JDubbleu

Preface: I realize after writing this I possibly came off as one of those, "just learn to code" people. I'm not. People should only join the field if they're passionate about or at least enjoy it otherwise they will burn out fast. With that said, I don't think the field as a whole should be written off by those who enjoy the work, and CS degrees are as useful to software engineers as physics is to a mechanical engineer. Back to the main discussion.

I think we just have different views on where AI is headed and what it is capable of. Neither job is going to be replaced any time soon by AI IMO, but I'm pretty certain a UPS driver will be replaced much sooner as it's a fundamentally simpler problem to solve.

For comparison, software engineering is critical thinking turned up to 11 with tons of ambiguity and guesswork as to what people actually want vs what they're asking for. It's very people and communication focused despite what stereotypes might portray, and you often have to figure out and tell people what they actually want instead of doing what they say they want. Automating software engineering would be more like automating an entire supply chain as opposed to one part of the supply chain (delivery driver) because there's so many different types of software engineers out there. Not to mention you need software engineers to automate software engineering.

As for pay, that $170k is the absolute top end for UPS drivers and you have to work your way up from warehouse to a delivery position. Software engineers top end is generally around $500k (you can get up to $1 mil but it's rare enough I wouldn't consider it fair for the point of this conversation), with starting being ~$95k for most new grads. Absolute worst case scenario you go work for the government for $70k and earn a healthy pension with dope benefits, regular raises, and amazing work life balance.

Student loans are definitely a consideration and can be high risk, but attending a community college for your first two years before state school you can get out under $30k of debt. My total tuition cost for 5 1/2 years of college was <$20k in California. I was fortunate enough that my mom paid for my education, but I could've covered the cost with loans and paid them back by now. This is all ignoring that software engineering internships regularly pay in excess of $50/hr making it possible to put yourself through school while working summers just like your grandparents did.

I agree somewhat with your concern over the uncertainty of the world, but I figure no one really knows where we're headed so I might as well do what I love and make as much money as possible in the meantime. Neither are bad career options IMO and trades can be awesome, but it's important to consider the long-term risks that often come from certain occupations including those sitting at a desk all day.

It still kind of is though? The market is ass right now but my TC last year as a new grad was $200k and I only started in April. If you grind interview prep you're bound to get something eventually, and new grad software engineers currently pay near to low six figures.

It's not easy but CS bachelor's degree to software engineer is a solid career prospect long term even if the market sucks right now. Not to mention trades destroy your body in ways that cause long term issues, and pay way less over the course of a career unless you're doing something exceedingly risky.

Consent-o-matic/I still don't care about cookies both work really well. I haven't seen a banner in months.

You could theoretically get around this issue by installing Steam via Flatpak so that everything is sandboxed though.

The great thing about open source is that anyone can read the code. Even if you don't read every line yourself there are others who will. In popular projects it's pretty much a guarantee any suspicious or malicious changes get caught almost immediately due to the visibility of everything.

As for local-only I trust Bitwarden and their encryption schemes enough that I use their cloud sync, but you can always self host it in a Docker container with no Internet access if you're concerned about it.

Because by not using a password manager I guarantee you are duplicating passwords between services. This means the second a service you use is compromised, every single service you use with that same email/password combination is compromised. Even if every one of your passwords had a slight deviation malicious actors know people do this and will likely be able to write a program that attempts those deviations on other services. You're effectively leaving your security up to weakest link in services you sign up for, and security is more often implemented poorly than implemented well.

By using a password manager you generate a 20+ character long password that is unique to each service you use. These passwords being random and unique to each service protects you from rainbow tables and other hash table based attacks. In the event Bitwarden or another password manager you use is breached anything they get will be worthless as long as your master password is not compromised (which should only ever exist in your head) due to the data being encrypted at rest.

It is a similar concept to using a secure, trusted middleman for processing payments instead of giving your credit card to every single site that asks for it.

I'm a Zoomer with a Dell Optiplex running Ubuntu server, an 18 TB HDD, and 35 years of combined seed time. I'll let you fill in the gaps. Many of us are extremely tech literate and often share our Plex/Jellyfin instances with friends. Many of these not-so-etch-literate friends ask how they can do this for themselves using their computers and we shoot them over instructions.

Piracy is infinitely easier/more accessible than ever. It's spreading like wildfire and thanks to the FOSS community anyone with a spare evening can get themselves up and running very quickly.

I don't think it's diminishing the work of the Yuzu devs, but more so a strong belief in the capabilities of the open source community. They worked their asses off and are extremely talented, and I'm sure there are others who will hop in and carry the torch.

I'm also curious if there's a programmatic way to circumvent the argument Nintendo made about bypassing DMCA by separating the emulator from the code that utilizes the keys such that you can use tool A to bypass DMCA, and tool B (Yuzu with game decryption removed) to run the circumvented game. In this case tool A already exists, and tool B could be a fork of Yuzu.

Not OP, but I just use ZeroTier for this since it's dead simple to setup and free. I'm sure there's some 100% self-hosted solutions, but it's worked for me without issue.

I don't know what you're trying to get at. The original comment stated the stock market is a rich man's game that poor men are designed to lose. I pointed out that anyone with extra income can take advantage of the stock market and not lose. Just because rich people can take advantage of market manipulation doesn't mean poor people have to lose.

You don't need to manipulate markets to dollar cost average the S&P500 for 40 years and retire. This is a get rich slow scheme that's worked since the inception of index funds.

This is a gross over simplification. Yes, rich people can have higher risk tolerance, but that doesn't mean people shouldn't be going long on index funds and otherwise safe, low risk investments for retirement with what they can afford to.