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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • The thing with Russia in particular is that people seem to overlook the fact that it’s decades behind its western neighbors in terms of societal and political development, which has been the case for centuries.

    Having spoken to multitudes of people outside and within Russia, I do believe that the gap has shrunk rather significantly in the last 40 years or so. Despite the attempts of rapidly aging and increasingly more delusional people that currently comprise the Russian government, this gap seems to be shrinking further still - to some degree, thanks to the same people fueling the country’s desire for change.

    So I don’t think you’re being too optimistic or naive. I think you’re being very observant and keen-eyed. In fact, I’d go as far as to say you’re being a bit too pessimistic thinking that we’re going to face another decade like 90s, for two reasons:

    • they were considerably less brutal and terrible than the current Russian government made us all believe;
    • there will be no cultural shock to throw the entire country into the same state of turbulence this time, as people have been living this new, once-alien capitalist lifestyle for several decades and have, in fact figured many things out. We’re looking at a much brighter and rapidly democratising period once the old people in govnermnt start dropping dead.







  • Couldn’t agree more. I, too, spoke with my friends, but in a very different way - I first sent one of them an invitation to come with and leave a signature for the man, giving a brief explanation of what we could achieve; I didn’t make a long or comprehensive speech, and my friend agreed, as did the other one, who was in a Discord call with the first one at the time. None of these two are particularly interested in politics, I doubt I could call them left-leaning or part of the current opposition in Russia, but the sheer ease and speed with which they just agreed to come with me and sign for Nadezhdin spoke volumes to me, even more so than the Prigozhin’s march.

    The most beautiful thing about it is the fact that the point we got to initially wouldn’t be open for another 30 minutes, and then we learned we had to go to a completely different one because it was the only one open due to all the strain on the volunteers and the entire campaign; there we learned that they were out of blanks for the regions two of us were signing for, so they asked us to print some somewhere nearby, which we did, and then signed off as planned. None of them protested, despite the fact that all three of us were already late for work that day. The only concern I heard came from the least liberal of my friends, which basically boiled down to them saying that they hope Nadezhdin, should he become the president, wouldn’t become another Putin. That, too, says a lot about the Kremlin gremlin.

    As to why Nadezhdin got so far… I think Maksim Katz put it best - the government is full of morons, is run by morons, and those morons seek to make other morons happy. It’s been over two decades of theft, murder, deliberate destruction of trust and unity and critical thinking, extreme bureaucracy, cleansing, lies, and wiping out autonomy - of course a system like that is prone to make mistakes, isn’t it? Especially when it’s stressed with so much stuff already, and even more so amidst the elections the prime candidate for which is definitely not in favor as evident by his joke of an announcement to run for presidency, complete lack of his face on any material advertising the elections, and now the fact that seemingly a much larger portion of the population is actually going to attend the elections, making any tampering more difficult and risky

    They’re just incompetent and they get high on their own stuff, possibly truly believing that everyone is in love with Putin and everything he brings, that the opposition is just a few 18-year students making irregular donations to some irrelevant politicians. I really hope they’re losing sleep and mental health more than ever now as their beliefs crumble and they get more and more irrational, increasing the potential for even more mistakes that we can take advantage of.

    Either that or it’s some secret anti-Putin plot from within, because everyone is tired of the old bastard at this point, regardless of their political or ideological views.

    As for the people whose views aren’t as humane… my answer is Realpolitik. You’re right, they’re not going anywhere, and that’s why we must learn to work with people we don’t like - so must they. We’re not going to build a healthy and safe society that in turn builds a healthy and safe county, both for its citizens and the rest of the world, if we ostracise people that aren’t 100% with our idea of good or fair or just: it’s a yet another path to tyranny, for who gets to decide, and more importantly, most people often turn to radical, inhumane views and parties when they have no true human contact or empathy in their lives. We’ll have to offer everyone a chance to become a part of a kind and supporting community, one that doesn’t punish you the moment you disagree or seem different, one that embraces and teaches, one that’s inviting and welcoming - that way, the radical, the violent, and the hating communities and parties and candidates and politicians will have progressively less and less to offer, losing their old populist tricks of pride and grandeur they promise to give back.

    I’m glad we’ve met over here, my friend. I wish I knew of more people like you in my country and places to meet them easily, but that’s a whole other story. Let’s talk more and network, if you don’t mind - I think we all need it right now.


  • Seconding this as another Russia, another singee for Nadezhdin.

    The most important aspect here is let people act and get out of rut of feeling powerless and alone, which is exactly what’s been cultivated by Putin and his regime for decades. A lot of people never do anything because they’ve learned to see it as pointless, both through propaganda and through other commenters’ apathy, which is often propaganda, too.

    First there was Duntsova with her signatures and candidature, then many protested in Bashkortostan, then mostly self-organised to find a cat that was thrown into the cold out of a train by the conductor/stewardess, now Nadezhdin with his signatures amidst the coldest time of the year, traditionally long Russian winter holidays and rush to get everything done - people are seizing any opportunity to show themselves and others that not everyone is a warmongering blood-thirsty maniac, and that’s a very good thing.

    Some have been very skeptical about Nadezhdin and the elections, but even if all that proves to be worthless and fruitless in the end, there’s still a much greater benefit in trying to do something, confirming that there’s many like-minded people around - and it’s much, much more helpful than any apathetic take saying that the Kremlin will deal with Nadezhdin in one way or another; sometimes it feels like people want Putin gone, but hush and shame any attempts to do so, except for the unrealistically idealistic ones like a brutal revolution.



  • 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.



  • 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.



  • I had a friend doing mobile gamedev, making near unheard-of money for their then city of residence, had everything going well for them… except the job was soul-crushing and draining, eventually giving them severe depression.

    When I was getting my first dev job, they said I’d be really sorry about doing outsource, and I just thought that out of us two, I’d be the really happy one, even making much less than them.