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Hi, well it's probably not a good rate when you're just starting out. But I'm in my forties now, and it's basically an ongoing auction for my time that's driving up the price gradually. I have no opinion on whether or not it's "worth" it, it's merely what I can get.

Since I'm also working on my own projects, I don't usually work a full time equivalent or anything like that. Pricing might be different if I had to fill all my time with work.

Let's say I can fill 10 days per month with freelancing, that's 50% occupancy. After taxes and costs that boils down to about 3k per month of income - roughly equivalent to a mid-tier job in Germany. Again, if you're just starting out, your calculation might look very different.

But if there is one piece of advice I can give: gravitate towards higher-paying clients, even if the work is not as interesting or more demanding. Higher-paying clients in general tend to be more appreciative and more competent, on top of the immediate advantages for your wallet. Only take on jobs where all parties can feel satisfied afterwards.

If you make a game for a given platform, it makes sense to target the most common configuration, which in this case was 512k (not 512M btw). Even though RAM expansions eventually became popular, I guess publishers would be hesitant to put a "requires 1M+" sticker on their boxes. But man, 512k seemed like a blessing in those early days, too...

I admit I failed that question, and I understand the impulse to then challenge the way the question was constructed. In school, it's something I did regularly, partly because some of the questions were indeed weakly constructed, but also partly because I was reluctant to admit I actually misunderstood.

In this case, it's not a trick question per se, but it certainly does something to trick the mind into not enumerating the possibilities. It would be interesting to see how the majority of programmers respond to it, as compared to say the majority of mathematicians. I suspect the question tricks people into abstracting too early: 'one variable in this system is undefined, hence I can't say!'

Say you're getting mugged and the mugger opens with "If we accept that you don't have any right to your possessions, don't you agree that I'm justified in taking all your stuff?"

It is not an intellectual or rhetorical shortcoming to then answer with "No, I agree neither with your premise nor with your conclusion."

On the other hand, if you do D-Decouple and agree, then the mugger will either proceed to rob you immediately, or if an audience is present, they will first read aloud a well-prepared statement that 'proves' how you indeed don't have any right to your possessions - before inevitably proceeding to rob you. Not robbing you was never in the cards, they just made it seem that way by phrasing the question to provide an illusion of openness to discussion.

People who accept D-Decoupling during a debate get steamrolled by bad-faith counterparts, and the audience on average will never remember that there was an "if" hypothetical in front of the question to begin with.

In practice, the "If we accept X, then we must do Y" maneuver is seldom performed in good faith. It's merely a vehicle to move on to the Y part without concerning yourself with X, and it's mostly performed for the benefit of an audience who will only remember the Y part, or those who already agree with X. A side effect is also the gradual normalization of X through repetition.

People who already agree with the premise will see nothing wrong with this, and that's not necessarily unethical. It only becomes unethical if the proposition has negative consequences and the "hypothetical" becomes a deniable position that allows the speaker to retreat behind if challenged.

In other words, I do think the implications of the hypothetical part matter. Not all "If we accept X, then Y" have X's or Y's worthy of consideration. I would also argue that it's probably valid to look at the Y part in isolation. If Y is unethical or nonsensical, I believe there is no intellectual duty to consider any part of the argument.

This is wrong on so many levels. I've been writing code commercially for more than 30 years.

> This is also what Software Engineering has become: you memorize, regurgitate and participate in agile the masquerade. Creativity is shunned. Tried architectures/patterns are what is expected.

Not necessarily. If it feels like this, you may be in the wrong bubble. And that bubble is going away, too, because these tasks are the first that will be replaced by AI-assisted code generation. In the meantime, you can always Google an algorithm if you know what to look for.

There is almost zero usefulness in an ability to regurgitate boilerplate patterns, but there is tremendous usefulness in executing good judgement, creative problem solving, and a solid understanding of fundamentals.

Programming is about solving problems that are interesting to you personally, in a way that satisfies you (and ideally your customers). The hard part is finding that niche.

> I used to think this job was a creative one, since writing frameworks and libraries for further use, documenting code and extreme programming made me think that I was building something new and useful.

You had it right the first time. If you enjoyed making these tools, that means there is still an internal drive in you to solve those kinds of problems. Even if those tools happen to be terrible, apply lessons learned and repeat! Spoiler alert, everyone else's tools also make trade-offs at the wrong points, even successful ones. Don't be fooled into thinking that the big things are already solved.

In the end it's about finding gainful employment doing something you enjoy. The good thing about programming is that you get to choose your environment and the nature of your work from a very broad spectrum.

> I wish I had practiced law for the past 7ish years instead, because at least all of my skills would still be relevant.

If you chased framework specifics and arcane patterns for the last few years, then yes, some of that work is not relevant anymore. Learn from that, stop chasing ephemera. You may be better served by doing deep work on a specific thing for a long time, as opposed to perpetually playing catch-up with JavaScript frameworks to impress the next fickle startup that thinks it'll change the world by selling ads.

I would advise anyone who doesn't absolutely need it for an interview to stop spending time on LeetCode and such sites. Instead, invest that time in a project that is relevant to you, and learn everything about a specific domain as deeply as you can. Pushing up a score counter on LeetCode doesn't compare to actually making something competently in the real world. ADHD can trick you into believing that solving artificially parceled-up and pre-defined problems for points in a few minutes at a time is progress, but it's not. Work on something meaningful that doesn't leave you with an empty feeling.

SEEKING WORK - Remote, based in Germany

I recently went from my full time programming job - doing mostly business and scientific software - to a freelance setup. I'm up for:

  - game development
    I would love to help out with custom engines and games!
  - server-side code
  - scientific applications
  - core languages: C, C++, PHP, Javascript, some C# and Lua
  - experience with: OpenGL/WebGL/HLSL, Cuda, SIMD
  - performance optimization of existing code
  - working in custom codebases
  - researching solutions to algorithmic challenges
  - web stuff: Websocket brokers, server-side rendering, vanilla JavaScript web apps, Three.js, Pixi.js

My current hobby projects are rolz.org (an online tabletop/pen&paper roleplaying site) and I'm also currently working on a C++ based web programming server with the goal of ditching both PHP and Node.js as my go-to server-side solution.

Contact me at: [email protected]

Could you elaborate a bit on what you mean by "as bitter as this"? Reading the story with no context, it seems almost reverential to Christianity:

We're in the far future and space-faring humans still worship the old religion(s). A supernova that occurred roughly during the time of a key event in the religion's history turned out to have killed off another distant civilization. There is an observation that bad things can happen to good civilizations and how that doesn't square with a benevolent creator deity.

Do you perceive one of these as harsh criticism or was there some other issue in the text that I missed?

I know they're distinct things, I just wonder about the way visualization is described.

From the way non-aphantasia is characterized here one could assume that the difference is just how much control people have over the content of the image, as opposed to the degree of realism.

A hallucinating person may have an experience that feels indistinguishable from reality, but they can't control what the experience entails. From this test, I gather that a non-aphantasiac person has an equally-as-realistic image in front of them, but they are completely in command of what is shown.

The problem with this test is I have nothing to compare it to, and the answer spectrum provided is not helpful because it seems concerned with things like how vivid the colors of mental images are.

If I don't actually "see" the object but I know exactly what it looks like to the point of having a clear but abstracted version of it in my head, do I still put the slider all the way to the left, or to the center, or what?

I would say that me "visualising" an object kind of feels like watching a GAN paint an image, only the image is never as explicitly shown as if it was on my retinas. Does that count?

When I close my eyes and I think of an object there is never a danger of me not realizing that my eyes are currently closed. Am I an aphantasiac because of that? Was I supposed to literally hallucinate scenes all the time?

SEEKING WORK - Remote, based in Germany

I'm transitioning from my full time programming job to a freelance setup over the next few months. I'm up for:

  - game development 
    (I would love to help out with weird custom engines and games)
  - server-side code
  - scientific applications
  - core languages: C, C++, PHP, Javascript, some C# and Lua
  - experience with: OpenGL/WebGL/HLSL, Cuda, SIMD
  - performance optimization of existing code
  - working in custom codebases
  - researching solutions to algorithmic challenges
  - web stuff: Websocket brokers, server-side rendering, vanilla JavaScript web apps, Three.js, Pixi.js

Contact me at: [email protected]