Tying to make something of myself without working for anyone else.

It used to be easy for me, but fear kept me from perusing things all the way thru when I was younger. I never wanted to leave what were decent jobs at the time.

I finally did it. Threw away a very good job to bet on myself.

But the difference is, now I have a family and finding free time in itself isn’t that hard, but finding free time to code uninterrupted for hours... the way one needs to in order to hold a program in ones mind... yeah, near impossible these days, haha.

I have great ideas but I need help to get things to that ‘next level’ where an idea could take off and get real investments. And I need money to pay the help... Just getting the ball rolling would be nice. I used to take it for granted how easily I could get side jobs and be literally the best in town. But now it’s insanely competitive. I don’t even consider Webdesign an option for side work anymore, with sites like Wix and customers that don’t appreciate what I do vs a kid that gives them a Wordpress theme for just the cost of dirt cheap hosting... traditional Webdesign is dead.

But that’s all well and good, i saw that coming over a decade ago and focused more on coding application. I do think there’s a niche for my programming skills, so my current goal is trying to exploit that, or at least see if it’s viable. I just need something to get money to invest in my real projects.

I’d love to hear from people with similar situations! Not sure if I’ll pull it off before I have to go back to work. Although, I viewed never returning to the workforce haha. We’ll see...

I hate the feeling when the processes maxing out all my cpu cores are processes I thought were long since terminated. I guess even when I rm -f I don't really let go and still have the tar.gz in the back of my mind somewhere, and somehow zcat pipes those seemingly tidy archives all over my cwd at the worst possible times like some systemd transient timer that I can't recall the syntax to check... This is when the shell becomes unresponsive and I can't cd away, or even ps aux | grep -i 'the bad thoughts' to get their pid to figure out why this is happening again. Is it really time to hold down the power button? I'm so afraid of loosing unsynced data, I'll wait a little longer...

You know how the machine learning systems are in the news (and Ted talks, tech blogs, etc.) lately over how they're becoming blackbox logic machines, creating feedback loops that amply things like racism on YouTube, for example. Well, what might the ML/AI systems be doing with our code repositories? Maybe not so much yet, I don't know. But let's imagine. Do you think it's probably less worrisome? At first I didn't see as much harm potential, there's not really racist code, terrorist code, or code that makes people violence prone (okay, not entirely true...), but if you imagine the possibility that someone might use code repositories to create applications that modify code, or is capable of making new programs, or just finding and squishing bugs in code algorithmically, well then you have a system that could arguably start to get a little out of control! What if in squashing code bugs it decides the most prevalent bugs are from code that takes user input (just one of potentially infinite examples). Remember though, it's a blackbox of sorts and this is just one of possibly millions of code patterns it's finding troublesome, and most importantly it's happening slowly (at first). Just like how these ML forces are changing Google and YouTube algorithms so slowly that many don't notice the changes; this would presumably be similar and so it may not be as obvious as one would think. So anyways, 'it' starts refactoring code that takes user input into something 'safer'. Great! But what does this mean? Not for this specific example really, but this concept of blackbox ML/AI solutions to problems we didn't realize we had, what does a future with this stuff look like (Matrix jokes aside)? Well, I could go on all day with imaginative ideas... But talking to myself isn't so productive, let's start a fun community discussion here! Join in if you find this topic as interesting as I do! :)

Note: if you decide to post something like "SNN have made this problem...", or other technical jargan please explain it as clearly as possible. As the great Richard Feynman once said, the best way to show you understand a thing is to be able to explain it clearly to others who don't understand it... Or something like that ;)

Got a second 1080p monitor for Xmas ans it gave me an excuse to clean my desk off ;)

I included the obligatory 'screenfetch' window as well, haha.

Now to see if I can hack together something resembling a KVM switch from parts I have, to use the Mac mini on one of them (when it's needed on rare occasion, lol).

P.s. I'm sure many of you have more bad ass setups, I even used to have quads myself... But I'm not posting this to start some pissing contest! It's just mine and I'm proud of it :P

Happy new year everyone!!!!

Is it possible to subscribe to people from the browser version of devRant? On iOS it's obvious... maybe it's one of those 'right in front of me' things and I'm not seeing it... any clues?

This is not really the reason I got these parts, but I just had them lying around and have been following the project for some time... so why not? Haha. I was also thinking it might be cool to set these up to auto-disrupt known AP names that would be issued by companies most responsible for the dismantling of Net Neutrality. Like just make them in a dirt cheap throwie form-factor and let the companies deal with pissed off customers for a few days until the battery dies (thinking the little generic LiPo’s that cheap quadcopters use would give a few days if attacking sporadically and using the ESP’s sleep function). Just riffing here... ;P ;D

Long standing PhotoShop bug in Wine FIXED! It's stated that it was for CS5, but I've heard one report that it's also fixed a CC version, but not sure if it was the latest CC or not. I don't miss much from Windows, but the Adobe workflow is one thing I do miss. Possibly the ONLY thing I miss at this point. https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cg...
Has anyone got around to trying this yet? Maybe I can test tomorrow and report back!

Any suggestions for a good starting point for learning to do more with neural nets? Not interested in image recog so much, but would like to see the cutting edge of textual pattern recognition... I dunno, I don't even want my expectations to color this... whats do you guys find most interesting and enjoy playing with? Python is preferred but I'm grateful for any tips/links/ideas/rants you might share!

Trump admin bans words... I think the banning of “evidence-based” and “science-based" bothers me the most. It's all ridiculous and evil, but where are we heading when something like the CDC is being steered away from 'science' and 'evidence'!??!
https://washingtonpost.com/national...

I want my avatar to be just a bit heftier... I'm not that skinny.