My current job was done via a connection, but every previous job has been through spamming my resume to every job I'm even remotely qualified for and/or I find interesting.

I have a degree now, but I dropped out of college the first time around, and so I didn't have any connections in the software industry, or anywhere really. When I dropped out, I assumed any desk job career was out the window. I applied to Aldi, Lowes, Burger King, McDonalds, Starbucks, and Taco Bell in one day (driving and applying in person).

On a lark, and almost as a joke to myself, I applied to exactly one software job from an ad on Craigslist, and they were the only ones who actually got back to me, thus jumpstarting my software career. I've had a lot of jobs in a lot of different places, and despite knowing lots of interesting people I've only managed to convert that to a job one time.

I have no idea how people use friendly connections to get jobs.

I've been running NixOS for awhile, which is very firmly integrated with systemd.

I wonder if it's time to try something like sixos or Guix SD.

At least NixOS has signaled disinterest in this, and as an NL project it’s beyond CA legal reach. They also disable userdb by default, so this is irrelevant unless you enable it.

Setting aside the ridiculous nature of this move towards OS-level verification, NixOS (and Guix) is the last distro to worry about when it comes to age verification.

Why? Given the nature of how NixOS works (config-driven), the maintainers have plausible deniability: if push comes to shove, they can shift the burden to users and have them enable the age verification service as part of their NixOS config.

Artix (Arch) and MX Linux (Debian) are very nice

Oh I only use distros that are declarative like NixOS.

I've run Arch in the past and I liked it just fine, but they are ultimately different than how I like running my computer.

Why climb Mount Everest? Because it's there.

Interesting. I submitted mine.

Often I'm not even entirely convinced they know a lot about their own business either. It seems like the ones who make the cartoonishly large amounts of money are the ones who got lucky to hire decent people early on.

It says a lot that he thinks that empathy is the greatest human weakness.

One of many, many, many stupid things he's said.

In one interview, Mush called it the "empathy exploit".

This is the kind of person who would benefit from being raised and humanised in a village where people co-operate. Because then, as countless others have discovered, bluster and insults work only until the self-aggrandising narcissist meets someone not only bigger, but with better principles, and an actual leader of people.

There is a reason why many satisfying movie plots involve a final, usually violent comeuppance served to a self-aggrandising narcissist.

Not just stupid, sociopathic. Definitionally.

You don't generally reach that level of wealth and success without at least having strong sociopathic (maybe even psychopathic) tendencies.

that's a stretch: andreessen got wealthy because he worked for the UIUC group in a project which turned out super popular, super funded by Jim Clark, and got massive explosion in worth. there's no sociopathy involved from him back then.

Musk made a company that jumpstarted some wealth and invested in other things which exploded.

Toto Wolff is a gazillionaire because he too made some pretty incredibly timed investments.

point is, extreme wealth results from some combination of work, timing luck, strategy, and sociopathy, but they're not all required to span the space of wealthy people.

You might get incredibly lucky and bexome a billionaire without being a sociopath.

There's no way to stay a billionaire without being one, as long as there's abject poverty and suffering.

Yeah, that's the thing; once you have a billion dollars, you are set for many lifetimes of extremely comfortable living. Allowing a single person to suffer while you have more wealth than you can spend in a dozen (or more) lifetimes is pretty cruel. I mean, I don't really see how it is significantly different than hoarding.

I've never had billions of dollars and realistically I probably won't ever have billions of dollars, but I would certainly like to think that I'd keep enough for myself to keep myself thoroughly entertained, and then give the rest away somehow.

Of course, I've never been tested with this. Maybe if I was gifted billions of dollars I'd be as evil as the rest of the billionaires.

i think your observation is consistent with the giving pledge thing of warren buffett and others, that they accrued massive wealth but want to give it away.

I was allowed to use calculators when I started algebra in seventh grade.

I found that calculators didn't help all that much once you got into symbolic stuff. They were useful for the final reductions, obviously, but for algebra the lion's share of the work is symbolic and at least the relatively cheap two-line TI calculator I was using couldn't do anything symbolic.

I know that there are calculators that can do Computer Algebra System stuff, and those probably should be held off on until at least calculus.

It's the typical Microsoft playbook, where they release a product and convince everyone that it has to be used everywhere, and by the time people realize how unbelievably terrible the product is it's too late and it has entrenched itself everywhere.

They've run this experiment before; Windows is terrible and has been for a very long time, Microsoft Office is terrible and has been for a very long time, Sharepoint is terrible and has been for a very long time, LinkedIn is terrible and has been for a very long time, etc.

It's what they do, there is not a single thing that Microsoft does not half-ass, because all they focus on is getting embedded into places, and that does not require that any of their products be good.

I have trouble trusting anything run by Microsoft, and in particular anything run by LinkedIn considering it is the absolute worst site that I have to use.

Microsoft has lied in the past about what information that they do and don't store, why should we believe you now?

There was a time that Eclipse was my preferred editor. It was free and it gave cool sexy features that all the cool kids who could afford Visual Studio had, and it worked on Linux!

Nowadays I'm basically a Neovim purist, but I have positive memories of it. I'm kind of afraid to revisit it at this point, though, since everyone hates on it and I suspect I wouldn't like it as much.