programming cool
Computer plays video games
I want to make video games
Learn to program
Never even make video gamesYeah… Decades later I still sometimes think about making video games, but never have any time to do more than write down a quick idea. Maybe one day…
I was good at math and bad with people.
I always thought engineering is cool but time consuming. Programming was picked up along the way and now the money is too good to do anything else. Wish I could work on devices again.
I had enough common sense as an 18-year-old to know that writers and musicians need day jobs, but not enough to realize that I’d have been better off learning a unionized trade and becoming an electrician or a plumber. Since I didn’t have the looks or the personality to make it as a rent boy in Manhattan, I rent out my brain instead of my ass as a programmer.
There’s no inspiration or passion involved. I’m in it for the money. It’s thankless work best outsourced, and I laugh at articles saying that AI is going to take my job. An AI smart enough to take my job would be too smart to want it.
How was the process of learning it / getting good for you, as it can be really frustrating in the beginning?
If I wasn’t autistic before I learned to code, I sure as hell became autistic in the process. Learning to think like a computer in order to program one is a dehumanizing process. Kind of explains why so many techies are fucked in the head.
Fucked in the head and believe that we can solve every problem with tech.
The example of the guillotine ought to be all anybody needs to understand that social and political problems are not amenable to technological solutions.
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Nah, they would have rented 'em out: PEaaS: public executions as a service.
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December 8th, 2009 - Motorola Droid successfully rooted … [granting] root access on the phone using a terminal emulator. This is how I learned bash which inevitably pushed me into pursuing proper Computer Science.
I was apparently enraptured by PCs as a child, didn’t really do much apart from games / emulators until secondary school. At ~14 I was offered an extracurricular class to learn how to program TI-82 calculators. This really clicked for me, ended up pursuing a heavy math / comp sci / stem curriculum. I get to automate away tedious / boring tasks by working on a mentally stimulating puzzle. The rush on getting it working the first time is 👌
The rush on getting it working the first time is 👌
That’s so true, but what I think keeps us hooked in the game are the failures, the figuring out the "why"s.
Reading as a kid about virus analysis and how they work in a short column in a… newspaper. Yeah, they even listed full Windows Registry paths. Didn’t know what HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE was, didn’t own a computer, only knew about some DOS commands, but I knew I wanted to be able to do that job and decompile stuff (whatever that ment) and see how it worked. Just like dismantling (and ultimately destroying) toys to see the inner workings.
After finally owning a computer and being bored by the few games I had on Windows 95, being limited to Notepad, Internet Explorer (without an internet connection yet; or was it Netscape Navigator?) and Paint (in which I sucked, lacking any artistic talent), when I learned that I can just type stuff in Notepad, I borrowed a book about “programming” in HTML. Then Pascal, the pinnacle being a simple XOR encryption program, with a god damn white on blue “windows” interface with buttons (a la Midnight Commander). Writing TRIVIA “scripts” for mIRC channels made us gods. Then Delphi naturally followed, making my own tool to track how many hours I’ve spent on dialup a month (yes, internet was very expensive) while listening to 80’s music on Winamp. Nothing was more interesting than that. Then got a job and out of a sudden started making my own money by writing Delphi code. Up until then I wasn’t really aware that my passion would also bring food on the table. The rest is history.
Programming in those days felt unreal. Felt like The Matrix. I knew that what I want to do for the rest of my life is look at text on a screen, hit CTRL+F9, see a crash, set some breakpoints, and ponder around the room or while taking a piss about what went wrong and how to solve it. I’m no Einstein, but I understood why science people dedicate their lifes to their work and disregard completely their social life.
I used to make bots in RuneScape. If I’m being honest post high school I had to pick something and just said fuck it CS degree
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After typing in a bunch of programs on my 1KB Sinclair ZX-81 I wanted to understand how they worked and wanted to make some of my own.
Pretty much from the same era. Either you learned how to teach your computer to do stuff or you were stuck with an expensive paperweight.
I always read a lot. 100+ books a year, plus magazines. Then I got a job in the boonies and got home only on weekends. All of a sudden I was reading a book a day. Even with the library and used book stores, that was financially ruinous for our young family. So I bought a VIC-20, a used b&w tv, and the programmer’s reference manual to take out to the work camps… The savings on books paid for the system in just a few months.
One thing led to another and a decade or so later I made the transition from hobby to career. Now I’m retired and looking to reboot as a hobbyist.
Back in the mid to late nineties I used America Online and the warez chat rooms. I found out Visual Basic was used to create bot programs and now I work for a big tech company.
I don’t suck as much at programming as I suck at everything else.
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