• 1 Post
  • 58 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle

  • I thought about this before, and mostly agree. My mom knows nothing about computers and could probably use Ubuntu if I stick it on a machine and gave it to her. The thing preventing me from doing it is that when things go wrong in Linux, it often requires extensive terminal usage to fix. And my mother can often find new and creative ways to break a computer. If something went wrong with it, I would have to fix it. There is literally no one else she knows who would even know where to start. At least if she’s on windows, she can find someone to help her.


  • I’m sceptical that blue light lenses, even those that effectively block blue light, are doing much of anything. Blue light can mess with your circadian rhythm, but so can orange-tinted light if it’s bright enough. A better system would be to limit screen time after dark. If you are using screens, lower their brightness to the lowest amount you can still see. You can use a night -time filter to tint the screen orange after dark (most OS’s and devices support some form of this). Blue light lenses while holding a OLED device six inches from your face at full intensity? Likely not doing much.








  • Death is inevitable. Nothing I do will avoid it, I can’t escape it, and it will get me eventually. Thus, there’s no point worrying about it. If I live my life in fear of death, I’ll be just as dead as if I didn’t.

    I’m not religious, so as far as I know this is the only existence I’ll ever have. I didn’t exist for billions of years, I exist now, and then I won’t exist for billions of years. In this brief window of consciousness, all I can do is live my life and try to experience it as much as possible. When I die, all I can hope for is that I was a good person who left the world in a better state than how I found it.

    I won’t lie and say death doesn’t scare me. As I get closer, I’m sure it’ll scare me even more. I don’t want to die, so I’ll take whatever steps I can to avoid it. But to allow it to preoccupy my thoughts does me no good.







  • BS looks better than AAS, but honestly that’ll only really apply for your first couple jobs. Once you’ve got a few years of experience, your specific education matters less and less. I will say that a BS is “better” in terms of teaching you more, but your Associate’s credits will transfer if you ever decide to go that route.

    Also, once you pick up one language, you basically know them all (with some obvious exceptions). If you know PowerShell, you can pick up Bash pretty easy. If you know JavaScript, you can pick up Python. If you know Python, Java is pretty easy. If you know Java, you pretty much know C#. Learning a language becomes just figuring out how that languages does things. Picking up a new language goes from being a process that takes a year or two and schooling to taking maybe a week and watching some videos. There are some exceptions (Python doesn’t tell you much about SQL, and systems languages like C/C++ are their own animal).



  • It’s tricky. Depending on what direction you take, CS can be very math heavy or not. If you get into algorithmic stuff, deep learning, data analysis, etc., that has a lot of math. But if you focus on, for example, front end development, there’s not that much.

    I won’t lie and say CS has no math. At my university, you were able to avoid higher level calculus by doing a bachelor’s of arts instead of a bachelor’s of science. Calculus 2 is usually the highest level you have to take, which focuses primarily on integration. I was kinda in your boat of being hesitant to do CS because of the math, but I ended up minoring in it. The CS-focused math is mostly logic stuff and discrete math, which I feel is way easier than calculus. And honestly, calculus isn’t nearly as bad as its reputation would have you think (until Vector Calculus, that almost broke me).

    Look into it, but I’ll say that while the math is there, it’s not as bad as you’re probably thinking. And if you know you’re not going into heavy algorithmic stuff, see if there’s a path that avoids most of it. And once you’re out of school, you’ll never touch calculus again (unless you do a lot of physics, maybe? Game dev, perhaps?)


  • I think better advice would be “invest/save” in general. You could just throw money into a mutual fund, index fund, savings account, whatever. If you get a job with an employer matched 401k, max that out. I don’t think you need to worry about trying to play the stock market by buying individual stocks. You’ll end up spending way too much time doing it for minimal gains over an index fund, and a lot of the time you’re just basically gambling on what companies you think are going to do well.


  • For IT you could do Computer Science, Information Technology, Computer Engineering, etc. There’s a whole lot of angles you could come at it from too. Would you want to maintain systems or develop them?

    If databases interest you, you could be a DBA. If networking interests you, a network engineer. If you want to do development, you can focus on front-end development, back-end development, full-stack, embedded systems, and more. Maybe hardware interests you, so you’d like to be a computer engineer. Computers/IT has a lot of components to it, and even if you find yourself a person that likes to bounce between different things, there’s a lot here that you can bounce between. School will have you touch a little bit of everything, and you can find that part you want to specialize in.