As a solo dev, I use $5 VPS on OVH or Hetzner for peace of mind. I remember trying out GCP for some simple html or django thing a decade ago and it cost me $30/mo or something and I said nah. I've also seen an ex-coworker rack up $50k with no recourse. I've already read enough horror stories like this.
Also don't outsource your thinking to LLMs, it's a useful tool, but once you do, it's brainrot for programmers.
I generally like having roommates, but when they're bad, they're BAD. I've also never done the communal cooking thing. Either they don't cook, are bad at cooking, or have dubious food hygiene. I haven't met any potential partners through them either. I might take a walk or swim with them but I sure as hell didn't get OP's experience.
tl;dr: I felt like death for 2 years probably because of long covid POTS. Feeling somewhat ok now.
I had ridiculous nausea and other weird body issues appear out of the blue around 2022. While I never puked, I got nauseated from even brushing my teeth. I'd have to pause a few times to complete brushing. I suddenly got heartburn, I could only hobble around like an old man. I couldn't tolerate a single car ride, even just getting into a car was too much. After a year, I could at least get in a car and my limbs would all go numb. I could only eat small amounts. Zero tolerance for caffeine. Chocolate sprung up heart burn. Tested for H Pylori, negative.
It was over two years before I could take car rides without absolutely dying. While much better now, I still get abnormally car sick, bouts of relatively mild nausea, and haven't managed a significant meal outside of home.
While I suspect time is the largest factor, I did take a cocktail of supplements. Ginger rooibos tea with every meal, collagen, l-glutamine, creatine, unflavored whey isolate protein, and psyllium husk. Before bed I'd take 3+ mg melatonin, famotidine, ginger pill, artichoke extract pill.
I have a friend in his 40s and I asked him about his opinion on WFH. He doesn't like it. He prefers to go to an office and be around people. He also doesn't have much in the way of interests or hobbies. I suspect a lot of RTO decision makers fit a similar profile.
I was going to say it's expensive, but it's actually not outrageously more expensive than the current going rate for olive oil. It's $11/liter at Costco. Their refill can comes out to be around $20/liter. It's supposed to be a premium product so it's not out of my expectations.
Olive oil in general is just much more expensive after the recent droughts. I vaguely remember 6 liters of olive oil coming out to around $30 at Costco pre-drought, so prices have roughly doubled. But hey, I see nearly 2000 reviews on their Sizzle Oil, so I guess they must offer a good enough product for people to stomach the 2x drought price on top of the 2x premium product price.
Reddit comes to mind. Who knows how much money they spent on their redesign with users hating it and actively choosing to use their old site design YEARS after they rolled out their new design.
I also run a site and when I ask people what I should improve next, nearly no one says design, even when the design is clearly not very good.
An example of a site that never changes is Craigslist. I can't even recall the last time it looked different. It's probably overdue for a redesign even.
I've been using clojure as my main language for a decade. Few things can stay hyped that long.
My last few jobs were in clojure so jobs do exist, moreso than in Common Lisp and Haskell at least (probably). There aren't very many companies that use it relative to the programming world at large, so I'd say you're right on that front.
I'm happy using it and will continue using it. Sometimes I encounter interesting ideas and libraries that I end up using.
At the end of the day, it's a programming language. You can write interesting things on uninteresting or even subjectively awful languages and boring things on interesting languages.
Here's something I've been working on for the last two weeks: https://keyboards.justbuythisthing.com/. If I didn't tell you I wrote it in clojure, no one would know. It could very well be PHP.
I've currently reading Warren Buffett's biography, The Snowball by Alice Shroeder and "Sandy" Gottesman frequently appears. When I saw 2, I thought that sounds awfully like someone I read about in Buffett's Graham group. After 3, it was definitely someone in the Graham group I've read about.
The Graham gatherings that included Buffett and Gottesman had fine gentlemen, at least one of which has championed a similar cause in the past, whether that was Gottesman or another one of his peers, my memory fails me. While it's sad to see someone I am still reading about pass away, it's heartening to know that he ended on a high note and that he continues to leave a positive impact from beyond the grave.
I setup Samba share on my LAN. It works well enough for my purposes. It's not super smooth as not every app let's me open a file directly from the network and I need to make a copy first.
The really good investors are dumping their time into reading books and annual reports. I haven't found high quality investing discussion on the internet _anywhere_ yet. The closest is valueinvestorsclub but before anyone gets the bright idea to blindly buy what's there, there are _a lot_ of misses posted.
>I'm surprised they have this much in 'assets' tied to 'not sexy + boring' things like "not the best foods/drinks for you"
Buffett drinks five cokes a day and has said 25% of his body is coke. I haven't read his biography yet but I've heard that his family has never seen him drink water.
Boring has low capital expenditures. You don't need to keep pouring money in to maintain the product. They're also sticky, stable goods that people will keep buying no matter what. They're also able to grow stably year over year.
List also leaves off things like: WW2 Japan being totally immobilized from lack of oil, Allies not pushing a faster end to Nazi Germany due to fuel limitations, US eastern fleet being threatened by the '73 embargo.
The prosperity and security of the nations of the world should not be beholden to a handful of often unstable oil states.
My previous company was doing this. I basically quit out of frustration. They weren't much better than picking random people off the street and pointing them at code. It bled into my work life when they took over a project I was on and was pinging me constantly with "hello" and "good morning" expecting to jump on calls with their teams to explain exactly how to do their jobs.
I've been reading two hours a day consistently for the past half year. I generally read with purpose and settled into a daily routine of reading a book on business, a book on programming, and a book for fun. It works for me.
I also found that non-fiction is more interesting than fiction. Fiction needs to be believable, non-fiction doesn't. Non-fiction captures a complex, layered reality with characters that are often at odds with others and even themselves. Sometimes they randomly died off, sometimes they show up again in unexpected places. A fiction author would have to be an absolute master to create such a complex world.