I'm 31, retired a couple years back. Instead of going into FAANG I went the high-risk route and worked for small start-ups from ages 15-28. I've had a ~25% success rate on those companies and now have enough to maintain my middle-class lifestyle without further income.
I live nomadically in a campervan I built and guide raft trips and volunteer doing whitewater rescue now. However, I missed building things enough that I picked up another software job last year. I like building tiny-houses and campervans too, but as much as I hate staring at computer screens I'm just too addicted to the crazy leverage my efforts in software have to give that up it turns out! The jobs are way more fun too when you care not at all about getting fired.
Yep, this situation is pretty frustrating. I used to live in old town Superior which is entirely burned, and am good friends with some of my previous neighbors who have lost their places. Housing is in short supply here, and high number of displaced families have further strained the market. I offered my little camper trailer to a couple who are now out of short term disaster housing and need a place to stay, hoping they could park it on their property, but they declined based on concerns over legality. Turns out they were right to do that!
I personally think restrictions on living in RVs in general are silly, but the failure of the affected city governments to carve out exceptions under these circumstances is downright nonsensical to me.
Wow, I can't imagine the struggle you must be going through in a masked-up world. That's got to be just incredibly frustrating and alienating.
Do you think maybe your hostility might be misdirected a bit though? Do you think it's fair to lash out at people who are advocating for more sensible mask usage for their intended purpose of preventing the spread of a virus and simply failing to consider the impact they have on you and the minority of others similarly afflicted?
I do think that pulling down a mask to communicate with a deaf person is probably the right thing to do, but I also think the person who you're responding to isn't off-base in a general assumption that most people doing that don't have such good reasons.
Terse technical prose, for example, is useful for rapidly communicating concepts to readers with requisite comprehension skills. Nobody talks like that though because even if you could pick the right words quickly enough as a speaker, whoever is listening to you is going to have a hell of a time keeping up. Both modes of communication are useful in their respective setting, but the last thing I want is a textbook that uses only small words or a tutor that uses too many big ones.
I bought my OP-1 at a steal for $600 two years back. I'd pay $1200 for it today, maybe $1600.
There's a lot of more technically capable stand-alone gear that can be had for less of course. My MPC Live is what my finished (not good compared to others, I'm just an amateur making video game soundtracks for kids I teach game dev to) songs ultimately come out of, and the Octatrack is something I've really enjoyed playing with. None of these are going to be something that lives in my backpack and comes out in the park on a sunny day when I've got that perfect boss battle intro sequence drop popping into my head though. Size considerations aside, I can slam down a decent prototype of a song that's actually listenable in just a couple of minutes on the OP-1 before the idea fades away, and have a blast doing it.
I think their pricing is sensible. The thing fills a niche no other piece of gear I've found can. That seems worth paying for.
Even though the overall space is small, during the workday the logistics really boil down to us just sharing a table. If you're able to work at a desk with someone directly across from you it's not that much different. We've both a got a trait where once the headphones go on we're pretty well zoned in. You're right though, sharing a table is probably not viable for folks who need a private office to focus!
My partner and I have worked most of this year from a little 13 ft Scamp travel trailer all across the U.S. and we're currently building out a van to get a bit of extra mobility. I'm a staff engineer for a consultancy with lots of meetings with our enterprise clients, so solid internet is a major concern.
The hotspot I use is called "Glocal Me". It's run by a company out of Hong Kong, and sells fairly expensive U.S. data packages. I chew through a lot of data on that, but the price is worth it to me because there doesn't seem to be any throttling during periods of high consumption, I can scale back what I pay for when I have other options for access, and the data purchased works on all major U.S. carriers so I have a much wider coverage area than I would trying to tether with my phone. It works internationally so I'm looking forward to using it for trips abroad where I've generally relied on putting a local sim in my phone and tethering.
In a trailer this size, the table converts to your bed, so having a good desk set-up is tricky. I've landed on a usb-c external monitor that goes in a claw I mount on the table each morning to provide an eye level monitor. I use a small mechanical keyboard and wireless mouse, so the whole set-up is easy to store each morning. I can't recommend working on a laptop all day every day, I'm young and fit but maintaining that posture for long still really messes with me and most other folks I've talked to about it.
For power, we're just running 200w of Solar when we're off-grid (which is about half the time in the West where boondocking within cell-service abounds.) My partner and I are able to power our laptops with USB-c adapters so we can run off 12v directly without the waste of going through an inverter.
We love doing this enough that we're putting a ton of effort into building a van out right now. A primary factor in that choice is that with an RV or a trailer, you're much more limited on where you can park. We've had days where we haul our bitty trailer into town for meetings to get better service, but people certainly look at us funny when we're posted up in some parking lot working on our laptops.
Let me know if you've got questions. I've been having a blast with this way of living and have met a bunch of people doing the same this last year. I've really enjoyed sharing the experience with people.
> Here's my primary concern: what evidence do you have that this code actually works?
This is a strange concern to try to address with code-review. I don't think most folks actually expect to catch a lot of bugs by staring at diffs. Testing is the right tool for that job.
> I'm way more interested in that than I am whether variable names use camel case or snake case or whatever.
Style concerns definitely shouldn't be the primary focus of a code review. Ensuring some stylistic consistency through the code base is a benefit they can provide, but certainly not the the most major.
> In fact if your tests are complete
How do you know if the tests are complete on someone's work before they merge it? Don't you need to get in there, and well, review their code to see what tests they wrote? Evaluation of test coverage by a peer is one of the more important parts of a good code review. What other process would you use to ensure incoming patches have the test coverage you want them to have?
> we can always refactor the code later if we need to.
Isn't it better to catch code structure issues when they are fresh in everyone's mind rather than taking on technical debt and addressing it down the road when it will require more effort? We've all written code in somewhat silly ways. My experience is that when a peer calls that out before I merge it, it's way easier to fix up-front than a year down the road when I'm in there trying to fix some bug and am wondering if I should just refactor the mess while I'm at it.
I would love to see a good argument there, because while that argument is easy to accept at face value, when I dig deeper at the concept of what market manipulation is, I fail to find behavior that the majority of WSB is engaging in that fits that criteria.
Where are the fraudulent statements causing price pumps? None of the prominent due diligence the community has provided that started this run has been found to be untrue. Their thesis still stands: GME was undervalued and shorts were vulnerable to a squeeze.
Margin calls are surely coming for large short positions, starting Friday and likely continuing in coming weeks. If the short positions need to cover, there's forced demand.
The thesis that many Bulls are approaching Gamestop stock with is that the company was fundamentally undervalued prior to the current short-squeeze event. Even after the current spike resolves, a return to a $30 or so share price (up from $5 or so most of this year) gives them plenty of market cap and plenty of time to capture it for a major re-positioning in the market.
WallStreetBet's consensus on buying Gamestop was born from an understanding of its share price being undervalued, based on basic profit and loss analysis, as well as a promising board member joining who has the background to grow the company's digital business. Brick and mortar business has also run successful experiments with positioning as local e-sports hubs, which could be an interesting evolution for that side of the business.
The insane stock price we're seeing now is in anticipation of a short squeeze, but folks who took the bet before January seemed to mostly agree that the share price belonged somewhere around $30 regardless of the insane shorts. There was hope of a short squeeze being possible, but the downside was considered minimal with the thesis that GME was fundamentally undervalued regardless.
If the play here were a simple pump and dump, that would all be accurate. Your ability to sell at 10,000% relies on there being a greater fool and that greater fool that ends up holding the bag could often be just a regular person investing unwisely.
The social media hype here is about this being a short squeeze. Large institutional investors have taken short positions and will likely be compelled to purchase to purchase shares at whatever price when margin calls come in on Friday. The current share price does not reflect the potential to profit off Gamestop as a company, it reflects the potential to profit off of the institutions that have taken incredibly risky short positions.
Here, the greater fool is already committed to buying your shares, and the timeline for that purchase is known with enough certainty to make this a fairly low-risk play.
As an engineer who has worked briefly with one of the start-ups focused on here on their core product, Robert's critique of the the technology driving the current generation of template-based commercial solutions is absolutely spot-on. The results are useful but the template based approach along with the really lackluster tooling both my employer and competitors in the space had cobbled together made self-service nigh impossible. His assessment that these companies are really professional services companies dealing in bespoke one-off software solutions despite their efforts to market as robust AI products that magically turn some arbitrary JSON schema into prose is very fair I think.
I am eager to see if neural approaches develop to better handle constraints, but part of me thinks the level of control over generated prose that template based approaches provide is essential for customer-facing text and that part of the market will persist even when every other recipe in Google search results is GPT-3 generated rubbish around the actual damn list of ingredients.
I live nomadically in a campervan I built and guide raft trips and volunteer doing whitewater rescue now. However, I missed building things enough that I picked up another software job last year. I like building tiny-houses and campervans too, but as much as I hate staring at computer screens I'm just too addicted to the crazy leverage my efforts in software have to give that up it turns out! The jobs are way more fun too when you care not at all about getting fired.