811–820 of 890 posts
Explore a bit, ideally without concern for what might make money. Try to find one or more real passions, even if they are only short term. Then pursue them.
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> I have a hard time to see any relevance in a life without children anymore. In my view, having kids is a great way to take off the existential pressure of life being meaningless, by just having a default "do it for them" answer to every single question or hardship in life. And what then will give your child's life such a straightforward meaning? Well, just have kids of their own I guess, and their kids the same, al…
> It always seems like a bit of a cop out to me. "Life is empty and meaningless, so I'll just have kids, let that fill up all my time, and maybe they can figure it out." I suppose that could be the history of humanity in a nutshell. I understand the sentiment here, and prior to having children of my own, I would have agreed with you. But having kids brings tremendous meaning to one's life in a way that is difficult t…
I am extremely happy that I do not have children and that I do not have to deal with children. I have so many meaningful relationships with adults and wonderful life experiences and every morning I look forward to continuing with the day. I do not desire children and I'm completely fine with not having them at all.
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SQL isn't quite comparable today to punchcards in 1990, is it?
Depends on who you would ask. Anecdata: was asked by a client why the same query was running orders slower on our infrastructure (IaaS on Xeons) than on their test server (a regular desktop with i7). I check the load, IO, yada-yada and I don't see anything what could indicate the slowness. After a bit I check the db size and ... I'm pretty speechless, because it is 77MBs. 77 megabytes and the query runs for tens of s…
I'm still far from an SQL expert, and certainly wasn't 15 years ago, but you can get a lot of win by just spending as little as one or two days learning about SQL. It really surprises me how some people don't.
Then again, for a very long time I thought awk was basically useless to learn, until I did last year after which I kicked myself for not learning it sooner as I had spent a ridiculous amount of time cooking up inferior solutions for ~20 years, and spending just an hour or two learning awk would have been a great ROI *shrug*.
I guess the moral of the story is that you can never be quite sure if something is useful or useless until you actually learn it.
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> Learn, learn, learn. Find the new hotness 58 in a few weeks, and seriously considering going the other way: To jump off the treadmill of new fads and concentrate on / return to basics. "Big Data!" "Data Lake!" Data Vault!" "Apache Spark!" "Kafka!" "Cloud this!" "Cloud that!" "Cloud the other!""Snowflake!" "R!" "Python!" "Pandas!" "This new ETL tool!" "That new ETL process!" "This other new ETL tool!" "That other ne…
Pandas is a pretty fantastic tool for ETL.
I’m in my late 40s. Just gone through 15 years of absolute shit with an ex partner and financial chaos. Decided I’d fix it in 2019. Three important things to concentrate on: 1. Health. If that’s off, fix it first. Everything depends on health. Sort out your diet, physical fitness and health and mental health follows. I’m fitter than all my peers and both fitter and healthier than I was in my 20s. Can run a half marat…
I think a problem that a lot of people struggled with, especially those in their late 20s/30s that haven't quite settled down yet, is that corona has made this a lot harder (depending on region) in the last few years. Same on point 3 actually.
Fully agree with your points though; after breaking up with my girlfriend (whom I met on meetup btw) a number of years ago doing pretty much exactly these thing really helped me get back on my feet and went from "I feel like shit all the time" to "I have great new friends whom I do fun new stuff with, a girlfriend, and generally feel pretty darn good" in a matter of about two weeks.
Right now it's a lot harder though, and has been for a while, since both are much harder where I live, which has translated in various problems including feeling more or less like the OP is describing.
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(3) is a very negative way of looking at things. Do you think Bill Gates did it on his own? You don't have to be famous in order to play a small part of something impactful that's larger than yourself and will be respected for generations.
> play a small part of something impactful that's larger than yourself and will be respected for generations. So do you know anyone from MS who played part except Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer? I would attribute the guy who invented C# and TypeScript a significant impact, however I don't even know his name without googleing it.
I was in similar spot with around 30. My advice: 1.) Start dating. It might be a drag and maybe embarrassing at times, but obviously not being a loser having saved up half a mil in 10 years, you will probably find someone. Don't buy into that Hollywood "soulmate" crap. More likely than not there is already someone you know or at max someone one graph edge away which will be a perfectly fine partner for the rest of yo…
Unpopular opinion but even if you are a Bill Gates, I don’t think there is anything of substance about his technological innovation. What is noteworthy is how he has used his wealth in his philanthropic efforts to eradicate disease and suffering. That deserves kudos.
Well, yeah, kind of... But what is also at least as noteworthy is how he got that wealth. His philanthropy since he retired has only begun to make up for the stifling hand his evil empire laid over computing for decades.
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(2) This! Once you have kids your focus is on other people rather than yourself, which makes you a better human being... well that was my experience at least. Don't leave it too late. Take a look at the current "feminism" movement that aims to empower women to be equal to men in the job market. What has happened in the West is that women are realising by the age of 40 they have a great job, but no kids or long term r…
I wouldn’t say that was the result of a feminist movement as much powerful interests in society being able to exploit women’s work much more systematically. If a woman has a career the government can tax their earnings and somebody like Jeff Bezos has the value of their stock holdings increase by some multiple of the earnings created. Contrast that to unpaid domestic work which doesn’t contribute to either but does c…
And guess which of those parts the movement as a whole is usually most useful for.
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Plus one in health and physical fitness. Buying a bicycle and using it daily was probably the best investment I ever made in myself. Also, I can't believe that I smoked those filthy cigarretes for so long, but how good is that I stopped this habit. About material realizations please remind that the average successful enterpreneur age is about 45. I only started being able to save serious, retirement-style money when…
But cycling doesn't cut it, right? Especially when you do it daily, you build some kind of immunity. Can't even sweat from cycling. Of course, it depends on duration and probably weather. I guess winter affected my experience. Running is way better for me.
Yeah, it's called getting in shape.
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While I am glad that you are enjoying kids, I do not think it is fair the way you paint the picture of people who choose to not have kids ("feeling sorry for them") as if it was a condition or something. Plus I think having children is not something that should be rushed. Pretty sure there are many parents out there who became a parent because of social pressure. What if I tell you I find fullfilment in travelling? S…
If you don't have kids you are missing a fundamental understanding of what is driving most people each and every day. You are clueless about most of the world because most people have kids and it profoundly affects them. You can't know this unless you experience it yourself. It's also difficult to understand what you are getting into by having kids. It brings on a profound level of anxiety about their feelings and ul…
> Not having kids [..] allows you to focus on pampering yourself with your millions your whole life...with the side effect of perhaps coming to the conclusion that your own life is meaningless somewhere down the road.
That seems an unfair characterisation; I don't have children for the simple reason that there are enough humans on the planet; it's not like there's a shortage. Many childless people I know feel like this.
I'd actually love to have a family; I just chose not to (thus far anyway) because I think it's better for "the greater good", which sounds a bit lame but that's what it is. You can agree or disagree with that take, but it's not pure selfish hedonism like you're describing; quite the opposite in fact.