I can’t remember what it was specifically, but friend basically ruined a major plot point in Witcher 3 for me fully knowing I was a good ways out from discovering it on my own. As a kneejerk reaction and knowing he was about 20 or 30 hours into Fallout 4, I told him who runs the Institute and what relation that individual has to the protagonist.

He was angrier than I was because I had assumed Witcher 3 turned out the way he revealed, but my spoiler absolutely blindsided him. He never ruined anything for me again.

Pull off request, on the other hand (ha-HA!), approved.

Not like that bitch Stephanie is gonna be helping out with that anymore.

Genuinely curious why you think Apple Music is better. When I got my first iPad in years last year, I decided to try to go “all-in” on Apple services partly to consolidate and partly to save some money. After about 14-21 days, the only service left standing was Apple News+ (and only because the only other option was NewsReader which is 3x the price and I just generally didn’t love the UI and the way it worked overall).

Apple Music seemed to have slightly less of the music I searched for (I don’t have specifics, it was a year ago) and also seemed to be slower/shittier overall than Spotify. It was just generally unpleasant to use - this, coming from a guy who has plenty of gripes with Spotify’s user experience.

I’m all for ditching Spotify (I have all kinds of issues with their general business practices and how they stiff artists, among other things), but like @dinckelman@lemmy.world mentioned elsewhere in these comments: “every bit of competition is even more incompetent and greedy than they are.” I’m not going to say Apple is more greedy in this case, but they felt less competent.

My background is not on STEM and I was always passed the notion that without roots in hard math I can’t go far in programming.

I swear this is some BS repeated by people who have no idea what they’re talking about. I got told pretty much the same when I was younger - don’t believe it. It may have been true to some degree at some point in the distant past, but it’s outdated advice at best.

Your main general skills when it comes to writing code are the ability to think logically and to think about abstract concepts. Creativity and imagination can definitely help. The ability to keep organized in your thoughts can also go a long way. Just about everything else comes in the form of knowing the language you’re working in, exposure to common coding and software design principles, and knowing your coding environment.

Math can figure into a lot of different types of programming careers… Shit like writing video game engines and other complicated things that model physics and stuff come to mind. But it’s not so much that math is intrinsic to programming, but rather that those types of software just require a lot of advanced math.

For example, I’m an automation engineer. It’s just a sysadmin who writes a decent amount of code. Most of my programming work revolves around sending requests over our company’s local network to servers or internal websites to do shit like remotely power up or shutdown machines or trigger a task or open up work orders. There is very little actual math, if any, in the entirety of my work.

At it’s core, programming is just the storing, moving around, manipulating, and keeping track of bits of information. Especially in a language like Python (which is my primary language).

EDIT: I should probably add my background isn’t STEM either. I’m a two time college dropout who got a break 14 years ago and left the restaurant industry to go into the tech sector instead.

I’m one of the unwashed, ignorant music production hobbyists who can’t play a lick of anything on an actual instrument, and certainly can’t read sheet music (I figured out tablature a long time ago when I was trying to teach myself guitar and have forgotten since). I can noodle around on a 25-key MIDI keyboard well enough - like I have a good handle on the patterns for different keys and scales on the keyboard, but I can’t actually play. I’d take you up on the invite, otherwise.

The endless scrolling communities are the easiest to move. They’re low hanging fruit. One of the other replies to you here nailed it… without a massive community of millions, the future of Lemmy rests on the more modestly sized community here willing to actually come out of their lurk and not just respond to posts, but to start posts on their own and actually drive the content.

I feel the same way about music production-related communities here. I just don’t have much to ask and I suck pretty badly at it so I don’t feel like I’m good enough to drive content/discussions lol

Yeah, I used to configure vim with syntax highlighting and auto-suggestions and whatever else. I just like… don’t anymore. I’ve been feeling less burned out over the last few months and it seems, at least, like its still lifting slowly. Maybe when I get the energy back, I’ll take another crack at vscode.

Yeah, for sure - I don’t deny that at all. For me, it’s a confluence of general burnout, laziness, and comfort with what I already know… and likely not a really urgent need to move to a proper IDE. The majority of my coding is small, one-off Python scripts where I can :wq and run it and then open it back up to refine, fix bugs, add debugging prints, etc.

I stick with vim because every time I try to use vscode, I get so bogged down trying to set things up and figure out how to use it that I end up just being like, “eh, fuck it - I’ll do this later.”

Some younger admins and engineers look upon me with awe, but really I’m just secretly a really lazy bastard. I don’t even pack plugins into vim anymore to make my life easier. Just plain old vanilla vim.

Funny, I just came off a 2-week task and it took 6 months. Just started a 3 day task… get back to me at the end of July.

it needs time and more users, but I think it’s alright so far.

I had looked into a couple other decentralized or federated services in the past and they seemed like kind of a pain or they were poorly explained. until now, all of it also seemed too obscure to have any kind of notable traffic. if this isn’t temporary and the reddit api controversy actually did something meaningful, then I look forward to seeing how the federated service ecosystem grows and changes.

reddit’s dethroning was a long time coming in my eyes. it’s just not going to be as smooth as the digg -> reddit pipeline years ago.

I think there may be room for another couple million users spread across a ton of communities. wishful thinking, but maybe that would keeps thing toned down with the bots and other shady shit.

lots of polish and QoL needed both on the main site(s) and the mobile offerings out so far. all in all, pretty good start.