My go-to is a fantasy in which I give an unfiltered speech to graduating seniors at a university, explaining in detail the day to day bullshit they will be dealing with once they enter the workforce.

1. Get GitHub pro (4$/mo) and do two or three side projects. Try to space out commits so you have a little activity every day or so instead of a few big ones. Add a nice readme for your account.
2. Update your resume. Use an online service, or ideally, run multiple drafts by some sort of career advisor at your school. It should be short, clear, and include a side projects section. Put your GitHub URL in it too.
3. Clean and update your LinkedIn. It’s a shit website, but managers, HR, and c-suite people use it a lot. Make sure you have a nice headshot- it doesn’t have to be professional, but nice.
4. Make a list of companies you’re interested in, find them on LinkedIn and connect with everyone you can from them. Prioritize management, HR, and company founders (for startups).
5. Tell everyone you’re looking for work. The people you connect with on LinkedIn, friends, family, whatever. Be personable, somewhat funny, and don’t act desperate.
6. NOW apply for positions at the companies you’ve got on your short list. Apply to every position you think you’re a fit for, give it a few weeks, and then apply to everything you might be able to figure out given some time. If you’ve had friendly interactions with people through LinkedIn, tell them you applied to a position at their company.
7. Practice interviewing, but don’t feel like you have to be smooth and charismatic. Feel free to go off on nerd-tangents about related tech that you’re interested in. Most of the people interviewing you don’t have the expertise to tell if you actually know what you’re doing, so the way they identify good tech people is through stereotypes. If you act a little autistic or geeky, they’ll eat it up (most of the time).

Good luck.

Thanks!

I’ll tell you the strategy that worked for me last time (quit for ~2 years), and that I’m using this time.

• Switch to a vape. Lung capacity increases immediately, and you get rid of the bad smell. If you haven’t vaped, give yourself some time to get used to the different habit (no cigarette packing ritual anymore etc)
• Buy a 0 nicotine vape or two, or find a local place you can get them easily. This is your “inside” vape.
• Buy a refillable vape and get nicotine liquid roughly equivalent to the full-nic vape you switched to from cigarettes. This is your “outside” vape.
• Start restricting the locations you use the full-nic vape. I work from home, so I don’t vape full-nic at my desk, I walk outside to do it. You want to break the absent-minded vaping+work or vaping+tv habit.
• Step your nicotine intake down over as long a period as you like, but don’t ever step it back up. First time I quit, I did it over about a year. That’s a little extreme. You could probably do it over a few months.
• Once you’re on 0 nic all the time, either stay with that, or gradually wean yourself off the habit as well. This is much easier without the chemical addiction.

Good luck.

I poked around and couldn’t find a repo link. Can you point me to that?

Worked security at a hospital, and was responsible for signing corpses over to the funeral homes. One week, there was a car wreck in a nearby small town- a pickup truck flipped and rolled with five or six teenagers in the back. I spent the whole night rolling them out of the freezer and passing them off to various funeral homes.

If you’ve ever used an outhouse in the early winter, this understates the reality by a factor of 10. Also, this guy doesn’t wipe?

The man has a type, and that type is either 17 or 6402373705728000 years old.

My patron saint

I attended a federal contracting conference a few months ago, and they had one of these things (or a variant) walking around the lobby.

From talking to the guy who was babysitting it, they can operate autonomously in units or be controlled in a general way (think higher level unit deployment and firing policies rather than individual remote control) given a satellite connection. In a panel at the same conference, they were discussing AI safety, and I asked:

Given that AI seems to be developing from less complex tasks like chess (which is still complicated, obviously, but a constrained problem) to more complex and ill-defined tasks like image generation, it seems that it’s inevitable that we will develop AI capable of providing strategic or tactical plans, if we haven’t already. If two otherwise-equally-matched military units are fighting, it seems reasonable to believe that the one using an AI to make decisions within seconds would win over the one with human leadership, simply because they would react more quickly to changing battlefield conditions. This would place an enormous incentive on the US military to adopt AI assisted strategic control, which would likely lead to units of autonomous weapons which are also controlled by an autonomous system. Do any of you have any concerns about this, and if so, do you have any ideas about how we can mitigate the problem.

(Paraphrasing, obviously, but this is close)

The panel members looked at each other, looked at me, smiled, shrugged, and didn’t say anything. The moderator asked them explicitly if they would like to respond, and they all declined.

I think we’re at the point where an AI could be used to create strategies, and I would be very surprised if no one were trying to do this. We already have autonomous weapons, and it’s only a matter of time before someone starts putting them together. Yeah, they will generally act reasonably, because they’ll be trained on human tactics in a variety of scenarios, but that will be cold comfort to dead civilians who happened to get in the way of a hallucinating strategic model.

EDIT: I know I’m not actually addressing anything you said, but you seem to have thought about this a bit, and I was curious about what you thought of this scenario.

I was home schooled from childhood through highschool. I got a GED before I joined the military, then used the GI bill to go to university and took placement tests for everything, which put me at the same level as everyone else except for trigonometry, which I had to take a remedial class in.

Yeah, the US grade system up to highschool. I haven’t done those grades at all.

Never have I ever gone to school in grades K-12.

Thanks for the PTSD flashback. It was delightful.

Bonus fucked

Just wait until they start serving ads for things that don’t exist and then throwing manufacturing together to make them on demand.

No one I fought with was helping kill brown kids either. You could argue that we were indirectly helping, since we were fighting for a country that was also sometimes bombing areas with civilians. If that’s how you would like to approach this, then everyone helped.

If you’ve worked in retail then you’ve sold goods to soldiers, if you work in agriculture then you’ve fed them, and if you’re a teacher then you educated them. Some small fraction of those soldiers went on to bomb kids somewhere.

If you want to criticize the US policy of invading other countries on a pretext and then propping up governments that do what we want, go ahead. I’m right there with you. If you want to live in a fantasy where all soldiers are merciless baby-killers, I guess you can do that, but that’s where we part ways.

Soldiers are individuals, and they sign up for all sorts of reasons. A very common reason is an education that gives them a better shot at a high paying job so that they can care for their family or start one. Is it fucked that people feel the need to do that? Sure. Would it be great if there was a straight forward way for a person with no resources to get an education and a better job? Yes.

But currently, we’re in an environment where risking your life to fight for your country in an unjust war is the best option some people have. And pretending that the reason they do it is because they’re Bad People doesn’t help solve the problem.

None of the veterans I know killed any brown kids. The people we shot were generally either shooting at us, or had just set off an IED with a car battery. Most of our interactions with kids involved someone getting in trouble for giving away MREs to the kids that would walk up to the vehicle.

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice

Going meta is always allowed. Just say you’re dumbing it down, that you don’t mean to be condescending, and invite them to interrupt if they already understand.