Sleep outside, if you have a space. Get a deck umbrella, a mosquito net and a cot and a sleeping bag (actually on super hot days I used to just sleep on a towel). It’s so much cooler than trying to get by indoors with no AC, even with fans. And it’s rather pleasant.

I think generally speaking, we’ve been in a computer tech boom for decades, driven by the growth of computers going back to the 80s. The internet and smartphones just grew out of that.

Unfortunately I think we’re running out of new stuff to compute and newer technologies seem to be a bit week on the “problem being solved” end of things. Most likely what we’ve come to think of as tech will take a back seat to technologies with more room to grow, I’m guessing biotech in particular will be the next big thing.

Left my iron plugged in for a week without realizing it.

Accidentally caused massive heat wave. Sorry folks, but I unplugged it so temps should start to go down now.

I swiped almost everything right

Don’t do this, if this is an input into your app’s algorithm at all it’ll assume you’re ugly and desperate and not show you to anyone. Only swipe on people you’d be at least potentially excited to meet and that could actually work out (e.g. don’t swipe right on someone who’s profile says “I want a man of god” if you’re a hardcore atheist). I shifted to this strategy on hinge and it made a noticeable difference in the number and quality of matches.

Think about it - if you only swipe right on good matches (for both of you), they’ll see you and be more likely to swipe right on you, improving your match rate. And don’t worry about how their level of attractiveness plays into this, because it’ll be weighted for that.

As a massive introvert it’s pretty much the only way I meet anybody. I could write a multi-volume treatise on why people hate online dating and how it points to them doing it wrong in some way. But I’ll spare you other than to say remember that you’re asking a computer to match you with someone. It has no feelings for you and will just do what makes sense for the system as a whole, not for you in particular.

Just have low expectations - a lot of people treat those they meet on the app as relatively disposable compared to someone they met in real life. So if someone ghosts you or just disappears from the app without a word, it’s definitely impolite but not uncommon. Don’t take it personally (even though my friends tend to take it personally when it happens to them).

At least it’s not driving straight into a tree, I call that an improvement.

The paradox of tolerance relies on a lot of assumptions that don’t really work in reality. We don’t tend to see more open societies have more intolerance, quite the opposite. Part of the problem is that “the intolerant” is not a single group, but many groups that hate each other. And those who are intolerant towards the intolerant are themselves part of the intolerant.

For a less-political example, let’s imagine hypothetically that Lemmy is very pro-linux. However, some people who absolutely hate linux show up and start posting anti-linux memes. These people get insulted, downvoted, and eventually banned by others on Lemmy, because they’re showing intolerance towards linux.

But then what happens to those anti-linux people? They go off and created their own forums, and talk about how intolerant lemmy is to people who don’t use linux. So whenever a linux user shows up on those forums, they’re inevitably banned. The result of intolerance of the intolerant is that they remain intolerant, and now the tolerant have become hard to distinguish from them, and there’s no way for pro-linux forces to be part of the conversation anti-linux people are having - allowing them to create their own culty filter bubble.

Now imagine an alternative - instead of banning the anti-linux people, pro-linux lemmy users decide to engage with them and correct misconceptions about linux. After all, linux, like many other topics, can get kind of complicated, and linux users need to remember that not everyone has the same background knowledge that they do about the topic. Sure, some linux haters would be persistent, but maybe others would be like “hey, these linux folks are actually kind of cool and helpful, I want to be more like them.” That may sound idealistic, but I think that’s a lot closer to what we see in reality - intolerance thrives in closed off spaces, and dies in open ones.

Sure. My parents had different religions and being an atheist I don’t really have a duty to care about other people’s religions.

Of course it helped that my parents weren’t too seriously religious. And I’ve rejected religious people for having religion-tied views I find appalling. But the religion itself isn’t the issue, just the things that sometimes result from it are.

Social media is just a symptom of the larger problem which is the corporations prefering to build walled gardens so they can control users rather than the open protocols that defined the early internet. Back in the day, I used to call it “everything becoming facebook”.

Social media is fundamentally a moat - a wall built around a set of consumers to keep them away from competitors. Investors love moats. If you whisper as quietly as you possibly can to yourself “I found a company with a wide moat that no one is talking about yet” JP Morgan himself will literally burst through your wall like the Kool Aid Man. They love it because it avoids competition, and as much as competition is the whole point of capitalism, it’s the last thing an actual capitalist wants to deal with.

A big part of what made the early internet super valuable was the opposite of moats: open protocols. For example how GMail can send email to Yahoo or any other email provider. If Google had their way, that’s not how email would work at all - you’d need a google account to both send and receive emails. That’s why these companies have been trying to kill email for ages, trying to get people to use their own proprietary messaging systems instead, where you can only send to others with an account. Then they could capture you and keep you all to themselves.

Which brings us to the fediverse. The fediverse is an attempt to return to open protocols rather than creating a moat around a group of users. In many ways it’s like email - your email provider might cut off a server if it’s just sending spam all day, and this is basically defederation. But otherwise nothing stops you from communicating with anyone, and that’s how it should be.

A lot of people are saying cut them off, but I have a family member who was into the anti-vax conspiracy theories and kinda still is, but it’s much less of a focus now and is pretty obviously just being carried forward by cognitive dissonance at this point. There will never be total victory, but there can be a reasonable truce.

What I’d suggest is the most counter-intuitive strategy - show genuine interest. Say “Ok, I want to know more, but I need you to be specific. Tell me what your theory is and what the evidence is, I’ll take my time looking at it, and respond in detail.”

Keep in mind, they probably won’t pay attention to whatever your respond with. That’s ok. The response isn’t the point, pinning them down on what they think is. So often these things are purely emotional, and forcing them into a logical framework will make them do the work for you. As for the response, odds are it’s some combination of cherry-picked data and spurious correlations, if not outright made up facts. Think of alternate explanations for what they’re showing you that are more plausible than a vaccine killing people. And remember that if the vaccine really was killing people, it would be really obvious, not something we need look deep into the matrix to find.

I think genetic engineering is the most high-potential tech right now. They’re already using it to cure sickle cell, and my (total non-expert, probably way too hopeful) pipe dream is that we could basically treat it like we can open a terminal on the body some day and change whatever we want.

Edit: I just want to point out that I’m imagining curing cancer, reversing aging, etc. Not like, additional orifices or anything.

It’s a form of communication that reaches us more fundamentally than words. I imagine it’s like animal sounds - what does a dog’s bark mean to another dog? Probably the same thing as when you tell someone “Stop!” or “Hey!” really loud. It don’t carry a concrete meaning, but feeling. Music is taking that and turning it into language. It can have many different meanings and tell many different stories, even without lyrics. Although it’ll never be as exact as written words, we can still enjoy the story.

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jeans and a t shirt pretty much daily

Not great but acceptable gym garb.

I feel like I could do all of that at home.

You could do it at home with light weights. But heavier weights and equipment are really expensive and otherwise problematic to keep at home. Also, I find that there’s something about being at the gym that makes it easier for me to work out. I did home workouts during covid but it just wasn’t the same and I didn’t get as good of a workout.

Also gym membership prices vary widely. Planet Fitness if you have one near you at least used to be as cheap as $10/month. Ignore anyone who says it’s not a real gym, it’s good enough for like 99% of people.YMCAs and other community centers tend to be on the cheaper side.

The ancient romans actually didn’t have gendered bathrooms. Or separate stalls. Just everything hanging out together, watching each other piss and shit. And then they’d all wipe their butts with a common sponge on a stick.

But then that was before Big Toilet Paper.

I guess I’ve never had much trouble with the initial recruiter screen, usually it’s just them saying what the job is and if I say if it’s a good fit, they go ahead with the test or whatever the next step is. What kinds of things do they ask?

I can definitely give you feedback on your resume if you send it over.

The problem then is that by responding, you’re engaging with it which typically helps it spread in the algorithms*. Ideally there should be multiple downvote options - maybe separate it out as “misinformation” vs “bad opinion” or something. Removing downvotes and banning users who disagree is the typical cult strategy (recall the classic cult sub, r/thedonald, was notorious for this). If you’re worried about downvotes being used to silence people, maybe another way to mitigate that would be a “sort by downvoted” option so that being downvoted a lot could actually put you at the top of at least that feed.

*On Lemmy, notice the following:

Active (default): Calculates a rank based on the score and time of the latest comment, with decay over time

Do you think vote sould be private ? Public ? And why ?

Public. Lots of downvotes is information that could indicate that the commenter is lying, or just saying something unpopular. But either way, it’s information. Before youtube started hiding downvotes, it was easy to tell that a video had a misleading title based on downvotes. Now clickbait dominates the platform.

Are you sastified with the current voting system ? And why ?

No. I agree that the slashdot method with more than just upvote/downvote is better. In a perfect world I imagine we could have every emoji be a reaction option, and then you could sort by putting an emoji in a bar at the top. In reality I imagine this would be a challenge from a backend perspective, but maybe like the top 5 or 10 emoji reactions could be an option for selection.

What other interesting software/website that tried something different do you know ?

I’ll do the opposite and say - please do not remove downvotes like Twitter/Bluesky/mastodon etc. Downvotes are super important. People need to be able to boo, the only place people aren’t allowed to boo are in church or at cult rallies. And that’s why those platforms are especially bad for misinformation, hyperbole, and overall depravity.

What way do you imagine to highlight content and improve search, discoverability ?

Remove all as a forced/default option on the main page. Back in the day before reddit had r/all, communities were much more diverse and niche, and this helped separate communities flourish in their own way. When r/all was added, the content started to resemble twitter, if not just becoming screenshots of twitter, on just about every sub. This actually improves discoverability because it would force users to branch out and look at subs instead of just looking at what’s on all.

For me WFH has helped me have a community. The office was never a real community, and the fact that we all worked together got in the way of being actual friends. Instead with the added time from WFH I was able to prioritize my social life and go to more events and meet people I actually have stuff in common with. Additionally my in-office job forced me to live in a dead suburb, WFH allowed me to move to a city with a lot more social opportunities.

Of course probably not everyone prioritized that. The office might be good for some people, but for people like me who don’t necessarily socialize at the office very easily WFH is much better for community.

Has anyone else made a successful pivot from software engineering to another field?

No, but I’ve done the complete opposite.

I’ve sent out 400+ applications

First rule of doing anything: if you hear grinding, you’re doing something wrong and need to rethink your approach.

I’ve found it to be much easier to get my foot in the door with the help of a recruiter. There’s a ton of them on linkedin, all you really need to do is start looking for jobs and they’ll appear in your messages. Interact with them, even if it’s just to say you’re not interested - I think somehow this helps you show up in whatever algo linkedin uses. I’ve only very rarely gotten anywhere with applications. Recruiters help because they usually already have a relationship with the hiring manager.

Emphasis on usually, because you need to only work with recruiters that actually have that relationship. First clue is that they are physically located near the employer, and if they’re actually an internal recruiter, all the better.

Second thing I’m guessing you’re doing wrong is your resume. Remember that anyone filtering out through resumes is probably not a technical person and is just looking for keywords. So make sure every technology you’ve worked with is mentioned by its official name on your resume.

E.g.:

worked for 1.5 years at a major financial firm building data pipelines, working with financial datasets, and using technologies like Python, SQL, and AWS

Then make sure your resume includes “Python”, “SQL”, and “AWS”, as well as the specific SQL you’re using and the names of the specific AWS services, and whatever other cool keywords you can throw in about the financial systems you were working on. Even basic things like Git should be mentioned, because you never know when a HR person might have that on a list of qualifications.

I can say I’ve been looking at switching jobs within tech and I’ve been getting plenty of interest from recruiters. Now I do have a lot more experience, but I don’t think that’s the only factor as I’m also looking at more high-level jobs. The difference in approach is probably the key.