There are many things that are crazy time sinks - either because they are difficult, or because they are emotionally or intellectually engaging. Or because they are mandatory in the context of the person doing them.
And the concept of “free” time is also relative. For example, you could argue that child rearing is a game for those with lots of free time.
zsh4humans is the most recent zsh “trick” I’ve discovered. zsh is a bit like emacs when first installed: it can do a lot of things but it’s not nearly as useful without a lot of manual configuration. I’m honestly surprised it doesn’t have more stars on GitHub.
Is this similar to Oh My Zsh [1]? I personally have been using Oh My Zsh for years and I've always been a fan of it. I can quickly add themes and plugins and have my shell ready to go how I like it quite quickly on new systems.
zsh4humans is like ohmyzsh but much better IMO because when you first install zsh4humans, it walks you through a setup wizard that walks you through choosing your fonts, prompt style, completion style, etc. and automatically installs the appropriate zsh plugins and things like powerline fonts according to your choices.
Oh wow, that actually sounds much nicer! I wonder if it's worth switching to this or if I may as well stay with ohmyzsh for now and switch to zsh4humans in future installs.
Do it. You never know where it will lead. For example I started screwing around with C a few months ago and now I playing with microcontrollers and cameras because of that.
I started playing with Linux and C in 96. I was just an ignorant teenager. I didn’t know C was “hard”. I didn’t really care that Linux was different from Win95, I just knew Linux had fvwm2, gedit, and C compilers I needed for hacking on MUDs. I didn’t know chasing down obscure memory leaks was hard, I just linked libefence and did it. I was just playing and learning. Then I got offered a job doing web development with ColdFusion while still in high school. I was amazed at how easy the language was compared to C. Every “wow they must have a lot of time” project is often some other hacker playing and learning. Play and finding a way to make programming and computers not seem like work is how you develop a life long love of hacking and learning :) (this is not follow your passion advice, I think that is terrible advice, but if you can make your work feel like play and your play very intentional you will struggle to burn out or find it hard to sit down and write code any given day) :)
Edit: also, in 96 the Internet was very different. Many problems were solved by reading man pages, reviewing library source code, and thinking hard about what was happening. Modern Internet and stackoverflow /can/ make you more efficient in the short term but in the long term, it’s worth not rushing to google every error or weird problem. Give it a few minutes. If you’re writing a web app for example, in say Django or Rails go peek at the source code (they are beautiful projects). It’s almost a crime to not review the Go standard library source code, it is one of the cleanest out there. Etc, etc.
I had a similar experience growing up as well. At age 8, I learned QBasic (on an MS-DOS / Win 3.1 system). At age 13, I learned C, and wrote a lot of code in it as well. (I used to write tons of C code up until around the middle of age 17. I had grand plans for all sorts of glorious software projects.)
But then, at the middle of age 17, a certain mild depression ("dysthymia") set in, and I lost a lot of hope, inspiration, and motivation. And now, I'm 31, and I've accomplished very little of my teenage dreams (even though I still hold/aspire towards those software dreams). I might be "successful" in society's eyes, with software engineering jobs paying in the ~200k range (which is not really that impressive, as I have many friends making in the 300k to 400k (USD) range); but in my own eyes, I still feel very much like a failure.
The depression or dysthymia had a crippling effect, that made a lot of dreams hard to accomplish. My 2021 New Year's resolution has been to overcome it my mental issues, and live life to the fullest.
Not many people anywhere make 300-400k. It’s a lot of money. 200k is a lot of money. You are doing great. As long as you can do what you enjoy the money isn’t a big deal anyway. 200k is waaay above what the average programmer makes. Im guessing you know this and your insecurity doesn’t stem from compensation directly, but an indirect prestige and “am I doing enough” type thoughts.
> an indirect prestige and “am I doing enough” type thoughts
It's more like "I am not accomplishing my goals and dreams" type thoughts.
I am just living an existence of working for tech companies (doing stuff valuable to people indeed), and making good money; but however, with the talents, and gifts, and skills that I've been gifted with, I could be doing so much more.
Ahh, well, everyone has to eat. I know it is an increasingly popular option for folks to essentially work at FAANG companies, save up a bunch of cash and then semi-retire from big tech living modestly, RV life style, tiny homes, living remote, etc. A lot of folks, especially those that start families young, don't have those type of options, but it is worth considering if it is still an option for you :)
That's awesome. I am currently an ignorant teenager and I started messing around with C around this time last year. If I had to describe this current age I'd say it's driven by endless curiosity; I can't wait to start studying later this year. I don't think there has been one day in 2020 on which I haven't tinkered/hacked around. The latest thing I did was looking at the AArch64 reference manual and studying the structure of ELF binaries and then disassembling them manually.
This is good. Computers are very simple at their core. One of the first questions I used to ask people in interviews, for highly technical programming and information security roles, was “How do computers work?”. The number of people, even those with years of programming experience, who could convincingly answer that question was low. It was often hand-wavy answers about processors and memory and stuff. When someone could walk me down to logic gates, that was great. The odd electrical engineer or computer engineer who started taking about silicon doping was great, but I would stop them there lol. Never let the computer or it’s components be a mystery to you! Those fundamental skills and understanding will pay off over a long technology career. It’s not like everyone needs to be a systems programmer, but it’s a competitive and enjoyment advantage in my book :)
How, exactly, are they abusing it? Are you suggesting that they send the contents of the clipboard back to their servers? Do you have any proof that they are using the clipboard for nefarious purposes?
It’s disappointing to see the lack of skepticism applied on a site like Hacker News.
The contents of your clipboard _can_ be directly related to the functionality of an app.
For example, a link saving app like Pocket might check if your clipboard currently contains a URL when you open it. That allows the app turn a slightly tedious operation (tap/hold input field to bring up context menu, tap paste, tap button to save) into a single tap ("save copied URL?").
Whether or not the convenience is worth it might be debatable, but I fail to see how one would call that nefarious.
There a APIs in iOS (which existed before iOS 14) that allow you ask the OS if the clipboard content matches a pattern (e.g. is it a URL) that doesn’t trigger the warning in iOS 14.
It does appear that lots of apps don’t use these APIs, the developers probably never knew the existed till now, but there is a privacy preserving method of the building the functionality you talk of.
Aren't they just checking with an UTI? So for example a package tracking app can't ask if it contains strings matching patterns describing common package tracking code formats?
True (and I'm aware of those APIs). Just pointing out that "I want to know what's on the system clipboard without the user explicitly pasting" does not automatically equal trying to hoover up your data and phone home with it.
The maker of the Apollo Reddit app chimed in on the reddit thread that his app would check to see if a reddit URL was in the clipboard and offer to take you to that page.
Chrome uses it so the URL appears when you select the address bar.
Some apps detect if you have a 2FA auth code copied and auto-pastes it. I think Discord might be one? I can't remember which, but I've seen it on at least one app.
I can totally expect others to detect copied URLs that may belong to the app's domain and then offer to direct you to that particular URL (for example, I think the SomethingAwful app on iOS does that - if it detects a forums.somethingawful address it'll offer to load that particular thread for you).
That said, I definitely want to see more visibility about when and why this is done. Apple are absolutely in the right to show me a popup whenever it happens, so apps are forced to be clear and transparent about it.
I can guarantee you that there are tons of apps that send your clipboard verbatim to their analytics services, because some product manager "wants to see the data".
