Thanks man, that’s some solid advice even if my work is a lot more pliable for security. I’d also say that compliance and risk are very good motivation, if you can nmap the servers and SSH in with default credentials and zero alarms during, that could cost millions in data loss, compliance fines, and recovery efforts. Show them solid figures and it’s a hell of a motivator.

It’s funny how people make such sweeping generalisations like they’re prophetic or something. Are some people shit? Sure, some suck at their jobs, and some are arseholes. Does that make all of them evil incarnate? Fuck no.

I’m on jerbora as well and can see the previous person’s pronouns, but it could be an instance specific thing.

If you can optimise those by doing small task while waiting, e.g. when the microwave/oven is running, while you’re watching TV etc. then you can effectively do chores without losing time as well

That’s pretty standard for country celebrations I’d bet - around Australia Day we have plenty of people flying flags, but the day after it’s back to normal

I’ve found if you accidentally take a spam call it can be fun to string them along and waste their time for a good 30m if you’ve got time to kill, the humour is great but it also gets you blacklisted for a while and they stop calling

While it’s a pretty good vpn all round that’s super easy to set and forget, I’ve been having issues the last ~6 months in Australia with the CIDR ranges getting blocked by Google, Reddit, and the like. It’s annoying to have it run fine for a few days, then suddenly have every second thing I do needing to solve a captcha for it.

Try the freemium tier for a while and see if it works for you - I may be wrong and you’ll run a whole month with nothing, but never hurts to verify.

You can also literally solve problems with a computer lying around - bitcoin mining isn’t very useful, but you can contribute to science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_projects

Read up on your local laws, in Australia for example it’s required that 3 basic methods of cash, cheque, and bank transfer are accepted, may be something similar for you

For the latter, a good approach is to pick a project or idea and try to make it. If you’re familiar with the logic you can look up the syntax for the new language, but it you’re fresh off the boat then there is a bunch of good stuff on YouTube, Khan academy and stack overflow that are geared to newbies.

Some starting ideas:

• Make a text based tic Tac toe/card game
• Make a number guessing game
• Find all prime numbers under a number given by the user

Once you’ve got a decent grip on the logic involved, it can be quite effective to implement more complex approaches to the solution. Instead of guessing randomly, implement a binomial (1:N divided by 2) search algorithm, or have the game play against itself. Go back over how you wrote the solution, and add some good comments, improve the functions descriptions, even refactor some code to be more efficient and more readable. I learnt how to code through doing, textbooks are great for some people but my preferred approach is to make something, break it, and learn how to fix it.

Part of the identity crises that comes with(out) religion is the ultimate question of purpose: why are we suffering, surely it has a reason? Some of us are content to accept that there is no purpose, and therefore we must define our own; others need a purpose greater than themselves and/or to have one defined for them, and look to religion for that purpose. There is no right answer, and the struggle of identity and purpose are well documented in religion, fiction, history, and philosophy.

I was about to say something like this, hands on work is really satisfying when you can see the results in front of you, and even show them off as well!

Even for those us who fit into the straight/white/cis mould, learning how to create purpose and meaning for yourself is a really hard battle against expectations imposed growing up. Thanks for sharing a really wholesome story :)

I went in with a 4 year degree, the other grad next to me went in with a 6 month kinda masters. You can pull it off if you try hard enough and know your shit, wish I’d known that before I wasted so long at uni.