I don’t know how this works for help desk level jobs, but I do know that big tech companies generally avoid the massive job sites and recruiters. They also frequently have at home advisors. Have you tried hitting up the individual company sites?
Thanks! I will check back.
I can’t say anything about Soylent but it might be a good substitute. I thought there was some kind of issue with them (I think their target market was the “code academy” types), but I might be misremembering.
However, I can recommend Boost. It has something like 100 more calories than Ensure, and like Ensure I can down a bottle in a single go.
I’m currently going through something similar (although I did mostly stop getting sick in the morning), and I’m toggling back and forth on the solid food thing. I’d be interested in learning more about your diagnostics.
As someone who has been playing in the stock market since the 90s, I feel these folks may be over invested in GI Joe and might want to diversify to reduce risk.
I’ll change my socks every day, and more if I’m swapping out workout clothes for fresh clothes.
Oddly, I really don’t experience foot odor. Other bits can get rather ripe, but whether I’m wearing boots or going barefoot, my feet just do t get funky. That said, I have had athlete’s foot and I’ve seen what happens when someone doesn’t change their socks after days of marching and working in the field. I know it’s not a major danger for me at this point, but I’ve got a whole drawer full of socks, and in any case I want them to match with my shoes and pants.
Leaving aside a copy of BASIC on an Atari 2600, the TI99 was also my first, followed my the C64.
My parents didn’t want to buy me any software though because they thought that was just being lazy and I should just write it.
That’s also what general happens in the US if you die without a will. It’s called intestate succession. If your spouse survives you, they will generally get everything held as community property. If you had property prior to the marriage, it might be divided among your children, if any. Of there are no immediate family (spouse and/or children), it can then be divided among any relatives you do happen to have.
If you have any valuable assets that you want to bequeath to someone in particular, then it’s important to have a will. If you want a bigger chunk of money to go to a relative you know is struggling financially or could otherwise use it (kids heading to college, buying a house, whatever), then that’s another reason to have a will. Of instead of a family member, you want the money to go to a charity, then that’s yet another reason.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I think that phrase might have been coined by Slavoj Žižek, talking about the pop culture fascination with zombie films. I’m almost positive I read it in one of his books/essays back in the 2000s. I refer to it a lot.
the IRS running an AI designed to close loopholes or otherwise minimize sidestepping
That’s the one kind of thing Congress will be able to agree to outlaw.
I do not mean this to come off as blunt as it sounds, but I’m trying to be both clear and concise.
What you’re talking about is not how game theory works. What you’re doing is taking the most basic, highly abstracted representation of a generic idea and expecting it to correlate with reality. It’s the same thing people do when they ascribe some kind of wish fulfillment to the free market or to evolutionary dynamics. It’s not even a platonic ideal - it’s drawing a supply/demand curve and thinking you understand how prices work in a market economy. Here’s the main issues you’re running into when you try to play Ultimatum with something the size of the Democratic Party:
We as voters aren’t playing Ultimatum. Instead, we are playing minimax as an emergent strategy to defend the rights of marginalized populations.
I am a moderately heavy kindle user and have been since the second version they shipped. When I upgrade, I usually buy the best new model available. I am skipping the one with pen support because Amazon’s text autosuggestions are absolutely the worst I have ever seen - it’s like they’re just using a random number generator and not a predictive algorithm - so my current Kindle is the Oasis.
It is so far beyond any other one I’ve owned that they’re not really comparable. The backlight is steady and even with no patchiness. The text reads cleanly with no fuzziness around the fonts. It’s comfortable to hold, and because it just inverts very cleanly and automatically it makes it trivial to hold upside down if you change hands or roll over. My requirements for a case are that it makes the device easier to hold and prop up for hands free reading in bed. Any of the origami cases should do - I think they’re all very similar in design but I’d just go off the reviews for build quality.
That said, there’s a number of kindle books that cannot be read on kindle devices because the publisher decided to prioritize the formatting over the text, and those I have to read on one of my iPads. I still prefer the kindle for text only books because it’s lighter and easier to hold.
The oasis has a slightly different form factor so it might be worth checking out in person, but I went from skeptical to really appreciating the design.
That is literally not how it works. That’s how people think it should work, but when you see that it doesn’t, you have to turn back and review your premises and your model. I know the way you think it should work and how you want it to work, but when it doesn’t work you need to revise.
The problem is this - the feedback loop is insufficient and the correlation is unclear. If you are directly negotiating with someone, then you can play Ultimatum. If you are one of a hundred million people casting a vote for one person or another, you cannot. Perot cost Bush I the election, and Nader cost Kerry the election. Neither party decided that they needed to move in the direction of the spoiler candidate. They’re especially not going to do so for 3p candidates who pull in the low single digits, even if they lose by low single digits, because they’ll think they can get more by moving towards the center.
You can vote however you want, but don’t base it on a theoretical foundation that has less than zero application to the scenario you’re modeling. It really, honestly is a minimax choice, and if you are truly an ally for those of us in marginalized communities, you have to recognize it.
I’m not being a right winger here - I’m a member of the DSA and this is in line with what they (and people like Chomsky) advise. But I’m not talking about even that angle. I’m just talking minimax and BATNA. If negotiations fail (ie we didn’t get Bernie), the best alternative is Hillary. At least Roe wouldn’t have been overturned and we wouldn’t have states suing to make ten year olds give birth to their rapist’s babies.
I’ve taught game theory. Voting isn’t the Ultimatum game, because the most a third party is going to do is shave off a few percentage points, resulting in the main party losing, resulting in the main party generally becoming more conservative. Look who ran after Reagan - the entire Democratic Party shifted right with the third way. Look who we ran after Trump.
In voting the way it’s currently configured, there are two elements from game theory that apply. The first is minimax strategy - minimize the maximum damage your enemy can do. Above all that means keeping republicans out of office if you care about minimizing harm to women, minorities and immigrants, the poor, and the LGBT community.
The second concept that applies is the BATNA - the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. If the negotiated agreement fails (we get a left democrat on the ballot) our next best alternative is to get a Democrat elected.
We came within a hair’s breadth of not having another election, and at the very least we will be looking at a roll back of LGBT rights, a nationwide abortion ban, and a massive crackdown that will make sure they don’t lose any more elections.
The US would benefit from being a compulsory voting country. There’s a couple of ways of conducting polls - two of them are “likely voters” and “eligible voters.” The LV model can vary from poll to poll but usually has some criterion like “voted in the last election.”
The LV polls are usually to the right of the EV polls, and the conventional wisdom is that the greater the turnout, the better the democrats do. Republicans on the other hand are generally trying to make it harder to vote.
So compulsory voting with vote by mail would pull things a bit to the left, at least for a few years.
We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.
-James Baldwin
You’re still really young.
First, getting an education and getting a career going is a great start. It shows a level of maturity and that your life is moving in a positive direction. That’s a big plus.
Second, you mention that you’re from an immigrant culture. That might be skewing how you perceive the age vs relationship factor. In the US, it varies widely by socioeconomic class and geography, but just starting to get out there at 25 isn’t that unusual and shouldn’t raise a lot of red flags. I wouldn’t lead with it as an intro statement, but if it comes up naturally after a few dates with the same person, they’ll have the context to understand rather than rush to judgment.
Getting in shape generally only helps - it’s also a signal indicating that you have your life on the right track and do self care - but charisma isn’t all about weight or even appearance. You should be able to talk great, listen great, or both.
The main part you need to pick up is being able to establish the mental hooks around the ideas that are central to programming. Do you know how you can watch a choreography session and see the dancers just pick up the moves as they’re described/demonstrated? That’s because they’ve learned the language of dance. It’s an entire (physical) vocabulary. It’s the semantics of dance.
What you need to do is do that with programming. There’s a number of getting started with books and videos, but you’re going to want them to learn the fundamentals of not just a language but of programming.
If you’re talking about using other people’s functions (like in an api), then the function name should give you a clue about what it does. The cool thing about functions is that you don’t have to know how they’re doing their thing, just what they’re doing. If you have the source code, you will find you remember more if you use comments to make notes for yourself (it engages more of your brain than just reading).
If your problem is writing your own code using functions, start out more slowly. Write a program that’s just a giant block of linear code. Once that’s working, then take a look as to how to break it down into functions. If you have a block of code that sorts a list, for example, and you had to copy and paste it into three different areas, that would mean it should be a function.
Use comments very often as you’re going. Before you write a block, write a comment about what it’s supposed to do. You’ll start to see some generalities, which will be you learning programming, not just a language.
It literally has nothing to do with being ashamed about who you are. You should read my more complete explanation to the other person.
I’m a manager at a FAANG and have been involved in tech and scientific research for commercial, governmental, and military applications for about 35 years now, and have been through a lot of different careers in the course of things.
First - and I really don’t want to come off like a dick here - you’re two years in. Some people take off, and others stay at the same level for a decade or more. I am the absolute last person to argue that we live in a meritocracy - it’s a combination of the luck of landing with the right group on the right projects - but there’s also something to be said about tenacity in making yourself heard or moving on. You can’t know a whole lot with two years of experience. When I hire someone, I expect to hold their hand for six months and gradually turn more responsibility over as they develop both their technical and personal/project skills.
That said, if you really hate it, it’s probably time to move on. If you’re looking to move into a PM style role, make sure that you have an idea of what that all involves, and make sure you know the career path - even if the current offer pays more, PMs in my experience cap out at a lower level for compensation than engineers. Getting a $10k bump might seem like you’re moving up, but a) it doesn’t sound like you’re comparing it to other engineering offers and b) we’re in a down market and I’d be hesitant to advise anyone to make a jump right now if their current position is secure. Historically speaking, I’m expecting demand to start to climb back to high levels in the next 1-2 years.
Honestly, it just sounds like your job sucks. I have regularly had students, interns, and mentees in my career because that’s important to me. One thing I regularly tell people is that if there’s something that they choose to read about rather than watching Netflix on a Saturday, that’s something they should be considering doing for a living. Obviously that doesn’t cover Harry Potter, but if you’re reading about ants or neural networks or Bayesian models or software design patterns, that’s a pretty good hint as to where you should be steering. If you’d rather work on space systems, or weapons, or games, or robots, or LLMs, or whatever - you can slide over with side and hobby projects. If you’re too depressed to even do that, take the other job. I’d rather hire a person who quit their job to drive for Uber while they worked on their own AI project than someone who was a full stack engineer at a startup that went under.
Anyway, that’s my advice. Let me know if I can clarify anything.