Glad to hear this isn't just something I'm encountering in isolation. My role at a BigTechCo (and I'm barrelling right through my mid-40s) could be summed with exactly that same word.
> No one can tell my age.
My beard finally started to grey and after about 2 years of that steady progression I shaved it off and now people treat me so differently. Even people who already knew me treat me differently. It's been quite the experience.
They are now but they weren't always. I don't know much about hardware these days, I gleefully walked away from embedded development over a decade ago, but what I believe is that you don't really want to forecast to hard on any single player too far into the future.
I agree. It isn't a superpower, even if it does help us get beyond the bad times. I mentioned in another comment that my wedding day and the birth of my children are basically like any other day in my life to me. I know they're special but they don't carry much emotional weight.
I also have aphantasia and I do believe I have SDAM, too. I also had a traumatic childhood and am a combat veteran. I think I've always been this way but that's a hard question for me to truly answer and is one that I grapple with a lot, actually.
> How about the pain of reliving old memories? I could do with a little less of that right now.
I don't relive the past the way it seems most people do. I know what it's like to feel hurt or feel stuck but I don't generally feel emotions about things in my past. That's good because I've endured a lot of bad shit but also sucks because my wedding day is kind of like any other day to me, as was the birth of our kids. I guess I know all of the good and all of the bad things that have happened to me -- though I don't really carry them with me the way some people seem to, they're part of me but I don't spend much if any time ever thinking about them -- but I don't feel any particular way about any of it. I know that I love my wife and kids more than life itself, I know these facts and I know the timelines but there's not much else there. I know these things but there's no emotional weight to them.
I don't really have anything to add but I also recently spun up a Sinatra app for my personal use and I really had a lot of fun doing it. It was my first time using Ruby since 2022 when I left a Rails job, after having spent more than the previous decade primarily writing Ruby. I love the language and community so much but I don't have a professional use-case for it at my employer today, and I don't have a lot of free time in my personal life, so I just don't end up using it much. Thanks for sharing your thoughts here, I resonate with them a lot!
Same here. I have a 5TB external that I use for TV shows and movies and run Jellyfin off of my main desktop. Obviously we're not massive consumers and don't need a huge array of tens or hundreds of TBs... What's nice about it is when we're going on vacation or whatever, the external fits into a sling bag with my iPad Pro and it's all highly portable without the networking headache.
> But you and I both know of 90 year olds that are 'younger' than some 60 year olds.
I once had a rough hike at Half Dome that went deep into the early morning hours (a friend, who was an experienced alpine climber, made the horrible decision to bring his girlfriend at the time who had never even been on a hike before but was "in shape," and so they thought it would "be fine" -- it was NOT) and it was a total mess. We make it back to the trailhead around 2AM and a van pulls in. A 95 year old woman got out with her support team, they were starting the hike up so she could catch the sunrise from Half Dome.
This makes me think of early employees in a startup that goes through an IPO or acquisition. Skill and talent get you through the door but heaps and heaps of luck lead to that event. Having personally won a (minor) startup lottery I got to see the luck factor first hand.
How many are born into it? If I think about the people that I personally know who are worth 8-figures or more they were each born into wealth. I wouldn't ever say that they also don't work hard and have talent, because they truly do, but it doesn't apply to their wealth.
One of our twins is this way, her sister will accept making a choice based on options we present and so will her younger brother. Bit of a tangent but, basically everything I ever I believed I understood about the nature vs. nurture argument have broken down completely in the face of raising (fraternal) twins.
Because road crossing are genuinely terrifying today. The automobiles are too big and the drivers are too distracted. I have a hard time walking my kids across the street for school sometimes and that's with a crossing guard.
People are fucking nuts and are driving around in these oversized vehicles with their phones in their faces. You can very casually, very trivially observe this any time you want by simply walking down a semi-busy street and looking at the drivers as they go by.
> They're basically never better than a laptop at things laptops are good at (though often serviceable enough that folks don't need both)
I'm experimenting with replacing my personal laptop with an iPad Pro this year. I'm not a professional content creator, photo or video editor, etc. So far it's been great. I write a lot, creative writing, journaling, and lots of note taking. It's been wonderful for all of these tasks and it basically goes with me everywhere.
I picked up a dozen for $3.99 last night at a major chain grocery store, too. They had plenty of eggs in stock and I was there around 9pm. I've seen the insanity at Costco first hand so I've stopped buying milk and eggs from there until that sorts itself out
Yep, I get mobility work in pretty much every day. Generally at night after we've eaten dinner as a family, I'll do some mobility drills and foam rolling, etc., while we're doing other activities before bedtime.
Basically, yeah. I find that the aggregation here is a dozen cuts above what I can find elsewhere and the "news" is tends to be things that are at least tech adjacent and when they're not they're genuinely "newsworthy."
Yep, I've adopted that mentality. Finally. I wish it hadn't taken me so, so long. My wife even commented that I'm much less on-edge, much less prone to find the negative in things. It's sort of like a switch inside of my brain has been welded permanently to the off position, it's pretty wild how it only takes 2-3 weeks for the brain to sort itself out after many years of being stuck in some cycle.
Wake up ~5:30am. Get dressed, brush my teeth, and make a black breakfast tea. go for a 20 minute walk. Change into workout clothes, workout til ~6:30am (I have a full garage gym -- strength is Mon, Weds, Fri, and conditioning is Tues, Thurs, and Sat). Shower, morning face and hair routine, get dressed, get my wife and kids stirred and moving. Get downstairs, get breakfast started, pack lunches, out of the house by 7:30am to get my twin girls to school (I take them Tues, Weds, Thurs, my wife takes them Mon and Fri) or leave the house at 8:15am to get my son to school. On Tuesdays, I meet a friend at a climbing gym near work at 9am. We climb top-rope or do some bouldering til around 9:50am. I get to the office around 10 or 10:10am, check email, check overnight processes, check ops dashboards. Standup at 10:30am. Focus time from around 11am til 12:30pm when I take lunch. Work through the afternoon, leave around 5pm to get kids. Generally home around 5:30pm and we start our evening routine which runs us til 8pm. If there's work to finish, I finish it. A few nights a week my wife and I will watch some TV together, discuss family / household stuff, etc... The other nights I practice my Mandarin, read, walk, listen to podcasts, light YouTube stuff, or some combination of it all, and then I'm generally in bed by 10pm.
I'm maintaining an absolutely massive Perl codebase at work. I've made it extremely resilient so that I can stop fire-fighting it and 2025 is the Year of the Rewrite. Wish me luck...
We end up there maybe 6 times a year now that we have kids. It's the correct option when we're on a road trip. Like another commenter said, it's consistency is a huge selling point and kids will never say no to a Happy Meal.
My grandfather had Alzheimer's. My grandmother dementia.
My grandfather would, not uncommonly, escape from his care home. He'd be found, miles away, trying to "walk back home" -- and, despite his deterioration, he knew the routes, he was walking the right city streets to get to the right country roads, etc... He wanted to "get home" and make sure his garden was being tended to. Sometimes he'd have shit himself, or pissed himself, but had been walking for hours regardless. That isn't a painless existence. Through what I know of his experience alone, I've understood this to be deeply traumatic.
And my grandmothers experience was something else entirely. I believe I've commented on it here before, but her experience was also uniquely horrific. Bed-ridden, gangrene, do-not-resuscitate orders that were not acknowledged... I am terrified of what they went through.
Personally, I feel that our notions of "pain" don't really get even approximately close to what these patients endure.