Me too. The D15 is great laptop and runs Linux really well. Fantastic build quality, hardware, and battery life… for USD 700$.

Besides, I get lonely if only the Americans are listening.

Perhaps ironically, I live in a nominally Communist country that went through decolonization quite a number of times. It doesn’t change much in my daily life (I’m not really political), although I arguably own some tiny slice of the means of production these days. So maybe in retirement I’ll provide public access to those for working class people. That would be really fun, I think. Who knows what we might create together? Certainly if the machines are sitting unused in my retirement, they are creating nothing, and I would feel sad for the machines.

I don’t do the whole 9-5 thing. That would stress me out! I work as long as I feel like, any day of the week I feel like. Generally, this is really nice for both managing stress (there’s always tomorrow!) and steamrolling over any competition.

I’m just a mercenary (and a bureaucrat) though. You pay my fee in filthy lucre, and the job gets done – legally, and reliably. If someone annoys me with politics at a client, I just try and replace them with a computer program. The result is that several of my best coworkers are machines these days. I foresee that trend increasing with time.

Yeah… I couldn’t cope with that unfortunately (I’m a bit jealous, it sounds nice). I need to work long hours and make things, it’s a compulsion. “Taking it easy” can stress me out to the point where I end up in a hospital.

So I sold all my worldly possessions and immigrated to the developing world on an investment visa (where things are made). My timing was a few years early, but I had no path to a decent life left except having my own company in a growth economy – my entire industry vanished twice overnight in my home country due to changes in legislation.

Nowadays, looking at the local economy, there is no path to home ownership except for people who own companies, and maybe senior executives or senior software engineers. An average university-educated couple would have to save 100% of their income for their entire adult life to afford a nice home – if they don’t have kids. I think this kind of cruel equation is slowly coming to the West too – although you guys have more land so I guess it takes longer.

One of the sad aspects of my job (in IT) is building tools to eliminate less stressful jobs, especially ones that pay well (usually management or accounting, in my case). Design has definitely been a specific target in recent years though – off the top of my head I could at least imagine two approaches to writing a tool that automates color and font selection with results comparable to human expertise.

This is one reason it’s a good idea to regularly study new things (IT or otherwise). I have to retool every few years as whatever I know becomes obsolete – this used to mainly be a frustration in IT, but is rapidly becoming a necessary process in other fields. It won’t be necessary to become an IT expert, but I would keep up-to-date on how to use the new tools technology provides… especially if I wanted to keep a job in say, graphics design or copywriting!

(Incidentally, my first job in this country was in marketing! It was high-stress and I did not earn 130k. I recall font and color choice processes vividly :D)

I am a level 15 lawful-evil bureaucrat.

If it is possible at all to fill and file a form correctly, I will do so efficiently, without error, and with misplaced joy. Even if it’s longer than my thesis. This is automatic and no dice roll is required. The receiving organization has to make a willpower check else approve the form without reading it in it’s entirety.

Once per tax reporting period as defined by my company license (unless my company license is updated to change my legal address, in that case, the longer of the two possibilities), I can pass any standardized exam, on any topic, without study, or even knowledge of the language it’s written in.

Additionally, twice a day (holidays excluded, except labor day, and Saturdays only before noon), I can rubber stamp any form using only the power of my mind and a rubber stamp.

Yeah, the best solution I’ve found is inflating the initial deposits with new clients (enough to cover costs for the project, but not more than that). Then if they agree, overdeliver on the work, then pursue a more collegiate arrangement in the future.

Working with Western companies can still be a pain sometimes. Many of them don’t come to Asia to do things well, they come here to do things cheaply. A cheaper option than paying me, is not paying me. In reality, I have little recourse as my company doesn’t have the resources for an international lawsuit. I’ve been burned a couple of times, but to some extent it’s just the cost of doing business.

Running an honest business is even harder :(

Although catching scammers is pretty fun. There have been some pretty wild cases. Maybe I should retire and go work for law enforcement or something.

No.

Honestly running a business in Asia is like… 35% harassing people who haven’t paid you. I hear it’s pretty similar elsewhere but can’t confirm.

A lot of the underlying scams are very low-tech. I sometimes work for VCs and get asked to investigate blockchain stuff (a lot in 2022, not so much now!). I’ve vetoed 100% of deals after investigation. For brevity, I’ll only describe the main two type of crime I’ve encountered.

Embezzlement of funds raised is a common one. Most are not exactly criminal masterminds though, and you can see the project accounts being emptied steadily into exchange accounts if you’re really determined.

A lot of the rest is wash trading. Usually exchanges will give you a zero-trading-fees account, and tell you that you need to maintain a minimum volume, wink wink. So most of these scammers just trade between accounts they own, to create the illusion of a sudden rise in price (coinciding with a marketing push). This you can also sometimes catch by looking at orderbook timing. Sometimes you can break their bots too. Often they hire external entities to manage this, so won’t notice overnight.

Anyway, in this last case there is usually just an illusion of people making money at the top. The price spikes, but the whole orderbook is just someone trading with themselves. So if you buy in, they take your payment (and they make a little money)… but there’s no one to actually sell to. You can detect this sometimes by looking for orders being placed then filled within very short time intervals. A lot of these groups make a lot less money than they claim to!

This is easier for NFTs because they are non-fungible. One way you can do this is to track which ones are owned by your company and which are something someone else bought. So you only trade the NFTs that are internally owned in a way that makes them look like they constantly increase in price. Once an NFT is sold to an external account, you cross it off the list and never buy it back, and it’s magically immediately worthless.

If you mention these activities on their official channels, they will just ban you.

There’s also a whole slew of regulatory compliance issues, fake legal opinions, and so on… but I’ll spare you those as it is more boring to read about.

The whole blockchain space is a cesspool of inequity. Stay far away, unless you just like playing around with cryptography for fun. In that case, it’s a cool toy and it’s fun to build a few blockchains in an afternoon to play around with before getting bored and moving on to other technology. I have built a dozen or so blockchains and a few smart contracts to make sure I fully understand the technology before recommending my clients reject investment deals. This has (perhaps ironically) made me somewhat of an expert in the domain, albeit an unwilling one. I consider that path a career dead-end, and look forward to slowly forgetting about it.

I issued a (valid) DMCA notice to a small corporation who used the intellectual property of a colleague but did not pay them for it (they promised payment in writing, then just… didn’t pay for a year or more). Their whole business website was down for a week or more as a result, as their registrar just took down their website without checking anything, and they didn’t really have technical staff to resolve it.

The whole DMCA system is quite a broken mess, and is often (usually?) used unethically. However, it is possible to use correctly, even by private individuals. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it a little, that day.

Haha nice! These things have a funny way of happening.

I met a colleague of Paul Erdos by walking up to a complete stranger on a train and simply asking if they were a mathematician and if they knew Paul Erdos. He turned out to have a lot of lovely anecdotes to share.

I’m not sure what possessed me to specifically do that, but I probably won’t do it a second time and risk losing the 100% hit rate for colleague-of-Paul-Erdos divination.

Emigrate to a new country.

Note though that this form of new game + is quite difficult. The enemies are more numerous, you have fewer starting resources, and the rules of the game are stacked against you.

I’m some form of science hermit, so I measure these things by degrees of separation. So I meet people by proxy. Some long after they are deceased, I suppose.

I have two degrees of separation from Paul Erdos (and of course his mother), several prime ministers of Vietnam, Kevin Mitnick, and Keanu Reeves. Three from John Von Newmann and most world leaders.

I also probably have an Erdos-Bacon number. It would be quite large though.

Space is the only thing you can explore. You’re in space right now.

Are you in Quebec? The CEGEP system there is specifically a great and cheap way to try out multiple career paths. It’s like a mix of trade school and the freshman year of every university faculty.

It’s still a system that sort of pushes you into university without any experience of what doing a real job is like, but it’s at least a good way to explore the academic side of a wide variety of subjects.

This is a major failing of the school system.

The best I can recommend is that you try out jobs now – but maybe skip anything ‘fake’ like online courses unless you think they prepare you for what’s in the next sentence. Go find people professionally doing a thing you might like, and try to work with them, somehow. Internships, volunteer work, organizing events, etc. File paperwork and make coffee, if that means you get to see the work actually being done.

Barring that, do the thing yourself if possible. Publish the results. All code goes on public repositories, all stories should be submitted to magazines or literature groups. All songs written must be sung in public. Get certified for CPR and first aid if considering medicine, and volunteer using it. Get an amateur radio license and build a radio. Look at jobs on a freelancing platform, and just do them on your own to build a portfolio (maybe actually apply for the jobs, once you have a portfolio). Not every type of job can be tried out this way, but many can.

You’re going to get rejected a lot, you can’t just show up with a resume and demand a job (people who claim this works are weird). People who create and do nothing will mock you sometimes. A lot of jobs want young people ‘out of sight and in school’ too. However, this kind of disappointment happens to all of us at some point anyway, so may as well get it over with.

If you’re lucky, you’ve got a few years between the age of say 14 and 19 where you’re not expected to support yourself financially but your brain works as well as it’s ever going to. While it’s useful to get good grades while you’re in school (although they are useless afterward), I think it’s a mistake to focus on that at the expense of actually trying to do things. A college degree is too big of an investment of time and money to go into blind.

If you’re in a situation where you do have to support yourself or your family before finishing school, then the necessities of life obviously take precedent. I won’t pretend I have a good solution to that difficult situation.

Learning things quickly.

It’s totally its own skill, and you can learn to learn faster. What skills are useful changes with time – the ones used in your career now might age like milk for reasons beyond your control.

There’s some part of my brain that applies display:none to the upvote/downvote function on every platform.

So if I don’t vote on your content it’s not because I hate it. My brain is just wired to automatically edit out anything that’s not content. Mostly this means ads, but voting features seem to have been caught in the net too.

Haha, you got me there. So I guess you could more correctly say ‘a font with serif for titles only’.

Plain old static HTML is fine, and you can host it on a potato! Here are some design tips to keep it easy to read. None of them are objectively correct, and you are already doing some of them. They are just some suggestions as you move forward:

1. Don’t use dark-on-dark fonts. Use near-black on off-white or at least something high contrast.
2. Break up content using horizontal rules <hr> and various headers <h1 to h6> You can style both of them in css. This keeps things easy to find and read.
3. Generally, do not center-align text if it is more than one line. If you need to display blocks of text side-by-side, put each in a container then left-align the text within those containers.
4. Use a bigger font than you think is strictly necessary.
5. My preference is to use sans-serif fonts. Google makes some good free ones. Sometimes I’ll go back and make titles serif only.
6. Resize and compress your images. A bit higher resolution than you need but with lower quality is usually better than the reverse (for jpegs)