Mother tells me my dad was slightly disappointed that I didn't become an optician. He passes away in my first semester so I never got to ask him.

She meanwhile is rather supportive but the older uncles etc think I am wasting my brain using the PC for so many hours.

Little brother learned some R by himself for courses and thinks it's a badass profession from what I see.

When you're in your mid-twenties and get the first few wrist aches on your mouse hand and get anxious about possible carpal tunnel syndrome... I can't be the only one.

Have a friend who wants to enrich his coding portfolio but is scared of people copying his more serious code if he puts it up on github.
Told him it's all about open source and he could just keep the more casual code up there while giving access to serious projects on request from a company, but it's not very ideal, is it?

What would you tell him?

Go rubber duck. Seriously, for the people that don't know:

If you're stuck with a particular problem just try to explain the code out loud to yourself, a coworker or said rubber duck. Having to actually put the whole thing into words might give you insight into something you've not noticed before!

Disclaimer: cursing at yourself for likely stupidity is not only allowed but encouraged!

I just realized why you should never help people with tech problems, at least for free.

I went to grab the rent from a family that lives in my grandma's childhood home.

The father asks me if I could have a look at their new internet connection because it doesn't open any pages on the browser.

After fiddling for about an hour and a half trying every trick in the book and gently explaining to his children how everything is supposed to work (kids need to learn how these machines work imho) I ask him to give me his service provider number and confirmed that indeed the problem was that the connection wasn't activated on their side. Installed chrome, set the date,/time because it wouldn't sync and told them twice how to get past the certificate problem should some page not open. Smiles all around, all is well.

Fast forward next to next morning and I get a call from the guy telling me his internet doesn't work because he pulled out the power cable for whatever reason. I instruct him to restart the router just to be sure and then ask him what's on the screen. Turns out it was the certificate problem. I try as best I can explaining and reminding him how to get past but he doesn't understand. He goes on asking me to "come over for 5minutes and have a look at it". I politely tell him that just the trip is half an hour and that I am currently in the middle of exams to finish university. His tone becomes increasingly passive aggressive as I tell him again that it's isn't possible for me to make the time for a one hour round trip at the moment. Hangs up with a grim "right right whatever you say."

First time I was genuinely angry at a person being both so ungrateful after helping them and not even trying to fix something after I took the time to explain it to them.

To the friend ranting about having to copy pseudo code on paper, I feel your pain. Analog IT professors are the worst.

I raise you one with : I had a professor that had me sent in source code files, a pdf with all the source code and a paper printout of every single line of code for a html/php project. Fifty pages of code printed for reasons I cannot understand. And no, I checked later, he didn't ask for it to take notes during the exam.