Software developer, intermittent indie game dev, formerly u/captainbland on reddit. Also kind of interested in medical imaging etc.

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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: February 5th, 2025

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  • I spent some time in a mountain cave replica in a Nepalese themed restaurant, diligently honing my programming skills without the noise of the outside world. No internet, no mains, no toilet. Just me, my laptop, an angry manager who called the police and 60 charged replacement batteries that fell off a truck.

    There I created the art of meditative programming where I learned to program not just my machine, but myself. As a result of this resume gap I am now able to function as a 13.6% more productive employee and have finally met the benchmark of 1.0x engineer. At my former employer I delivered a project which brought them in revenue totaling at least $12, giving me priceless experience because of this training.




  • The unfortunate reality is that most jobs linked to humanities are considered “passion jobs” for which there are more applicants than openings by a wide margin. If you don’t have connections that gives you an edge, you’re likely being crowded out by those who do.

    This is probably not helped at all by AI/LLM buzz meaning firms are increasingly seeking to automate roles associated with language processing of whatever kind.

    So suggestions might be: Widen your net: consider roles like administration, HR, paralegal etc. which generally go to educated people but don’t have specific academic subject requirements.

    Retrain in something in demand like a trade, healthcare assistant or similar.

    Attempt to leverage your language skills to present yourself as a “prompt engineer”, lean into the AI hype to land a job.


  • To a large extent people are just the products of their surroundings. Doing the default thing is an energy saving technique, as well as something which people do to prevent being ostracised by their peers. If you’re able to break that in some small way, you’re still doing better than most.

    If you want to do more, I guess you have to interrogate why you’re not doing more. Is it fear of rejection? Fear of failure? Lack of time, energy or resources? Dependency on e.g. cars? Lack of confidence in your actions?









  • Technically correct because greed is the cause of capitalism. But don’t be fooled into thinking there’s a long term, greed restrained capitalism that is going to work out for us; wealth is power. With sufficient wealth, a man can raise an army.

    As soon as you allow him to accumulate it, you raise the possibility that he will buy your politicians and corrupt your citizens through amplifying his messages to make society ever greedier in his image. He will hire people to make unlawful works, and pay the fines and dodge the court room.

    When you resist this corruption, they respond with fascism.


  • I’ve come around to the idea that ultimately socialist countries live under constant pressure from capitalists to collapse, from birth. Thinking about the history of the USSR in particular, it went from counterrevolution, to WW2/Nazi invasion to open US backed sabotage with very little breathing room.

    The birth of liberal nations was also messy. The US started with probably the largest genocide, that of native Americans, in known history. Revolutionary France was no picnic either.

    On the other side of the coin, lib socialists/anarchists have unfortunately been crushed by their neighbours repeatedly. Thinking about the Paris commune, revolutionary Catalonia, etc. I think we would all love to live in a world of nothing but love and peace, but there are bad, selfish guys out there who will smoosh your utopia in a heartbeat.

    This ends up necessitating some degree of authoritarianism as a self-defense mechanism.

    We are now being presented with the reality: that it was never a choice between peaceful exploitation under capitalism and idealistic but authoritarian socialism, just that the capitalists were biding their time and building support for just long enough to make it seem like a viable driver of increased living standards. The capitalists are done with worker power and are bringing down the hammer. They are bored and want us to war again.

    The Soviets were accused of creating Potemkin villages, the capitalists created entire Potemkin “service economies” that barely produce anything, funded/enabled by historical imperial wealth and power dynamics.

    We are then presented with a choice, do we want working people to be in charge? Or do we want to let the wealthy treat us like their property?