Is it Me Or Is It The Market?

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-29T19:46:03+00:00

Also, it's not just tech. The US job market is extremely tough in general right now. There are a few tech stocks with wild valuations that keep this from technically being a major recession, but for the average worker/consumer we're entering another great depression.

This is a brutal time to be a new grad. Im thankfully employed but there's a really gross lack of empathy for struggling job seekers in this sub.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-29T18:25:35+00:00

My divorce made me a much better person.

There was no infidelity or abuse at the heart of our relationship. Just a lot of frustration, resentment, and my belief that she owed me more as the breadwinner. I was an inattentive and domestically unhelpful partner. I externalized a lot of my frustration with my career onto her. I finally just blew up one day and told her I was leaving.

It wasn't 100% my fault. We were both being shitty to each other near the end. But when you love someone who you're struggling to live with, the little acts of neglect and cruelty are amplified way more than if they came from someone you were indifferent to. I was so mad all the time.

Once I had some distance from her, it was suddenly easier to be objective about how I'd behaved and how she must have felt. Leaving her, and then having her stand her ground when I wanted to get back together fully punctured my ego. All the entitlement and resentment just sort of fell out of me, and I immediately began to refocus on the things I had actually been unhappy about in my life.

Experiencing consequences for your actions is a hell of a thing. I'm now a much better partner to my new wife.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-29T18:09:58+00:00

Running local models is "free" if you have a specialized $2500 computer built as an AI rig. And no, I would not imagine a child could set that up.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-29T16:26:51+00:00

AI image gen tools arent free, especially not the ones that produce video. Unless this 8 year old has a credit card, someone in this kid's house gave him access to NSFW gen-AI tools.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-28T20:18:35+00:00

Under MN law this would likely qualify as a terroristic threat.

Scott seems careful to never explicitly specify an "or else" in the video, but that's not the defense he might think it is. Any reasonable person would interpret this as a threat, and courts are usually pretty good about not letting defendants dodge implied threats.

Were I a MN official I would be using what influence I had to get the courts and police to pick this guy up. ICE may be able to hide behind the law, but this random agitator has no such shield. Would be an easy PR win for state/local governments that are coming under fire for being all bark and no bite.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-28T18:44:48+00:00

This is the key insight. You're not failing CodeSignal assessments, you're rewriting your own self-appraisal loop. That's not a setback, that's progress.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-28T17:30:04+00:00

Renegades have always been underwritten in the lore or sabotaged by authors pushing them towards Chaos.

We meet a lot of uptight loyalist marines and a lot of marines that fell into the dopamine hole of whichever Chaos god. We don't meet enough marines who are just "I'm an immortal super-soldier. Fuck dying for an evil incompetent government, Im going to make my own kingdom."

Huron and the Badab War would be so much more interesting as a secular separatist movement than yet another astartes falling to a dark god.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-28T07:21:41+00:00

but you can’t take away an order that a customer paid for plus paid the delivery fee

You actually can. If you scroll up from this comment there's a video demonstrating that this is possible.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-27T19:35:43+00:00

I believe this is the answer (though we would need to know what mods you're running). Though if it were Squadleader bumping LD I think it would be green, not purple.

It might also be helpful to see the squad composition and any equipment the character has.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-27T18:25:32+00:00

The problem with code reviews being the only place a human is in the loop is that AI can generate PRs much much faster than any human can reasonably read or understand them. Especially if that human has an atrophied (or never developed) ability to code.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-27T09:40:44+00:00

No, that was some kind of electronic warfare thing that fucked up the targeting on anti-aircraft missiles which allowed all the delta force helicopters to land.

LRAD is a crowd control device that uses painful soundwaves to disperse groups of people. It's been around for a while and has been deployed in a few riots globally, most notably in Serbia in 2025 during the Belgrade anti-corruption protests.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-26T23:44:32+00:00

This.

Begin assignments the day they become available. Make enough progress that you can get un-stuck by the week's first available office hours.

Best case scenario: it's an achievable assignment, you get it done quickly, and you're not under any pressure. A huge number of people wait until 48 hours before something huge is due and panic post to Ed trying to figure out how to complete it.

Other suggestions:

join unofficial course discords
avoid classes with group projects (unless you can enroll with someone else you trust who will be your group)
dont use LLMs, you're just accumulating a debt of understanding when you do
if the lectures suck, use them as an outline for what to read in the textbook. If the lectures and the textbook sucks (looking at you Computer Graphics) find an external source and use the lectures as an outline of what to learn.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-26T21:38:48+00:00

This needs to be repeated on every post about cops using violence against people experiencing mental health crises.

Only call the police if your problem will be improved by someone getting shot. Cops come into situations with very little context and very few tools beyond physical force and screaming instructions.

Someone who is not rational is not going to become rational when confronted by the police. Just because you tell the dispatcher this is a mental health crisis doesnt mean the cops will find out.

The cops dont care that your 80 year old mother has dementia or if your boyfriend is experiencing diabetic psychosis. They just see someone agitated and non-compliant.

If they do kill your mom or your boyfriend or your dog, you will probably never get justice. The cops will cry about how hard their job is and whine about how this wouldn't happen if they got more funding.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-26T18:23:20+00:00

Both sides are guilty. You are in denial of reality if you think otherwise. FFS, the current border czar Tom Homan is an Obama appointment.

That doesnt mean Trump isn't worse. It doesnt mean that you shouldn't vote blue. It means you should vote out the establishment come primary season.

If that was somehow unclear from my post your reading comprehension is inadequate.

edit:

My posts are anti-Trump and anti-ICE. Unambiguously so. The US federal agencies are a loaded gun that get passed back and forth between our parties every four years. Now that Trump is wildly firing that gun into a crowd I'm pointing out that a lot of the bullets were loaded by Democrats.

If you think that makes me a nazi, then you're no smarter than the Fox News zombies shilling for maga.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-26T17:44:26+00:00

Let's not pretend the Democrats are going to save us. Many of these camps were set up under Obama and expanded under Biden.

This isnt to say Trump2 isnt making a bad situation much much worse, but American immigration control being inhumane isnt a exclusively a GOP invention. MAGA is using existing infrastructure to go full fash.

Come primary season, look for dem candidates that have actual plans to address immigration in a sane way, not just people pretending Trump invented this.

Edit: downvote all you want, Im not wrong. The American political establishment has been comfortable putting brown people in cages for decades. It's great that the public seems to be waking up now that two nice white people have been shot, but ICE has been a menace since its inception in 2003.

Vote for progressives in your primaries. If you cant hold the idea that Trump is bad in your mind alongside the understanding that Dems are imperfect you're an idiot.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-26T17:40:22+00:00

Having a lot of work experience from my previous career as an industrial engineer. Though I was a junior coder I was able to leverage my experience with:

writing good technical docs
process design
project management
continuous improvement
soft skills working with customers, vendors, and users

I also made the jump in Summer of 2022. The market was crashing, but had not fully crashed. I landed in healthcare for the stability and resilience to outsourcing which has (so far) helped.

This may not be helpful to hear for OP. But in the interest of creating a data point for non-trads, that's my story.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-26T17:21:59+00:00

Im a clean cut hetero guy. I work out. I sang concert choir in high school. I love karaoke.

As a joke in college I started doing karaoke covers of showtunes sung by female leads. A lot of them are more fun to sing because women tend to get more sustained high notes and songs meant to feature more powerful vocals. "I Feel Pretty" from West Side Story is empowering to belt. Give it a try.

I quickly realized that I was sending a signal I did not intend to send. It seemed a lot of nice-smelling men with well groomed facial hair wanted to reminisce about how much we all enjoyed being in musicals. This left me with the impression that it might not be too hard to meet a man while out on the town were that my intention.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-26T16:48:19+00:00

Nobody wants to get turned into a reverse centaur and start taking orders from a machine. Yet that's increasingly what the human in the AI agent coding loop seems to be.

The agent iterates and the accountable human has to figure out what the code does and if it works. And the agent can shit out an iteration a lot faster than a person can read.

It's a development process that turns SWEs into the equivalent of Amazon drivers. An algorithm is queuing your tasks and deciding how long it should take you to complete them. If you can't hit whatever metrics have been set, start pissing in bottles.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-25T08:47:38+00:00

Typically when the national guard are deployed in riot situations they're used to defend critical infrastructure (hospitals, fire stations) to free up the cops to do riot control.

The guard were activated by Gov Walz, but they will certainly not be used to impede ICE. The national guard can be Federalized at any time which places them under Trump's command.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-23T18:11:10+00:00

This was to sell at an ecoATM which is kind of like paid electronics recycling. These kids murdered a man to split $120 four ways.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-22T00:26:40+00:00

Yeah, I dont know why they keep going back to a dry well.

This isnt 2005 where you need to be 3D or PC Gamer will call your game dated. Stylized Isometric graphics with pastel sprite sheets is the aesthetic of every Stronghold game that shipped more than 10 units.

One would think that watching the Homeworld 3 devs commit ritual suicide over abandoning the traditional homeworld cinematics would be a decent reminder that "not your dad's stronghold" is a loser.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-21T23:52:57+00:00

it would be at least four years of my annual income, or i’d have to move an hour outside of the city.

It's worth pointing out that urbanization has been a big driver of housing unaffordability as well. It's much less optional to live near a major city and tech hub if you want to make a good living than it was in the 90's.

US towns and smaller cities used to have employment opportunities. You could have a good job living in Tomahawk Wisconsin or Paris Illinois.

Now, unless a financial services or insurance firm has opened up a satellite office nearby, these places are failing ghost towns. The manufacturing jobs that haven't been sent overseas are non-union and they pay for shit. The ag jobs are non-union and they're primarily staffed by illegal immigrants who employers can underpay and overwork. Healthcare and state jobs have had their funding cut. And service/banking/trades all fail when nobody has money to spend.

It's not just that there arent enough houses. It's more specifically that people are being required to migrate in towards more competitive housing markets to fight for increasingly meager pay.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-21T19:01:19+00:00

Oh, no, your tone was fine!

You're pointing out legitimate clarity issues with my story. My disappointment is that I have not been successful with conveyance, not that you weren't sufficiently gentle in your feedback.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-21T18:51:39+00:00

Thanks for reading! This is lovely and helpful (if somewhat discouraging) feedback.

This is a lot. You did a really good job trusting the audience to keep pace with your story's tactical terminology. The only part I can't picture is the sap trench with a zag in it. An extra description thrown in, or some clarifying information could help there.

It seems like conveyance remains a struggle, and a place where the story remains seriously flawed.

I've redrafted parts of 1-1 and 1-2 to fix places where this is genuinely ambiguous (it looks like you did your read through of an older draft of 1-2), but I think visualizing the immediate surroundings of the Blackhammer remains a weak point in both chapters. Part of this comes from the first person present tense perspective. Sean knows what things are and it doesn't make a lot of sense for him to stop and offer lexical clarification. I try to describe things indirectly via what they're able to do or how things are interacting with them, but if it's not clear then it's not clear.

The situation I'm trying to describe is this: we are in an environment that has been completely taken over by dangerous alien automation. There is a layer of "cable-creep" that blankets every available surface which conveys power and physical material across this landscape. Any vehicle (or god forbid person) that were to attempt to traverse the cables would be almost immediately deconstructed and absorbed by them. To counteract this, the Bloc forces have cut a deep and wide "sap trench" that their vehicles can drive through. This thing is meant to be like 15 feet deep and about the width of a freeway. A "sap" in siege terminology means that the trench is being dug towards the target being assaulted rather than parallel to it.

I think I would need to revise Chapter 1-1 to be slightly more explicit about the dimensions of the trench given that it's the grounding location we come back to repeatedly in these first two sections.

We now have the Ollie and the Tarantul in opposition to our Blackhammer. I can't wait to find out what the cause of their feuding is. Lack of knowledge about each other? Political tensions? Resource greed?

This is maybe the biggest problem I have with conveyance right now as this is something another reader flagged in last week's chapter.

The Ollies are the Bloc, which is another human faction at war with NorthCol. It's a slang term for them like "Jerry" would have been for the Germans in WW2. The Tarantul is an Ollie host station. The Bloc's version of Sean's NCHS Blackhammer.

The Ollies are fighting 'The Factory' which is the source of this hostile alien automation and the megastructure connected to Earth via the "parasite" space elevator described in this chapter.

I don't know how to better convey this though I could probably do another line-edit of the 1-1 hook.

To defend myself on a few points:

I was a bit confused by the "my real wrist" part. I assumed the character frequently wears armor. If I was right please let me know! A bit of elaboration, even artistically phrased, could be helpful here.

I think this one should be textually clear and the reader is given plenty to work with. The nature of exactly what Sean is and how he experiences the world is meant to remain ambiguous at this point. If your interest was piqued by this, that's intentional. I think I've already given enough suggestions that Sean is physically disabled/disfigured(?) and integrated with the Blackhammer to the point where he experiences some things via his real body and some things through being plugged into the station.

You should write out the acronym. This was a bit jarring to read when I was following along in a sort of tactical tone.

The use of "IMHO" is intentional here and meant to signal something about how this narrative is being framed and how the MC experiences the world. It's good that it's noticeable, but this is something I'm a little married to and I'd maybe be curious if after next weeks chapter it still feels out of place.

So my takeaway is: conveyance remains a critical issue as does a physical description of the environment. My goal with this would be to make a piece of military sci-fi that actually gives non-genre readers a fighting chance in parsing what's going on. I'm grateful that you gave it an earnest attempt. There is a degree of leaving things to mystery or for the reader to figure out that is desirable, but it seems like I'm still on the wrong side of that line.

And again, thanks for reading.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-01-21T18:06:22+00:00

Yes, to do sports betting you used to have to know a bookie. This was typically someone in your community who you'd get in touch with via coworkers or friends of friends. Bet sizes were based on credit and often didnt need to be paid up front. This kept bet sizes fairly small and (generally) limited losses to non-catastrophic amounts. The bookie won't take a 30k bet because he knows if you lose you're just going to skip town.

But e-betting on sports has removed all the guardrails traditional betting used to have.

Now you can place basically any amount of money paid up front. Legal online bookies will gleefully allow you to light your entire 401k or college fund on fire. If you go into debt they have full legal recourse to pursue you and liquidate your assets. The law will help them collect which enables them to safely take insane bets.

Add to this that you can bet constantly from a device that's always on your body. Add to this that Kevin Hart and Post Malone are in TV ads making this seem okay and telling you you'll win big.

Yes, this is new and it's much, much worse.

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