Here’re my two cents. I’m in the US with nearly two decades in engineering for experience. And I started programming young, like you; it’s very much a passion for me.

There are great places out there. Look for the roles that are going to expand your skill sets. More money is nice, but long term you’ll benefit more from pushing your boundaries. Ask lots of questions about the team when you’re interviewing—that can give you plenty of insight. And get comfortable with AI programming. That’s a seismic paradigm shift happening right now and embracing it can help you leapfrog others. Right now I like Windsurf AI.

And I get how this sequence of events you laid out is dispiriting—it would be for most imo. Personally, I think it’s worth the pursuit if it’s something you’ve enjoyed since such a young age.

Happy to answer more if it helps.

It does doesn’t it? It’s like a weird mix of a potato camera and AI

Mammut is top notch. I love their gear. I never see them in the US.

The glove joke is that only Steamboat Willie is in the public domain. Wearing the gloves makes him Mickey Mouse, which is why he should absolutely not wear them as his copyright hasn’t expired.

The other doors look like Donald Duck, Superman, and I guess James Bond? I assume their copyright expirations are coming soon—in that order.

This guy was appointed during Trump’s first term. Back then I remember this gutting/privatization of the USPS being a topic of discussion. I kept expecting to hear that Biden had replaced him; I wonder what made him keep him.

Well, plastic’s already in our brains and testicles so we might as well get whimsical with it at this point.

I can’t properly put into words how useless this appears to be. I run git from the command line so maybe others do it in a way where a dedicated button is more useful? I can’t fathom that.

Oh yeah? I’ve definitely noticed how slow GR is. Maybe I’m more willing to cut the little guy some slack on that front. I don’t use the paid tier since none of the features appeal to me. Though I have been thinking of getting it just to support them.

I’ve been using this for maybe two months? I like it better than GR. The only thing I wish it had were my notes/highlights from my kindle reading. Even without that it’s a much better experience than GR.

I love Megyn Kelly’s all caps vitriol beside the admission that she barely cares about football. What a life. The smoke signal goes up and you jump online to shit-stir—transparently so.

Yup. Plenty of us sure do! It stems from bogus autism research by Andrew Wakefield like 20 years ago. There are a myriad of reasons for people to buy into it. We’ve even enabled them with religious exemptions at the state level (i.e. it’s against your religion to vaccinate).

Louisiana has even stopped promoting them, https://abcnews.go.com/Health/louisiana-health-department-stop-promoting-mass-vaccination/story?id=118819674

And we have a particularly nasty outbreak right now in one of our states because of vaccine avoidance, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq8yvg5359po

That’s the kindle app. At least that’s what it looks like on my iPad.

My god, just let things alone.

“Attempting to summons me but I’m alive not dead” made my morning—hilarious. On the flipside, actually dealing with these so willfully obtuse people must be maddening.

I’m about done with Character Limit, it’s about Musk’s takeover of Twitter. It’s super fascinating, an absolute page-turner. If that whole shitshow remotely piques your interest I’d recommend it.

I torrent a lot, even Ted Lasso, but Apple TV is the only service I pay for. Their content is consistently good imo—worth the spend.

And Severance is pretty damn good. Check out Foundation if you’re into sci-fi, too.

To add a bit for OP. This is 100% context dependent, I agree. My partner did this with her family and it was the correct choice imo. I have never met such a group of toxic individuals before—holy cow. To the point I felt like I was incredibly sheltered. She has some insane stories, somehow always worse than the last.

I get turning the other cheek, and looking at things from other’s perspective, but sometimes that just won’t do it. People can be truly awful and you have to take care of yourself when others don’t have the wherewithal (EQ) to understand the damage they do.

Nuclear war would be absolutely apocalyptic. Lookup the US policy on “Launch on Warning” and “Hair-trigger alert”. Russia has the same thing and China by this point probably does, too. If the US were targeted those doctrines would come into effect and we’d go into “escalate to de-escalate” mode. And that’d make it worse.

There would be multiple thousands of warheads launched around the globe. EMPs would be detonated in the atmosphere, continent-wide power grids would fail. A single Ohio-class nuclear submarine has more destructive power than every bomb, including the two nukes, dropped in WWII — and they’d light the place up. And then you have all the various contamination in the air, soil, and water that would be cycled through the ecosystem for hundreds and thousands of years.

Pockets of people would live, certainly, but it’d be awful. Like Khrushchev said, “the survivors will envy the dead.”

I love how he can straight-face call the decision a “purely political move” that undermines “election integrity”. Maybe soon the brain worm can find a brief moment to spare for self-reflection.

I haven’t regretted it. Though if you were to do consistent long drives, and only have one car, I might suggest checking out PHEVs.