gcc_programmer

It's a she ;)

I recently started a new job and it goes a bit like this: the 5 weekdays I average about 11 hours per day (office time only, no commute). My commute is about 45/50 minutes in total (2 ways). I usually spend at least 2-3 hours on each weekend day, but sometimes it can be as much as 7 hours. When I am on holiday I usually login 2-3 times for a few hours (2-3).

I work definitely more than the average in my company, although not by much, and the weekend/holiday bit not many people do, although some do it. I find it that I am extremely productive the whole time: I constantly create new things and I get a lot of ground covered. It often happens it is 6pm, I have an idea, and instead of going back I push it. 2 hours go by but the idea is finallized and I know tomorrow I can start something new.

I don't feel burn out, but genuinely interested in my job. I read a book every night before sleep, exercise for 30 mins after work, and spend time with my partner. I thoroughly enjoy weekends, I often work on side projects and hobbies, and I do chores with my partner, and also speak with relatives.

The only reason I would ever need more time is if I have kids one day. But otherwise if I had to work 9 to 5 I would feel like shit because I will be watching netflix for like 3 hours in the evening, which is what I used to do in my first job. So constraining myself actually is great for not wasting: I am direcrly converting my time for knowledge and money, until I need to have kids.

Long story short, some people find extra free time pointless unless they have something meaningful like kids to spend it on. I do believe a lot of people are not willing to work so much, but to those that want free time, I will tell you this: be honest with yourself if you are making the most of it.

any file is executable on linux, if you are brave enough

Setting a goal for yourself and following it through to completion.

Delayed gratification and hard work.

Doing the right thing, when everyone else is doing the easy thing.

I tried to read this article, I really did. I tried to read the comments and to be emphatic. I really tried. I just do not feel pitty or any empathy towards anyone in the comments, or the author. I think I am emphatic towards the people I love because I actually deeply love my partner of many years, and my parents. But somehow the idea of homelessness disgusts me: I do not feel any positive emotion towards people who have experienced it, or are experiencing it. Maybe it is my upbringing: I did not grow up in a developed Western country (although I live in one one) but a developing country, where everyone is struggling to some degree, so the homeless there to me always seemed like they are homeless due to their own bad choices. The ones that beg are truly repulsive and I have my own experience of why I will never give them money: when I was a little kid I saw a drug addict begging and I stopped to give him cash out of pity. When I took out my wallet he became aggressive and wanted not only to take what I gave him but all my money. I was very scared, it was dark and late, and people around pretended nothing was happening and would have let him do it if I didnt board a randomly arriving bus! This lesson taught me that no one will help you in bad situations, bad people want to hurt you, and people who stop you for money want to scam you and exploit your naive pity. I was also mugged, twice, arround the same time by teenage boys who threatened my life both times. So I really cannot understand how people can feel empathy towards the not-well-off, especially as I myself was poor as my parents were struggling at the time and yet they didnt steal or beg or do dodgy things while the drug addict and those teenagers did. So either I am a psychopath, or everyone here truly is a Western naive person who has no idea how the world works even if they were homeless (to me being homeless in a Western country is something my brain cannot understand given that most such countries in Europe have wellfare states). Can someone help me understand? I am not trying to start a flamewar, I just want to know how can my opinion be so vastly different? Am I missing something here?

I read your wall of text. You make some interesting points. But I will be honest with you: I also used to think like you, in these long convoluted ways where I was trying to explain everything I saw via programming and all sorts of mathematical extrapolations, and I for a time I believed my own bit. But then I realised: it was all cp and youthful arrogance.

In a nutshell, you are nitpicking. You can always define an arbitrary scale at which nothing matters: you used time in your rabbit example very effectively to discount the usefulness of the "rabbit category". Or you used these XX males as a counter example to a rigid definition of gender. You even yourself realise that this way of thinking is completely useless as you yourself say that the category of species is extremely useful:

> So strictly logically speaking, this definition is useless. Nevertheless, the concept of species is clearly a useful concept that helps us communicate things about the real world. How do we explain this?

I can explain this for you: you are thinking life is logical and "discreet" because you are a programmer and this is what you were taught. It is not: life is... continuous! Like the integral: each point has measure 0 but when you "add" a transfinite amount of 0 measure points you get... non-zero area! This resolves your rabbit paradox: each generation of rabbit is a point with measure 0 since its "difference" is so small with the generation before and after that it we can model it as 0...

Or second model: Rabbit_n = 0.9999 * Rabbit_{n+1}

After 100 generations: similarity is already 0.99

After 1000 generations: similarity is 0.90

After 10000 generations: similarity is 0.36

Tadaa: problem solved. So don't think so hard about this, use your common sense and realise that most people are men and most people are women and a few edge cases do not matter for practical purposes. And this is the crux of the matter: we need to make decisions. Hence we do what you very well describe: we categorise the particle soup around us and we act. So the usefulness of categories/abstractions CAN ONLY EVER BE MEASURED BY THEIR USEFULNESS FOR DECISION MAKING (sorry for caps I but want to emphasize). When I say decision making I mean almost everything: from deciding what sandwich to eat to deciding on how to prove Fermat's last theorem. If categories help you to do things, they are useful. End of story (for me, you can go write a book about this, make sure to send me a free copy).

Finally, this is also all bs so don't take it too seriously: I am a person on the internet.

It's not a side project, it's a production database owned by a company... I hope I never have to use products you buils either...

The maturity of the article is laughable. I'm sure my age is the same as the people who wrote it, but this is unacceptable: dropping databases in prod is a serious issue, not a joke. I think the culture of the company is toxic and not professional at any level. #change-my-mind

Listening to Warren Buffet is as useful as playing the lottery.

I am on your side: I fix it by disabling javascript.

I think the author is arrogant and closed minded. He underestimates the levels of complexity of software systems and strives for some utopian "elegance of design" which I think doesn't exist. The only thing which matters is to deliver results and move forward. Requirements change: back in 1990 the internet existed in a much much smaller form, and WWW was just about to be invented. Linux had yet to be invented by Linus. Unix and Linux survived and adapted, VMS (or whatever it was named) didn't. Also the argument about "speaking English" is again so arrogant and closed-minded: not all of us are native English speakers. To me rm or delete or del or banana doesn't really matter...