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The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are

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Re: The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are

#151

Post by sgtnoodle »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #58
sgtnoodle wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a steam deck. It's not a joke that I can tweak settings on it all day, but within 10 seconds of launching a game I want to play, my wife shouts my name, the baby starts crying, or the 4 year old trips and falls. At least my favorite technical achievement of the deck is its reliable suspend button.

Actually, Steam Deck is a real life-saver. The ability to play games 3 minutes at a time, anywhere, cannot be overstated (or explained to those living a more predictable, free life :). And games like e.g. "Steamworld Dig 2" or "Jack Moves" can similarly be picked up without needing 15 minutes to "get into the groove" or "drive to next mission" etc. (I've also enjoyed Outer Wilds more on SteamDeck than any other devic…

I just finished playing completely through L.A. Noire for the first time. It was great on the deck.

My wife broke her leg and our existence has been more miserable than typical. To keep my sanity this weekend, I've been working on getting a reliable stream setup from my desktop. One day I'll start playing through Red Dead Redemption 2.

Steam Remote Play works fine when the deck is the server, but it seems rather buggy as the client. "Hardware decoding" freezes up, and "software decoding" has messed up color on the preview release. Software decoding works on stable, but even then it's choppy and has lots of artifacts.

Yesterday I set up sunshine on my desktop, and today I got moonlight set up on the deck. Out of the box it seems to work very well. It looks better than Remote Play, and it seems to be better latency too. The only problem I've encountered is an inability to unlock my screen from the steam deck over moonlight; I type in the password, but my desktop rejects it for some reason, then after a few tries locks me out for 10 minutes. Thanks Arch Linux!

Since I'm incoherently rambling, I also tried to launch linux-native Tomb Raider yesterday, as I have successfully for several years. It didn't work because that would bring me too much joy. I switched to proton and it worked, but didn't have my progress saved. Okay, I am a software engineer with multiple computer science degrees. Missing libssl.so.1.0.0. An hour later, 10 minutes of compiling half a dozen random libraries, and a 200 character LD_LIBRARY_PATH override spanning four directories, it works again. How did it ever work?! According to the internet this problem happened to everyone else in 2017. Also a joke that's not a joke, windows has become linux's most stable ABI.

Re: The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are

#153

Post by ipnon »

electric_mayhem wrote: post #65

A mentor told me that he felt like he was about twenty until after his first heart attack and bypass surgery. After that, he said, he felt like he had aged a ton.

People take for granted the cardiac muscle dutifully pumping away oxygen and nutrients to each extremity. A weak heart makes it difficult to move, difficult to think. Once your heart deteriorates everything else quickly follows.

Re: The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are

#154

Post by alchemist1e9 »

wrycoder wrote: post #142
alchemist1e9 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is pretty neat. How is coding at 80? I’m in late 40s and I’m hoping coding is something that can stick with you, I’ve read it definitely can.

It's a lot of fun. I'm back to my old interest - small systems programming on the bare metal. I did Nand2Tetris several years ago, and now I'm following the work of people like Tunney and DeVault as they bootstrap de novo. 100rabbits is also fascinating. I'm working on an electronics program for the local makerspace - some combination of ham radio topics, microcontrollers and sensors - trying to figure out some good…

Thank you for the response. I really like the idea that in older years I can keep coding and be on HN. Of course we all can once we think about it. Why not.

Your comment also illustrates something I already feel, that software and systems knowledge can be lost over time and that wisdom from long experience can be valuable to younger generations as we get older.

It’s too bad FOSS is such a battle. One odd Linux desktop adoption tip I’ve found. I setup people on Ubuntu mate instead of regular Ubuntu desktop, the fast streamlined, lightweight, more old school desktop environment seems to draw them in more than MacOS and Win11 imitation desktops.

Re: The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are

#156

Post by rramadass »

RHSman2 wrote: post #48

Tendons. Once beautiful, stretchy creatures that probably now resemble a curmudgeon being asked to be nice to a neighbor. Been playing soccer with my soccer mad 8 yr old. I too was that guy. Brings me back and I am so much better at technique now but boy oh boy does my hip and lower back hurt the next day!!!

One of my favourite stories is "A piece of Steak" by Jack London. It is about an old boxer who must win against a younger boxer to feed himself and his family but eventually loses because "Youth will be served" - https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/PieSte.sht...

Some quotes:

It was to be expected. It was the way of Youth, expending its splendor and excellence in wild insurgence and furious onslaught, overwhelming opposition with its own unlimited glory of strength and desire.

And Tom King patiently endured. He knew his business, and he knew Youth now that Youth was no longer his. There was nothing to do till the other lost some of his steam, was his thought,

Sandel must foam the froth of Youth away before discreet Age could dare to retaliate.

He grinned with a certain wistful pathos in his ring-battered countenance, and went on cherishing his strength with the jealousy of which only Age is capable. Sandel was Youth, and he threw his strength away with the munificent abandon of Youth.

But that was the trouble. Sandel would never become a world champion. He lacked the wisdom, and the only way for him to get it was to buy it with Youth; and when wisdom was his, Youth would have been spent in buying it.

Yet he looked upon the fight as his. It was impossible that a man so punished could rise. Only Youth could rise, and Sandel rose.

Re: The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are

#157

Post by wraptile »

neilk wrote: post #66

I still feel like the upstart who barely knows what he is doing. The only difference is the people around me. I used to be surrounded by people I looked up to, who seemed to know everything. But now everyone around me has become mysteriously less and less competent and they're acting like I am the established authority, which just shows how little they must know!

> But now everyone around me has become mysteriously less and less competent

I feel as we gain experience we learn that most of the things can be learned! It kinda removes a lot of magic from the world but also is weirdly freeing. I dread if there's the other end of the bell curve somewhere out there where we start to think that learning is not possible or practical anymore.

Re: The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are

#158

Post by cm2012 »

thriftwy wrote: post #97

I never had any problem with my age, but. This year I've turned 38 and for some reason this number stopped being funny. I know a lot people make a fuss about turning 40, but for me the transition happened to be 38.

Passing actual middle age based on life expectancy!

Re: The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are

#160

Post by za3faran »

dehrmann wrote: post #55
crdrost wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jukebox the Ghost in 2012, In my lungs I still feel young But my body won't play along I'm thinking this must not be where we Belong. Alan Kay was talking somewhere, but I don't have the link, about how a lot of his success in his youth had to do with the research community around him, and I think he was asked a question about how that sort of thing changes as you grow older... He replied that the combination of grow…

> Java to Kotlin Don't. I tried it, liked the language itself, but went back to Java. Kotlin's syntax is nice, but it predates Java 8, so that syntax plays poorly with the stream API and lambdas. Iterop works as-promised, but again, Kotlin syntax doesn't work well with libraries that are Java-first (in my case, this was Hadoop). Finally, mainline Java keeps cherry-picking the best new language features while learning…

Don't forget pattern matching in Java is more fully fledged compared to Kotlin. Java is also getting string templates, and project Loom (virtual threads) make the entire suspend/await approach unnecessary.
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