

I have always thought of Fallout 1 as such a pure RPG experience that gives you freedom and options. The main story line only has two objectives you must complete to beat the game, but getting there requires going out into the world and figuring out wtf to do and where to do it.

I loved making interfaces like that for internal systems in the past. I’d find a way to put everything relevant on the screen and able to be read or interacted with any time it’s necessary. I also had it flow top to bottom and left to right, because there was typically a physical process step associated with that station.

Yeah I didn’t think I needed it. It was a last second addition just in case.

Yeah, but good service is a profit problem!

/s

Mobile games for kids are the worst. Those and any self-help mental health apps.

It’s $10 a month to access the features of a basic game that runs on the local device, or the subscription renews weekly, or you can get a 7-day free trial after which it charges you for the entire year. And in the latter case, you usually have to sign up for the free trial before you are allowed to see ANY content.

A cheap subscription makes sense for some things, especially those using cloud based resources. But so much of that business model seems to rely on making money by screwing people that forgot they were paying you.

They must be going for the mainstream audience that just knows printers suck. That, and anybody who knows enough to see how funny that sentence is, has already sworn off HP forever.

I’ve been a lemming for less than a year.

I’ve been on the same black & white brother laser printer for well over a decade! It’s on toner cartridge #3.

I still like having a console strictly for games, but not for media stuff. Plus since it’s an Xbox, you can subscribe to Game Pass and treat every game as a rental.

That doesn’t do anything to help game preservation though, which sucks. But between the sheer volume of games and the “every game is a rental” attitude, I treat new games as a one-time experience that I probably won’t care about returning to.

Fortunately though, the games I care most about having access to forever are easily backed up and can be played with an emulator if necessary.

I am in my first job that’s a full-on “software engineer” title, which is a move I wanted to make. However, leading up to it I have a 20 year engineering career covering various aspects of electronics as well as software.

What I work on is C/C++ that runs the company’s main industrial product, and not some more mainstream web or app development. So it’s software work as part of a multidisciplinary team to design or improve a physical product.

So for those reasons I only think of myself as an “engineer.” But I can totally see how other jobs using similar skills would be more “software dev” or even “I’m in IT.”

Yep. I was going to write that maybe somebody like Warren Buffett would stand out as the real deal who is consistent and could do it again. But even if that’s true and he is 100% unique skill, he STILL got very lucky by birth.

I have to wonder if the entire concept of the business savvy billionaire is just a case of survivorship bias. Not for all of them, but a lot.

I mean, if you get the population of the civilized world together and have them start flipping coins, plenty of people are going to get heads 20 times in a row. Or if they’re from a rich family maybe they only have to get 10 heads in a row.

(Used round numbers for illustration. 20 heads in a row is only about 1 in a million, 10 heads is one in a thousand.)

Ok so I’m not saying the correct solution to this is to just give Google the money they want, but for me YouTube premium is the best value for any streaming service my family subscribes to. (Unless you count the lifetime Plex pass I got on sale years ago, lol)

Things like our smart TV or the kid’s iPad work flawlessly, including convenient downloads for trips. And since I watch a lot on my TV, it’s nice having higher bitrate available.

YouTube music is a nice addon for music in the car, even though it doesn’t make or break the deal.

And as I understand it, creators make significantly more money from premium views than ad-supported views. I like watching all kinds of niche scientific/tech/educational creators so I like to know they’re getting a bit more from me

I am almost a year into a job where the main piece of software is a mix of C and C++ and there is no documentation, hardly even code comments. Some of the files say they were created over a decade ago. Just pages and pages of C code with no comments and no external design docs.

If I search my local copy of the source for .c and .cpp files, I get 1,485 items. But it’s not that bad because many files show up several times in different directories with the same name. :D

And you know, I HAVE been feeling better about myself lately! (The job is actually a perfect fit for me, other than the humongous scary & opaque code base)

This is the best part about it for me. It’s like finding the perfect code snippet or example for what you’re trying to do, but for all kinds of stuff on your computer and not just inside whatever project you’re working on.

I’m not any kind of command line guru, but the terminal is the first thing I open any time I fire up one of my VMs.