I spent some time in a mountain cave replica in a Nepalese themed restaurant, diligently honing my programming skills without the noise of the outside world. No internet, no mains, no toilet. Just me, my laptop, an angry manager who called the police and 60 charged replacement batteries that fell off a truck.

There I created the art of meditative programming where I learned to program not just my machine, but myself. As a result of this resume gap I am now able to function as a 13.6% more productive employee and have finally met the benchmark of 1.0x engineer. At my former employer I delivered a project which brought them in revenue totaling at least $12, giving me priceless experience because of this training.

There’s all sorts of other crazy options to consider like simply “stretching” this term out for a while. Any emergency will do.

Yeah there’s not really any plausible deniability there at all.

Two nazi salutes, one after the other

Yeah I think it’s less to do with intrinsic talent than motivation and sense of reward from engaging with technical problems.

One day there will be a computer with enough ram to run java hello world

Never poo on your lunch break, save it until you’re on the clock

They fixed the visible property damage and that’s apparently what counts

Not really. You’re strongly funnelled down the bluesky owned instance, most uses of ATProto are more or less mere plugins for that main instance. Can I migrate my account to another instance? Unclear.

The VC funding also adds another layer that implies they’re going to trap people into their monetisable market share sooner or later. This seems incompatible with fediverse principles.

So while they present themselves as a more technically refined iteration of the fediverse, the whole thing is a big trap. Enjoy it while it lasts would be my advice, but if you’ve got the sway then try to get those close to you to migrate to mastodon before it goes wrong.

The unfortunate reality is that most jobs linked to humanities are considered “passion jobs” for which there are more applicants than openings by a wide margin. If you don’t have connections that gives you an edge, you’re likely being crowded out by those who do.

This is probably not helped at all by AI/LLM buzz meaning firms are increasingly seeking to automate roles associated with language processing of whatever kind.

So suggestions might be: Widen your net: consider roles like administration, HR, paralegal etc. which generally go to educated people but don’t have specific academic subject requirements.

Retrain in something in demand like a trade, healthcare assistant or similar.

Attempt to leverage your language skills to present yourself as a “prompt engineer”, lean into the AI hype to land a job.

To a large extent people are just the products of their surroundings. Doing the default thing is an energy saving technique, as well as something which people do to prevent being ostracised by their peers. If you’re able to break that in some small way, you’re still doing better than most.

If you want to do more, I guess you have to interrogate why you’re not doing more. Is it fear of rejection? Fear of failure? Lack of time, energy or resources? Dependency on e.g. cars? Lack of confidence in your actions?

News corp. They’re the single most effective driver of fascist influence in the 21st century among the politically passive part of the population. Everything that all these other companies do is underpinned by News Corp outlets like Fox, The Sun, etc. justifying, equivocating, scapegoating and propagandising.

They’re all going to bluesky because for some reason as soon as social media gets involved, the wonderful human ability to pattern match just gets switched off.

Part of the problem is that highly partisan rightwingers were imposed on the BBC by the Conservatives. It speaks to Keir Starmer’s mortal weakness that he has not sought to replace them with unbiased figures.

In other words, the BBC behaves much like Starmer’s government: appeasing critics on the right and far right, while suppressing the left.

I don’t think Starmer has much of a “mortal weakness” here, he’s just right wing and winning.

Yep, it makes sense when you consider the real nature of management and why it actually exists.

A rich man starts a company. He hires 12 people under him. He’s working a bit harder than he’d hoped, he’s constantly fielding questions and such but all is well. He needs to hire two more people. This is too many for him to manage directly, so he appoints two people to manage the other twelve as two teams of 6. All is well again.

They expand up to 30 people and suddenly they find the two managers are too stretched again! So another manager has to be introduced. When the company is over about 150 people, we even need multiple layers of management to keep this whole thing afloat as suddenly there are too many managers reporting to the founder or to the managers.

Yet at no point does the person who owns the company agree to give up any real control. If someone sets a budget he doesn’t like, he gives that control of the budget to someone else. Everyone in that hierarchy is acting on behalf of the owners under this arrangement.

The managers are just sat there with the mandate to make employees do more work under ever-increasing resource constraints, in the name of profit maximisation.

The management hierarchy functions as little more than a way of getting the owner’s instructions down to the employees by people who can interpret them as such, and to feed issues back to whatever level has the ability to deal with them (or declare them not an issue, as is often the case).