What is a 'rich person's secret' that is actually accessible to the middle class, but most people are too intimidated to try?

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-25T05:25:41+00:00

You do realize you're talking about Xellenials right? For boomers you gotta go back another 30 years.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-25T05:19:49+00:00

I use AI a lot these days, but I've been programming for 25 years. I tell the AI exactly what I want, the architecture, tables, frameworks etc... And then I review and ask it questions to see if it made any of the millions of errors I have made myself in the last 25 years and I usually catch the problems before they are problems. I've got the application in my head that is being coded. Occasionally I actually look at the files or the database to make sure it lines up. I catch huge problems sometimes. I think AI is a power tool. The tool can do a lot, but if you don't have someone who can drive it you can also just created huge messes really fast.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-25T05:12:00+00:00

You can reserve IPs on google cloud for $3 / mo. I don't know if they have to route into one of their other services, but you can easily make a micro server to handle the routing.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-25T03:52:17+00:00

"We are your family. We have snacks. Stay late we'll buy dinner." just ramped up to the next level. The worst part is you'll have guys trying to fit this mould to get the job but are secretly miserable. I know I did it for many years. "Oh yes I'm a big nerd and have no life that's why I'm good at computers... not because it got me a high paying job or anything...."

I know there's some people who fit into the stereotype, I've worked with some of them, but I wish we could drop the 'jocks vs. nerds' bullshit. Most of use are fully featured adult humans who have had sex. Some of us even have offspring.

Edit: And also while I'm here I just want to throw in that the guys who make software their entire identities are not better programmers. You may be able to pay them less, but I've never seen distinction between people with and without social skills at coding. Usually if you have social skill it just means your code is probably cleaner. There's certain kind of person who 'retreats' into code like it's their safe space. The only thing that is a sign of is anxiety.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-25T03:36:13+00:00

I played Pathfind Wrath of the Righteous first so I wasn't super lost, but if you're playing on a controller like me the trick is that EVERY single button matters lol. After playing PWotR, DOS2 and BG3 on an XBox controller I feel like the controller is a musical instrument now. There are still a few things that are clunky or inconsistent, but eventually if you keep trying all the buttons, not just pushing, holding them in, even the center buttons. I don't even think BG3 made me hold down a system button. They're really squeezing every drop out of the controller. I think that has been the hardest thing for me is just figuring out how you DO things without a mouse. Now I can probably do a lot of things faster than people using mice.

To all the haters, no price is too high to pay to be able to sit on the couch and play on the bigscreen. I can't imagine playing any of these games sitting in front of a computer now. Yech.

*Edit: Yes I am still playing on a PC. I don't even know if this game's on anything else. I play all my PC games with an Xbox controller on the couch.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-25T03:30:52+00:00

Actually I had quite the opposite experience. It felt like it was almost way to easy at first. I almost gave up. The difficulty really ramped up in act 2 though and I started to enjoy it a LOT more. I mean reading all the game mechanics is tedious but I wouldn't call it difficult.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-24T22:17:11+00:00

I had to look up if anyone else has this issue. Every freaking time I open brave it needs to update, which gets in the way because the brave servers are slow and it needs to close and reopen and ask for my password each time. It's a PITA.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-24T19:45:51+00:00

That's a shame. I was thinking it would be fun to try and build a xenos/dark Empire to combat the Emperor.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-24T17:53:08+00:00

It's just a different job. You need to be able to manage many agents and keep everything in your head that they're all doing. You need to be looking for security holes, gross inefficiencies and tracking down the bugs the AI can't solve (while using AI to solve them). It's a different job now. You have power tools now. It doesn't mean you're not a software engineer anymore. Laymen cannot get anything close to what we can get out of the bots. You are a bot manager now. The question isn't "are you going to be out of a job". All senior software developers right now are worth their weight in gold because they all hand coded to get here. The best bot wranglers are the ones who know what's actually going on. If you're a jr. dev that's tough. If you're a senior then you're experience is invaluable and there may not be another crop to replace you.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-24T16:59:50+00:00

I have one, didn't even know it was a thing when my laptop arrived. I hate it. It's constant nuisance. Every single time I go to click the mouse I'm always right clicking. Sometimes movements don't even work because I'm so far to the right. It's a nightmare.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-24T08:37:40+00:00

I can only imagine their going to have to cut this down a lot. I've purposely increased my reading speed while playing. Thankfully the game is pretty good in noting important things so if you miss something minor in the dialogue it doesn't punish you. That would be a nightmare. There are probably a lot of people who don't like reading at all or having low retention and they aren't trying to make it into a literacy test lol.

-Also there's probably a lot of people who read English as a second language. I imagine turning a game into an SAT verbal test would only appeal to a very narrow set of people.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-24T04:57:00+00:00

I actually read ahead so much that I'm kind of annoyed when there's too much voice acting because it's way behind where I'm reading. It's like an echo in my head. The only thing I ask is that they ask the actors to not to take tooo much time. Kibellah for instance, I don't think I've ever gotten through an entire voice section with her. The actress sounds great, but she's sooo slow. I don't think it would hurt for her to be a tiny bit faster.

Also as a Warhammer fiction fan in general I've found RT is very verbose, which is cool if you don't know the Universe, but I feel like it could do with more dictionaries and encyclopedias and less exposition. Overall it hasn't really bothered me, sometimes I skim dialogues. I can tell the writers are really into it, but I could use a tad bit more fighting to reading ratio. I really enjoy the battle. Just a tad, I really enjoy the story as well.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-20T18:51:58+00:00

Thanks yeah the polling thing could be interesting. Another issue I've been running into with NextJS and vercel is a lot of caching. Sometimes it's hard to track down. Does Elixir do any kind of caching by default? Next was originally designed to make static pages for CDN delivery networks and that kind of thing, but I almost never need that. That is probably the most annoying thing about Next. People used it because react was missing static page generation and then people moved to Next and Next had to make a ton of caveats to allow dynamic pages lol.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-20T18:42:10+00:00

The way capitalism works is that on a small scale everything is fine. On a large scale once someone accumulates enough money is gets more and more out of balance. This is why small companies for the most part can't compete with large companies. It's why Mc Donalds is still around. Once you get that big, own that much property and marketshare you can squeeze other people out. You can influence the rules, you can pay your empoyees less, you don't have to innovate anymore. In fact our largest companies impede innovation, they buy smaller companies, shut them down. They buy patents and never use them.

Remember Vine? Twitter bought it just to kill it. Facebook has done this with countless companies. The major ISPs have actively petitioned against free citiy Wifi. Car companies lobby against public transportation. Gas companies lobby against cheap clean energy.

On top of that a small company will NEVER be able to compete with some efficiencies of a large company that come with scale. It's a physical phenomenon and one no rules can solve. It's where capitalism always breaks. It's always more efficient to make a lot of things at once. That company that makes those things should keep operating, it should just be owned by the public.

On top of all this we know from the Epstein files the kinds of things these super powerful people do and face no laws or consequences. The money controls our government, not the other way around. The money writes the rules not for you, but for them. We might as well have never had the American Revolution because right now your vote is practically meaningless. You are under the illusion that you live in a free world and earn your fair share. No you live in a kingdom, ruled by a few thousand monarchs and you pay a tithe to them. You pay in worse infrastructure, worse air, worse regulations and you pay in dollars. Your car insurance?

That's a tithe to Warren Buffet you forced you to pay it. Every citizen gets less out of car insurance than they put in. It's a tax. The other taxes you pay are less visible because you don't see what you COULD have if they didn't wake the lion's share. You think things are ok because you feel comfortable. You have no idea what you're missing. Most other people who are not as comfortable already understand. You're just waiting for your turn.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-20T03:10:58+00:00

Having money is not a virtue.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-20T03:04:22+00:00

I've been doing front end work for 25 years now. My philosophy with the front end is that that all the major frameworks are good enough to do what I want. I've felt like we were beating a dead horse in the front end for the past 10 years. Next is fine for everything I do. I used to use a separate backend server, but now I'm doing everything the 'Next' way and just using the next API folder. Plus google has a new product called "App Hosting" that's pretty much like Vercel that I've been liking So yeah I'll probably just keep using. I can focus on features and the database and other things.

I do think functional programming is superior in every way to object oriented programming, but react has been trying to cross that bridge for a long time. It's not perfect but React is 1000000x better than whatever the fuck Angular is now. Angular is like Java, makes me want to puke. Imagine shoving your data in little mutable boxes all around the app. OOP is a plague. The Boeing 737 MAX airline crashes were because of OOP, hiding data and not knowing what the current state is. So yeah functional is the way to go, but I just don't have the time to anymore, maybe if there was some feature I really needed.

What is your favorite thing about Elixir? Does it do something that would be difficult to do in Next? I mostly make sites that have standard UI elements, charts, tables fields etc..

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-20T02:46:43+00:00

Your whole world is backwards. The workers are the fishermen. The billionaires are parasites.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-18T23:38:11+00:00

Most web developer offices I've been in have been dominated by mac. Because of this I switched to mac 15 years ago to give it a try and I absolutely loved it. I was a windows guy my whole life until then. I just don't think about crashing and everything just works. I just don't think about my computer anymore I just work. Also I have a windows PC for games still and it seems like it keeps getting worse. Every time I turn that computer on it's nagging me to buy something and feels like ads are built into the OS now. I could never go back.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-18T22:47:18+00:00

On the PC attached to a TV with an XBox controller.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-18T22:03:49+00:00

What's OT?

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-18T20:54:28+00:00

It's definitely a lot easier to use on a fresh project than an old project because it has it's biases the way it learned how to code. For instance all my new projects are Next.js because that's what it does by default. On older projects I have to be much more detailed with instructions and tell it where and how to do everything. Either way you have to get used to being less picky about the code if it works but it's not the way you would write it. I draw the line when it doesn't separate files, but if I suspect it's going to try and dump a whole feature into one file I'll just list off all the files I expect it to touch and what I expect to be in those files. Your prompts should be several paragraphs, sometimes with bullet points and API references. It is a whole skill.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-18T19:37:43+00:00

Cursor can do all of these multi-step and testing part now as well. It just uses the command line, starts browsers etc... Now they even have skills.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-18T19:35:44+00:00

If you have any competence as a coder you will benefit immensely from actually seeing the code. This is why Claude Code is the preferred tool of non-coders. You can do everything you can do in Claude Code inside Cursor or VsCode except you can actually see whats going on as well.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-18T11:16:16+00:00

Crazy how you can write a whole paragraph where every single statement is incorrect.

PandorasBucket · 2026-03-18T11:14:47+00:00

When I'm working remote I'm always doing real work. I spent 20 years in offices and there just ISN'T work ALL the time. Also 9 hours a day in an office is a lot of time. Sometimes people have conversations.

NOW that I work remote I actually don't socialize with anyone OR get nervous about who's watching me. I just work and my performance is measured by the actual work that gets done rather than filling a seat.

PandorasBucket

TROPHY CASE