I moved out to go to college at 18 and back in with my mom as 21 after dropping out due to financial issues. I had trouble finding work there, nothing stable that paid well. I was a pretty lonely depressed guy, a virgin into my 20s, with nothing significant in my life and nothing to offer anyone else. It was a pretty shit time for me. I ended up moving in briefly with my dad 2 states away and was able to find a decent paying factory job shortly thereafter and got my own apartment. Then I found an even better paying factory job a year or two later, and got promoted to management within the year. I lost a bunch of weight, was able to save money, lost my virginity finally and I bought a house. I met the woman who would become my wife. Sold my house moved in with her. Went back to school, got my degree, got a much higher paying job, bought a much nicer house and we just had our first kid.

I don’t want to tell you how to live and I am not under the impression that everyone can just do what I did. Everyone is different. Circumstances are different. I know. But nothing in my life started to improve from my lowest point in my adulthood until I stopped the complacency, moves out and worked to improve myself and my life. I would be shocked if your 50+ year old uncles who live with you grandmother and have never had a girlfriend are truly happy with their situation. I would encourage you to seek to change your situation if you can. I’m only a year older than you. At one time I was tens of thousands in debt, out of shape, had teeth falling out, living with my mom, no social life, no girlfriends, sexless, penniless, and had no hope or outlook in life. I have had my own share of failures, yet I am in a good place now. I got my teeth fixed, got a degree, i have a nice job, a nice house, a wife and beautiful daughter, and we’re comfortable. I hope you can get there too.

Somehow -> Palpatine returned

Well, yeah. If you’re self employed, you have to report yourself too.

A flat tax is a poor tax. 5% of your income means WAAAAY more to someone working minimum wage with two kids than someone who has a second home, even if dollars and cents it’s way less. And the wealthy will evade a flat tax as much as they already do a progressive tax.

?

It should also be noted that if the vast majority of people do nothing special on their taxes and just accept the government’s assessment, then that leaves a much smaller group of people to be audited. And a much larger portion of those people will be those who are trying to weasel their way out of paying their share. Right now, with the IRS being criminally underfunded, they only focus on low hanging fruit, the small fries. With those people being boiler plater auto-accepting tax payers, that would mean the IRS has no reason to audit them and can focus on the big boys where the real cheats are. That’s another big reason we do not have that sort of system and why the IRS is currently so underfunded (despite every dollar spent on the IRS generating between 5 and 9 dollars in revenue from tax fraud/evasion). Those kinds of people pay to make sure it doesn’t happen.

They should (and do?) have the same information your employer, bank, or brokerage files. i.e. the same forms you use to fill out your taxes now. They know what you contributed to you 401k and your other retirement accounts.

Right. Filing taxes should only be necessary if you have itemized writeoffs or wish to contest the IRS’s statement of your tax liability. They already know what you earned their your employer, what’s been paid in taxes, what basic credits your qualify for, etc. They know what you owe so long as you didn’t have expenses to apply for that they couldn’t assume or know about. The only reason they don’t already do that or, at least until now, have a free public system for filing, it’s because tax companies have lobbied for decades to be able to milk the public for cash to help them file and navigate their tax liability.

No, they underestimated because they thought pc gamers would want to do whatever is necessary to play the sequel now, but pc gamers will wait forever if they have to rather than buy a console.

I took a principles of programming languages course a while back and got to touch on a lot of these old languages. My professor had huge hard-on for Lisp. Don’t get me wrong. The simplicity of the language is admirable. But reading and parsing that shit gave me headaches. No me gusta.

I’ve never heard of such a specific programming degree. Is that a 4 year degree or 2 year?

The job market for new devs isn’t in as high demand as it was a couple years ago, so hopefully it’s just a matter of time for you. But alternatively, have you looked into how many credits you’d need to get a more general CS/Software Engineering degree if you went back to school? A less niche degree should open more opportunities to you.

People are saying that their CS Degree took all their time? That’s not my experience at all. My experience is different from most as i failed out of school the first time because i was broke and had to choose between work and attending classes. Being able to feed and house myself won out. I went back to school at age 29 years old to get my degree, though.

I was a full time student, managed to schedule my classes to fall largely on 3 days a week, was able to attend most of the lectures remotely, had a job the entire time, and used the weekends to get all my homework done. It takes time, but I still played video games sometimes, went to the movies, had time with my wife and family, etc.

Now the bigger question is the value of a CS degree for you. I agree that you’ll likely learn some new things you don’t pick up from just learning to code on your own. But what of that is truly practical to your ambitions to independently develop games is probably minimal, if it matters at all. It’s not only a big time sink, but a money sink. If you’re not going to use the degree for employment, and the theory and math you’d learn in for you degree isn’t going to apply to what you want to do, I’d not recommend the investment.

If anything, spend a few weeks is a coding bootcamp, save years of your time and thousands of your dollars, and they’ll cover your bases on what you need to know for practical programming. I’m a data engineer and many of my peers have unrelated degrees but just went through a boot camp to learn to code. But honestly, if you’ve been coding projects for 5 years, I doubt they’re going to teach you anything profoundly new either. Neither a degree nor a boot camp ever teaches you everything you need for any given job or project anyway. There’s always going to be more to learn as you do. When it comes to programming, experience, practice and willingness to learn are the most valuable things to have. Just make sure you learn and follow best practices and internalize some software engineering principles. They will save you time and effort in the long run.

Edit: Also, the amount of pressure and crunch you experience will differ from employer to employer. But my job is pretty chill. I am not expected to work more than 40 hours a week and usually do not unless I’m on a support rotation which I am 3 weeks out of the year. I have more than 5 weeks off a year between holidays, pto, sick leave, and vacation. And my job is hybrid (formerly all remote, but that’s unfortunately getting rarer), so I get to work from home 3 days a week. It’s not bad at all.

Is this guy Tom Segura’s cousin, the inventor?

Serving multiple data streams

200: “I gotchu, bro. Here you go. Have a good day.”

401: “You’re not on the list. Get lost.”

402: “Pay me or get lost.”

403: “Everyone get lost.”

404: “You are lost.”

500: “Ooopsss.”

501: “Knew I forgot something…”

504: “I can’t do this shit all day.”

Mostly we’re more aware of the shittiness. On the whole, most things that were problems decades, generations, or centuries ago are objectively, measurably better now. However, there are specific things that are recurring problems or newer problems that have never existed before. Some of those are very serious problems that we are currently trying to, don’t yet know how to, or have failed to deal with. Things like climate change, mass misinformation in the information age, nuclear threats, gun violence, political corruption, war, and threats reproductive rights, LGBT human rights, and religious rights. So… bit of column A, bit of column B.

I am a software engineer and I also have a PC with RGB vomit. But not because I’m a software engineer. Because I’m also a dork, and the icy blue color keeps my cpu cold.

A bit in Freedom units is 2 metric bits because it wouldn’t be freedom units without unnecessary confusion. A metric bit is equivalent to a freedom unit lil’bit, because it’s smaller than a bit. A bite (no relation to a byte) is 25 lil’bits because saying 25 ones and zeros outload is a mouthful. A hot dog is 4.2 bites or 105 lil’bits because that’s how many bites it takes me to eat a hot dog. A hamburger is 6.4 bites because it takes more bites to eat. A double with cheese is 7.8 bites. A whole hog is 233 hot dogs. A stampede is 23146 hamburgers.

10+ years ago, it was very common to get an upgrade to your phone ever two years (or less). And at the time, there was a lot more variability in phones. And I mean in more than just battery life, storage capacity, camera quality, processor, etc. There used to be a variety of form factors to consider, sizes, genuinely different features and functionalities. The iPhone came about in 2009, and other smart phones soon followed, but even then there were still phones with physical keyboards, digital keyboards with stylus typing, flip phones, etc. Once smart phones completely dominated the market and all the manufacturers started just copying each other’s features and designs, eventually we got to the status quo of today where they’re all essentially the same. The only major difference now is the OS, and that’s largely just down to iOS vs Android.

squirms in discomfort