This person got so so close to the real answer as to why most software today sucks.

Money.

Capitalism.

Line go up - Forever.

It’s the systems we choose to live in, not the leaders who take advantage of them.

Really cool software has been coming out all the time for the last decade or so, and then the second it goes public and starts trading stocks, it immediately starts going south. A company, making cool stuff I love, goes public, and I know to immediately start grieving for its death. Money makes all creative endeavors so so much worse. And I truly believe software is a creative pursuit. It’s been hijacked by capitalists to automate every living being on this planet out of work. Right now the list of people truly put out on their ass for good by automation isn’t very big. But we’re accelerating very quickly to a future where nothing fun ever happens again. Useful, functional, problem solving software, from now until forever, will be made and used to kick your ass, stomp you into the dirt, and sell your stupid crying face to anybody who wants to purchase it. Then while we’re at it, it’ll take the things you love to do and do them for you. And then make you pay money just to see it.

If you want to see and participate in some of the most unique and amazing uses of software engineering in our time, there are so many open source projects that achieve incredible and fun things for absolutely $0

• Video Game Randomizers
  • And their decomp partners
• Mod Communities
• Free Digital Art Programs
• Open up Github, sort by most Starred projects, and just fuckin scroll until you can’t scroll anymore
  • And even this has been captured. Code made freely for everyone to use, instead being fed to machine learning bullshit. To what end? To fully replace the need for any human to ever write software ever again.

It’s endless. There are truly too many projects for me to list in one post. I’d spend weeks editing this comment, adding all the coolest things software has done for us and can do for us. But it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. I am 100% confident society and its leaders will abuse the good will, passion, and creativity of many a programmer from now until the end of my life. It’ll do that to every profession. As long as we cling to the idea that we only do work to make profits, as long as the only way we can survive is by making money, this will be our fate.

Wanna dogpile onto this comment to add that we can’t even automate robots to mow lawns by themselves. The ones you can buy that do any part of the job well at all require GPS, and also require manual intervention or remote piloting for even getting the bot back to its charging station. I work for a corporation that automates machinery like this and sells it to the US government, which advertises its products as automated or crewless, but actually requires somebody at the helm of a software suite to manually adjust and operate the bots at any given moment during their operations. How the hell are people expecting cars and planes to automatically get you to your destination? Imagine your “crewless” vehicle being piloted by some dude in an office somewhere in your country instead of someone actually being at the wheel. Does that make any kind of sense? Would you trust the delay in instructions? What happens when your vehicle can’t receive any outside connections?

Some level of complex “Autonomous” everything, from now until the foreseeable future, will always have a human in the pilot seat. 100% automation is impossible for us right now with our current level of technology.

The reason is more than just that the last few % points of automating is the most difficult hurdle, though I really agree with that part. It’s that automation can’t account for improvising, adapting, innovating. Automation can’t do on-demand problem solving. Space probes on the Moon and Mars can’t unflip themselves when they get stuck. Programmed machines can only do what they’re programmed to do. We’re beyond anything somewhat complex getting 100% automated any time soon.

Accounting? Helpdesk support? Labor that is repetitive and doesn’t require much ingenuity will get automated fast.

Heavy machinery? Art? Transportation? Medical care? We’re 100+ years a way from completely unmanned complex tasks. People eat up the sci-fi marketing garbage without really interacting with or testing the claims being made.

I’m not a therapist or any variety of professional on the topic. I will tell you it sounds unhelpful to remove emotions. I know there are similar practices in things like Stoicism. But many people take those practices to extremes. You don’t sound like you’re doing anything like 100% extreme about emotional suppression but you are probably overdoing it like 80% extreme. If that makes sense.

Emotions are useful. They’re informational reactions to the world around us. I’m an extremely emotional person (big happies, big mads, big sads, etc) and sometimes letting that loose is a huge problem. I can make myself physically sick if I don’t regulate my emotions and reactions. But I learned and practiced how to feel my emotions and then let them pass, rather than trying to stomp them out entirely. Which never really works. Suppression just pushes the problems to your future self. It’s not a relief or release.

So I guess I’m trying to say, you’re not at all wrong for what you’re trying to accomplish. But I think you’re probably not going to succeed or improve (in the way that you want) going about it the way you have been. I’d recommend finding counselors who understand how to teach effective emotional regulation techniques, or practice meditation.

Everyone I need to talk to is in my contacts. If you’re not in my contacts, my phone doesn’t even ring. You go straight to voicemail.

I was fine with phone calls when I was younger. Now it’s mostly spam robocalls or scammers or both. Nobody seems interested in solving those problems.

Wait a minute. Was this sarcastic or do I get to lore dump? In case you weren’t aware, Intel has been doing this shit to AMD for decades. And so has Nvidia.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna33882525

https://www.neowin.net/news/eu-fines-intel-400-million-for-blocking-amds-market-access-through-payments-to-pc-makers/

https://www-purepc-pl.translate.goog/intel-oraz-nvidia-mieli-wewnetrzna-umowe-ktora-blokowala-tworzenie-laptopow-z-amd-renoir-oraz-geforce-rtx-2070-i-wyzej?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US

Like this was a 3 minute Google search adventure.

I’m reusing a blade server I managed to snag from a company I worked for in 2008. It’s perfect as a media server for friends and family. It is only recently degrading slightly but hey, it lasted a long time!

Point is you can use almost anything. Do your homework on compatible parts and make what you can afford

I get it. I have like, life ruining levels of insomnia, which is like 90% because I have extreme nightmares every time I fall asleep. They’re so bad sometimes I wake up crying. Sometimes I don’t fall asleep because I know what’s waiting for me when I eventually lose consciousness. I’m so thankful when I have no dreams at all. I’ve talked to doctors and psychologists about it and they just shrug at me like, wow that sounds tough. Nobody has ever helped me with it. And really who would take it seriously? It’s just nightmares right? What adult is afraid to go to sleep? To dream about loved ones dying in gruesome ways right before their eyes? Or getting murdered in horrible ways, tortured to death, trampled, eaten alive by insects, being responsible for killing my whole family in a car crash, falling to death and remembering what the impact felt like, having my eyeballs plucked from my head, my stomach torn open and my guts devoured while I’m still alive. I’m not even close to the end of the list of what I’ve experienced over half of my life. Yeah they’re just nightmares. But I have to experience them. For the rest of my life.

The only fighting chance I’ve been given is to move to a state where weed is legal because it basically prevents me from dreaming at all.

I don’t know how seriously to take this kind of discussion sometimes. I can rationalize that a person can do awful things to people in a fictional setting and it’s not a commentary of who they are as a person. On the other hand I cannot escape the feeling that I am replying to a genuine sadistic monster, based on everything you just said in this post. Forget all of that. Unnecessary commentary when there’s a point I want to make.

There’s a crucial difference in video games vs more free-form varieties like TTRPGs: You’re on The Rails. Video game RPGs are almost always on the rails. There’s no real sandbox game anywhere. Like there are good attempts, but at the end of the day, any game has programmed expectations for your inputs and what it can output. Video games can’t possibly fathom how deeply evil you could actually get. It would be a developmental and technological nightmare to try programming in all of your awful choices and how they could spiral the narrative. They have to do their best within the limitations of how much could possibly fit in a game. And I’m assuming the game companies also have to take into account the ratings system, and PR. Even if you could play the game any way you want, good AND bad choices, you’re going to get odd looks from people if they know the game allows you to sexually abuse NPCs, or enslave people through extortion. You know what I’m getting at? The real limitation isn’t the technology, even though that’s already a big one. Even in virtual, completely fictional settings, being allowed to play that shit out is wholly monstrous. And I can’t imagine the toll it would take on designers who would be tasked to write it.

So if you really want all of that and accept the risks, make your own CRPG where you can go all out on Evil. Being critical of developers and designers for not being willing to go as far as your twisted mind can go in a video game is a wild take. Go play in an evil TTRPG campaign if you want to get those kicks. It’s way easier.

I’d say for myself it’s a tit for tat situation.

If the company I hypothetically pirate from is a total prick, mistreats their employees, donates a part of the money they earned from my purchase to lobby to my government to reduce the rights of minorities, I won’t give a single fuck. I may even just never touch their product out of spite.

Are they inoffensive and fairly neutral? I likely won’t pirate if I have the means to buy it.

Are they basically ConcernedApe? I will follow them to the ends of the earth showering them with praise and riches. Never pirate and would actively shame those who do

We’re at the “demonization of being left-handed” stage of understanding.

Yes you appear to be left handed but couldn’t you simply train to use your right hand? You and all the left handed people should work on that

Regardless of where anyone sits on this topic, I need you to realize something that none of you are even aware of. By accepting the premise of the argument as “men are generally stronger than women,” you are immediately accepting that trans women are men. It doesn’t matter how you land the rest of your opinion. The fascists got you to accept their presupposition that trans women are just men.

I approve of this expanded answer. I may have been too ELI5 in my post.

If the OP has read this far, I’m not telling you to use docker, but you could consider it if you want to store all of your services and their configurations in a backup somewhere on your network so if you have to set up a new raspberry pi for any reason, now it’s a simple sequence of docker commands (or one docker-compose command) to get back up and running. You won’t need to remember how to reinstall all of the dependencies.

It’s virtual machines but faster, more configurable with a considerably larger set of automation, and it consumes less computer resources than a traditional VM. Additionally, in software development it helps solve a problem summarized as “works on my machine.” A lot of traditional server creation and management relied on systems that need to be set up perfectly identical every deployment to prevent dumb defects based on whose machine was used to write it on. With Docker, it’s stupid easy to copy the automated configuration from “my machine” to “your machine.” Now everyone, including the production systems, are running from “my machine.” That’s kind of a big deal, even if it could be done in other ways naturally on Linux operating systems. They don’t have the ease of use or the same shareability.

What you’re doing is perfectly expected. That’s a great way of getting around using Docker. You aren’t forced into using it. It’s just easier for most people

SNES purchased by my parents in 1992.

An old blade server I was able to take from my very first job, state of the art for the time it was made around 2002. It’s still running and I’ve been using it as a media and hosting server for years despite how out of date the specs are now.

Chad, Chet, Chaz, the unbroly Trinity

Disco Elysium is so fucking wild. It’s the most empathetic game I’ve ever played. I am someone who has an easy time putting myself in other people’s shoes. The character is an alcoholic mess, on the brink of a depression so deep he has totally fractured his own memory and sense of self. He’s a genius. He’s also an idiot. And he’s a cop/detective in a world that really despises cops. It’s what I would call the idealistic cop: the one that would put themself between a group of armed men and a group of innocent people with nothing but a dinky pistol and say stand down.

Anyway, I love how it makes me feel about everything in its place. The ideologies that drive us. The youth we waste on fooling around. The insanity and, somehow, the humor of racism. The mistakes that make us who we are. The idealistic pursuits that are so high they can never be achieved. How heartbreak never goes away.

Most importantly, I played a game with an internal monologue built-in as the RPG system, and it nearly exactly matches how I think and feel. My mind is also fractured as identifiable pieces of myself. I gave some parts of them names because it made it easier to separate the thoughts from how I truly felt. I have nearly all the same psyches just with different names from Volition, Half-light, etc. And it floored me. I have never played a game that was as introspective as I was. Right down to the simultaneously protective and self destructive thoughts clashing within and one winning out. It gave me a third person perspective of my own self destructive and unhealthy thought processes. And it helped me love myself a little bit more. I feel like I’ll never be able to play anything like it again for the rest of my life.

Dialogue and movement in films and shows is so damn well rehearsed that I can never truly get immersed. Real conversations are awkward. We stutter. We fumble words. We forget people’s names, or what we were just talking about. Never for dramatic reasons. Just because we’re human. Script writers are hyper focused on fitting as much wit and humor as they can jam in there. I think some authors of books fall into the same trap. A 16 year old character somehow has the wit and wisdom of someone twice their age. I want more scenes made with genuine stumbling embarrassing awkwardness.

You know those moments where later people learn that the actor improvised the line? Or the movements? Best one I ever saw was Heath Ledger’s Joker failing to blow up the hospital.

[ He turns around. Well shit. Looks back at the device and mashes the button a few more times. Hospital finally blows up and he gets startled. ]

THAT’S THE SHIT. Give me more of that. Let me see the characters fuck up. Get uncomfortable. Make genuinely minor mistakes. Give me flaws. Give me something that isn’t witty. I’m tired of getting bashed over the head with polished scripts.

Animated movies tend to do this better to be fair. Lots to appreciate from the recent animated Spiderman movies for example.

GUIs are a useful tool to give common users an accessible way to understand how they’re interacting with technology. They’re best utilized,I think, when the point of the technology is to be viewed. Like imagine you had to browse and launch Netflix shows in a terminal. That would be incredibly annoying.

In contrast, its really goddamn slow to perform routine server maintenance and commands through a GUI. I save so much time managing my servers through CLI, scripting, and automated tasks. Almost everything I’m dealing with is text based information.

Quite literally you are your brain, trying to account for the entire body and mind as the self simultaneously. But you may catch yourself thinking or saying things like “I can’t wrap my brain around this.” Isn’t that odd? Your brain refers to itself as my brain. Is that a linguistic issue or is your sense of perspective off?

“Don’t you have a heart?” Why do we imply that our sense of compassion is only located in an organ that just pumps blood? That clearly can’t be the case.

We know cases where someone gets a brain tumor and suddenly becomes violent or unfeeling. When the brain is damaged either during life or during gestation, we know that we can lose all manner of things: cognition, motor skills, memory, emotions, etc. It’s all the brain.

What confuses the issue is everything the brain is attached to. What I think all conscious humans do is try to make sense of the mind-body connection. I feel tired, that’s not just my brain feeling tired. I can feel tired in every single part of my body independently or all together. “I” am the brain. If I lose an arm, I don’t lose my sense of self. But losing important functions can damage the self I’ve constructed of myself. If I lose my eyesight I will be a very different person when I’m unable to visually enjoy video games, movies, art, nature. But clearly blind people still have a self. If it sits behind their eyes, will it move? Adapt to their ears?

All this to say, your self is self constructed. It’s malleable. But make no mistake that the source of where self and consciousness are maintained is the brain.

I (almost) never make any plans. I travel to the city, and then I decide what to do on the spot. Whatever I happen to be in the mood for. Most places I visit have something I want to see already and I don’t have to plan for it. And if there are night life activities, I’m checking them out. No rules. No itinerary. Just spontaneous adventure.