I think it’s just true for the vast majority of countries, unfortunately. A country has to have a lot of things figured out and done right before it can regulate and train its police force so well that its population doesn’t nearly universally agree with the ACAB sentiment. Or at least doesn’t belive they’re all incompetent.

i3 isn’t a proper DE, though, but I definitely would go with that with that little RAM.

For strictly DEs, I’d pick XFCE - it’s just lovely for what it demands.

Recommend anything to read on the matter? Sounds very interesting, but I’m afraid I may find some dubious material before striking anything good.

I’m self-taught as well, and I’d say look through the current job market and offerings, but don’t worry all that much - teaching yourself IT usually nets you a considerable amount of transferable skills that you build upon if things don’t work out in one field; you also learn to learn and get much more comfortable with switching branches.

The less volatile your branch is, the less likely it is to turn out to be a fad that you’ll have to drop several years down the line at best. Crypto and blockchain, for example, were probably often recommended when the thing was on the rise, but that’s nowhere near as popular and safe now; I believe the current AI hype to follow the same fate. Basically, look at the news and trends and be careful with whatever big and stupid corporations push for, praise, or massively invest in: that’s usually nothing but good marketing successfully baiting the suits.

Web develoment is probably going to stay simultaneously volatile and relevant for decades more, so that’s a good option. Embedded development shouldn’t be going anywhere either, although that’s more low-level and intimidating, but it can be fun and stable and pay relatively well. I hate the smartphones industry and can’t really say much about Android or iOS development, but I doubt it’s doomed or anything.

So far, it seems like not following whatever Elon Musk or other billionaires tell you is the future is a good bet.

Like any good cartoon villain, Putin has enough in his biography to explain basically everything about his character, at whatever point of his life - it just doesn’t make the villain less evil and deserving of being removed from any sort of power and, hopefully, put to justice, with the former being imperative.

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What phones would you consider worthwhile in terms of price, i.e. those you can cheap out on, but not suffer the consequences of it being slow even in the simplest tasks?

One Android phone I had, Nokia 5.1, had to be replaced in less than 5 years because it often froze and lagged when I had to make or receive a phone call, open a single tab in some light-weight browser, etc.

I’m not a big fan of the smartphone industry and especially the reviewers because they seem to have a very twisted idea of a budget device. Or maybe I’m a cheapskate.

What if my phone isn’t supported by any ROMs? Is there an easier alternative to building it for your device on your own, following the given instructions, for example?

The lower amount of content on Lemmy is balanced by the increased quality and the fact I can’t spend all day on here

This is easily one of the greatest aspects of the fediverse for me so far; Reddit seemed great at first, when all of its content and communities were new to me, and as it gradually got more familiar and filtered and fine-tuned through my own activity, I noticed that I’d been just scrolling the thing mindlessly, aimlessly, hoping to experience something good, have a nice laugh, a nice read, just anything - ultimately wasting dozens of minutes, sometimes hours, with nothing but a sad sigh as a result.

Browsing Lemmy is a genuinely fun activity for a relatively short amount of time a couple of times a day max, always having a good time thanks to its quality and always having nice conversations because it’s the culture so far, and never scrolling through endless equally poorly-thought-out posts or comments because even if there are any, they’re few and far between.

I think I say the same things whenever I get to praise the fediverse in general and Lemmy in particular, but I just can’t help myself.

Share your RSS feeds with us.

I like your theory and wanna agree.

In 00s and 10s, my friends and I used to engage with the Internet and each other in a very different way than in the more recent years: We basically were the content generators for ourselves, making conversations based on our ideas fueled by movies, books, or pure imagination, with a lot of jokes and other content that, compared to today, probably took much more effort; we made ambient music with a shitty mic, gathered together, somewhere away from our homes, to talk and watch shit on some weak-ass laptops, maybe game and talk on said laptops, maybe game online, share stupid proposals for our art projects like making music or writing stories or drawing, sharing results.

Of course, we recited some jokes, rein reenacted some, and ironically enough, the most repeated were the ones coming from short-term content, like the z0r.de flashes or skits from collection-type videos like the GMOD Idiot Box. Back then such short-form content was more of a rarity, it seems, so we still had a lot room for creativity and something more meaningful and such, while now this type of content has filled way too many spaces, with much lower quality, too - we’ve seemed to have stopped creating, despite having arguably much more fuel for it thanks to the many changes our lives brought.

Thinking about this makes me browse the Internet a little less and focus on writing or reading, two things I’ve been most creatively engaged with since I was a kid, hoping that can bring creating stuff back to my life and the lives of my friends and family, at least to some degree, as opposed to just consuming lazy content and having even lazier, meaningless, dull conversations with people I care about.

Might be a Linux thing, though.

Would you happen to know how that compares to saying “Fuck it” and going with a Java career for the relative predictability? I’m not asking for any particular reasons, just curious.

Doesn’t sood good at all. I’m sorry to hear that, friend. I really hope there’s enough upsides there compared to working at a more mature company for you.

How you liking it? How many years have you aged in the months working at your startup?

That’s the point - you have the expertise to make proper sense of whatever it outputs. The people pushing for “AI” the most want to rely on it without any necessary expertise or just minimal efforts, like feeding it some of your financial reports and have generate a 5-year strategy only to fail miserably and have no one to blame this time (will still blame anyone else but themselves btw).

It’s not the most useless tool in the world by any means, but the mainstream talk is completely out of touch with reality on the matter, and so are mainstream actions (i.e. overrelying on it and putting way too much faith into it).

Welcome, have fun!

Hate it when they squish the arrow keys though.

Definetly gonna write docs from now on.

Sure thing.

No, I’m not undervaluing anybody. I’m just trying to tell you that yes, if the field was less competitive, i.e. if much nor people were good at it, we’d see smaller median salaries.

I think it is comparable to the healtcare and medicine in the US, where being a doctor or a good lawyer pays you very well for exactly same reasons.

As for your example of being an engineer doing similar stuff as some programmer and being paid differently, well, no, the pay would be very comparable. I know several people doing programming work as stated by their job descriptions and contracts, both are paid less than a middle manager I know, because the duties they have to perform can be covered by a larger population compared to the duties that pay much, much more.

The situation you’re talking about is already the case, and the only reason people see IT salaries as too big is because the field and the work is perceived to be somewhat easy and simply (“Don’t you sit in front of the compute rall day?”), and while it can be easy in some regards (much easier and less physically demanding that being an first responder of any kind or working in a cargo or fishing vessel), but it’s not simple most of the time. Same reasons engineers are often paid more than technicians or mechanics - both are extremely important, neither is simple, but have different capabilities to match the supply and demand of their industries.

If anything, it’s not like we’re the execs signing ourselves monthly $400,000 as a bonus and doing actually fuck all because we have powerful parents, neither are we trust fund managers or anything similar. These are the people we should be turning against, not fellow workers that don’t have dozens and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Look, you’re framing it in a very bad way, and I’ll sound like a prick regardless, but I’ll try my best.

First of all, let’s ignore the “ordinary workers” as a group, because that’s way too vague to base anything off of. There are ordinary IT professionals that are just that in their field, ordinary, and there are exceptional people doing manual labor that the society doesn’t think much about.

As for the pay, I know it seems disproportionate or “too much”, but it really comes down to things like repetition, value generated, skill variety, scarcity, and adaptability. There’s plenty of programming jobs that anyone familiar with the white collar jobs would call dead-end, because they got you working with the same old and irrelevant stack basically keeping some old system on life support with occasional changes, and these often pay salaries lower or at least comparable to non-IT jobs, all because with these jobs, there’s very little to none that you have to learn, you don’t have to adapt, you don’t have to come up with creative, yet technically correct solutions all the time, and you’re very replaceable, so the company doesn’t feel like they should share more of their profits with you - they’re simply not that afraid to lose you.

Things like frontend, on the other hand, often pay higher salaries compared to the above, because not only you have to work in a rapidly changing environment over there and adapt to it successfully each time, but also use a greater set of tools, some of which you may be working with for the first time in yuyr life, and you’re expected to know how to transfer your skills from other tools and projects to properly use here. I know it feels like everyone is a developer these days, but that’s because we’ve always been a very prominent part of the Internet, especially more FOSS and privacy and anti-big-corps parts of it like Lemmy - there simply isn’t a way to supply the market with enough qualified developers to drive the salaries down.

No less important is the fact that it’s all on the actually wealthy people’s whim, because they feel like they can exploit other jobs much more easily than they can devs, who are cherished and valued to a point to have a lot of leverage and many options on the job market - it’s much easier to quit a shitty boss when you’re working remotely using your laptop and a few peripherals, making enough money to create a safety net.

As for decrease in pay to have more sensible deadlines… again, we have enough leverage and confidence to either influence the deadlines enough preemptively, or miss the deadline and make a lesson out of it. I still have all my skills and knowledge that are worth the money, despite having more time to complete a project.

Most importantly, I don’t really care about the deadline, nor does the majority of other salaried developers, because there’s really only so much you can force in a set amount of time - a team of 5 people can’t build a fully functioning copy of New York in 7 days even if they completely miss any sleep, food, water, and other bodily functions all while doing cocaine and other stimulants, and the same applies to any job there is.