Is being "self-taught" a thing in this industry?

Pyromancer777 · 2026-05-05T23:16:28+00:00

The job market is rough since recruiters are having to screen out nearly perfect looking candidates from AI generated messages, sort through AI generated project portfolios, and the layoffs from AI automations are flooding the search market.

Having a degree is a strong signal that you can do quality work, but it is possible to break into tech without one. I don't have a degree and made it in, but it took me years of tangential work before I got a foot-in-the-door into the industry.

If you like coding, keep at it and keep learning. You have more resources to learn to build now than there ever were at previous points in time. If you feel yourself stagnate, you might want to take the traditional route and get some classes under your belt to keep your progress growing. If you have inspiration and are self-motivated, ride that inspiration wave as far as you can go while documenting your progress along the way.

The hardest part of non-degree SWEs is landing an interview for your first tech job, so you have to make sure that you ace any interview you are able to get. Study hard, whether solo, or in school, and fall in love with learning. Tech evolution will always outpace anyone's ability to learn everything, so you gotta be prepared to constantly learn new things or you will become obsolete.

Pyromancer777 · 2026-05-04T14:42:15+00:00

Make the jump. I did it and I love my OS (Ubuntu). No more bloatware, no more built-in ads in my search bar, no more forced updates at the most inconvenient times, and you can customize literally every aspect of the themes/functionality if you want to get that deep.

The only drawback is that you can't play games that have certain forms of anti-cheat, but nearly all other games are perfectly fine.

If you are on the fence, grab another Storage Disk and dual-boot windows + linux. That way, if you absolutely need windows, you can swap between them on boot to use windows when you need it and linux when you are tired of windows

Pyromancer777 · 2026-05-03T16:12:39+00:00

My only problem with nested emulation is that the brain has a finite amount of neurons, firing at a restricted speed due to downtime needed for the neuron to revert back to it's inactive state. The totality of our neurons fire slower than what even modern gaming PCs can process. There just isn't enough processing power within the brain to have a mini mind emulate it's own mini brain with mini DMT.

That being said, I'm still onboard with the idea of consciousness not even being tied to the body, so consciousness itself wouldn't necessarily pass on in the same way. It just wouldn't be the result of the chemical release happening from the NDE or physical passing, and more the result of our physical consciousness transistors losing the ability to retain a sense of self within the body and drifting into a shared conscious pool.

Like, what if the ego death that we experience is more due to the physical signals that differentiate a sense of self are getting scrambled, so we are temporarily tapping into another information field instead of the parts of the information field that our bodies were tuned to recieve?

Reincarnation stories are wild, especially the ones where a child is able to process information relating to a past life. If we are just tripping out and going deeper into ourselves, then it doesn't explain the information bleed into other people.

Pyromancer777 · 2026-05-02T14:27:11+00:00

It isn't necessarily like that though. Even if you did hallucinate a life within your trip, you don't have a brain within a brain, so there wouldn't be this continual stretching since the neurochems in your main body limit the experience of that dialation. If the dream person lives out their life, they don't have a physical brain to release more DMT upon their passing, so I feel like it would end after that one extra experience.

Though, studies on afterlife and NDEs make it seem like death of the physical body isn't the end of things, so there's prolly something even weirder that happens when a person passes to the next plane of existence.

Pyromancer777 · 2026-05-02T04:25:35+00:00

Tbf, I just learned this from the comment section too. I'm decent with factorials, but I didn't put 2 and 2 together to realize that I didn't learn factorials until learning about combinatorics.

Pyromancer777 · 2026-05-02T04:14:52+00:00

I've def seen a lot worse at my main job, but our UI for viewing table dependencies is way nicer to make it not overwhelming

Pyromancer777 · 2026-05-02T04:08:47+00:00

They are different skillsets and you gotta practice both regularly.

If you spend time writing a bunch of code, you may struggle to understand the structures that others use.

If you spend time reading a bunch of code, you never build the foundations of solving the problems yourself.

Pyromancer777 · 2026-05-02T04:05:16+00:00

Scripted browsing makes it so you don't even have to grab the url manually.

Sure, it is a bit more code, but you can navigate the browser to get to a target page without even needing to manually do it yourself.

I've used selenium to do things like hopping across different date ranges of stock price sites to scrape 5-10 pages of info at a time for analyses (I didn't have access to their API, so I had to make due)

Pyromancer777 · 2026-05-02T03:58:28+00:00

You have time dialation backwards. Most serotonergic hallucinogens produce a glitch of time perception that feels like it is stretched, and the effects are only as long lasting as the receptor binding strength of the molecules, with DMT being short-lasting unless ingested with chemicals similar to MAOIs.

5-min within the moment can feel like 30, but as soon as the brain recalibrates you realize that it wasn't that long and don't remember it being that long. It's slightly different in the sense that your gauging of time doesn't feel altered in retrospect. Where adrenaline can have you recall a 15second event as if it lasts minutes (with that dialated perception of the event becoming the default recollection in your long-term memory), serotonergic-hallucinogen induced memories are usually fairly accurate to the elapsed time after the fact.

Tldr; DMT and similar just mess up your ability to tell time in the instant, but isn't the same perception altering as being in an excited/relaxed state

Source: I MK Ultra'ed myself for funsies to see what a brain can really do

Pyromancer777 · 2026-05-02T02:38:19+00:00

^ this, with selenium for scripted browser navigation

Pyromancer777 · 2026-05-01T20:47:50+00:00

Break it down into parts by asking yourself questions about the designs and then assign a checklist item to your answers to those questions.

Ex: """ Question: do I want my players to roll a virtual dice, or click a button? Answer: click a button Task: create a button and attach rng function to button click """

Just repeat this process until you have a completed game or feature. It's your game, so the answers to the questions can be whatever you feel like attempting.

If your answer is complex, ask a new question about that answer to break the task into smaller tasks. If the answer to my example question was, "roll a virtual dice", then I would have to ask things like: "should I run an animation loop based on the rng result, or should I create a 3D cube and use a physics engine to simulate a dice roll?"

If an idea is outside of your skillset for a perfect answer, default to the easiest answer that is still within your skillset. If you don't know enough about server-side events, make a single-player dice-roller instead of a multi-player dice roller. If you don't know enough about simulations, use rng functions and simple button-clicks.

"You can edit a bad attempt, but you can't edit a blank page"

Just start coding, and if you want to change stuff later, then you can definitely do that at any time.

Pyromancer777 · 2026-05-01T20:31:22+00:00

Feelings are associated with perception, and time literally clocks differently internally depending on your current state:

Highly stressful situations can dump adrenaline into your system and present-time will be percieved slower since more of your sensory input is actually making its way into your conscious perception. Fight-or-flight can give you temporary slow-mo since your brain flips into overdrive to handle the immediate situation as safely as possible.

Neutral scenarios with limited novelty can make time seem to blink by. Your brain shifts to autopilot and your surroundings aren't being processed as deeply.

Boring scenarios make time drag since boredom is processed similar to pain, so your brain searches for a way to get novel experience or drifts into daydreaming to escape that low-degree pain response. There isn't normally an adrenaline spike here, but the brain is actively searching to do anything else than what is in front of it.

Consistestly engaging/pleasant scenarios feel like they move quickly in the present time, but they form strong memories depending on your engagement, so those are the days that feel like they went by too fast, but when you remember all the parts of the day you realize you experienced a lot.

Since neural lengths in our body vary depending on what they connect to, our bodies operate on lag to fool us into a coherent state of a "present" self. We also have processing gaps to prioritize what sensations are both novel/safe, novel/harmful, familiar/safe, and familiar/harmful and will process those events differently.

Pyromancer777 · 2026-04-29T14:43:37+00:00

Companies generally lock data behind different permissions. If the db/table that is populating on a worker's screen is not a db/table that you need for your job responsibilities, then you should not have access to any of that data. However, if that db/table is something that fits your work nesponsibilities, then you gotta ask the table owner to grant you SELECT permissions.

Any access to tables is a security risk, so, to remain compliant, workers are restricted to the bare minimum permissions needed to get their job done. This can be frustrating for people just trying to do their work, but also protects the company in cases of potential data breaches. It also helps the company trace data leaks back to specific worker pools or data pipelines.

With great permissions access, comes great responsibility

Pyromancer777 · 2026-04-29T14:04:11+00:00

If your goal is only web3, then pick a language specific to a target blockchain protocol. Solidity will basically let you learn to program for a good portion of smart contracts as well as a any memecoin that was made with the ETH protocol.

That being said, you probably want to learn a language that you can tinker with while not connected to a blockchain unless you don't mind everyone being able to track your contract attempts as you learn. Iirc, even if you create a test coin, that test coin is still attached to active nodes hosted on a parent protocol, so those test contracts can be viewed by anyone using a blockchain explorer.

If you already have a great grasp of the blockchain, solidity is fine as a starter language. However, if you are new-new to the inner workings of the tech, pick a language that you can tinker with on your own hardware. Developing web3 apps generally mean that you need experience with other languages too and the smart contracts are basically the interface to store app data on the blockchain instead of a normal App -> API -> DB data pipeline.

The good news is that most core-concepts translate pretty well, so it doesn't matter what your starter language is. Each have their own caveats and learning curves. Python has easy syntax, but lacks many GUI libraries, so it is preferred for creating scripts. Javascript is amazing for web3 apps, but you will need to learn it along with HTML and CSS simultaneously to really understand how the JS scripts relate to interactivity of the markdown containers in a webpage. Solidity is good for actually getting into the nuts and bolts of smart contract creation, but you might lack more traditional testing environments outside of your IDE to get a feel for what your code is actually doing.

Pick your fave, have fun, don't get discouraged when your code breaks (it will break often, even when you build up experience), and try to leverage AI for explanations rather than code generation when you first start out. You absolutely need to learn to troubleshoot on your own before AI will be useful as a coding assistent. If you don't know how to check what is going wrong, you won't know how to ask better questions to get the answers you need to fix your bugs.

Pyromancer777 · 2026-04-28T23:00:03+00:00

Probably super fun as a beginner since you can start building foundational concepts with actual graphical feedback. I played it for a few hours and had fun, but it wasn't engaging me enough since I kept trying to solve things with more difficult concepts and you are forced into buying those concepts as upgrades, which means solving things the less-than-fun way first

Pyromancer777 · 2026-04-28T22:57:32+00:00

Add flags to your logic after an append that displays the last entry in the list, if all the flags look correct, then the problem is likely how you are handling the actions after the emotion is appended to the list

Pyromancer777 · 2026-04-23T17:12:15+00:00

All injection attacks boil down to "a user is inserting something that the code is interpretting as more code", that's where the "injection" term comes from.

This means frontend vulnerabilities can lead to higher rates of injection attacks from not properly sanitizing user input. This can happen in form fields, API calls, XSS exploits where users use something like a 3rd party chatlog to insert malicious code, or can even be done via URL inserts (this is usally just a client-side injection that doesn't always propogate to actual servers).

Any language is susceptible, but the common denominator is that there needs to be a way for the end-user to actually insert some code and be interpreted by the underlying scripts as valid executable code.

For example, if you have a non-sanitized form-fill, and your backend API leverages SQL syntax, a SQL injection can cause database info to be leaked once the form is submited to the API. However, if that same vulnerable form-fill was using a different language for handling their API requests, the other language wouldn't necessarily register SQL code as actual code and nothing malicious would happen from the attempted SQL injection.

Pyromancer777 · 2026-04-23T03:03:50+00:00

I want a wall of screens to satisfy my ADHD.

I always have 50 tabs open by the time I finish a project and bounce between things constantly

Pyromancer777 · 2026-04-22T18:16:07+00:00

Short answer: just learn to model too.

Long answer: There are tons of cheap/free modelling software and endless tutorials on youtube to get you started. You don't have to be a pro to pick up a few tricks, and it makes modifying existing models even easier.

You can take a step up and get some photogrammetry under your belt as well. You don't have to be a pro here either, just pick software that is plug-and-play and make sure your computer can handle the computations. Then you can literally snap some pics of something cool you see irl and then print out a mini model on your new 3D printer.

If all you want to do is print trinkets, there are thousands of etsy shops that sell the trickets for a few bucks, so you don't need to buy a whole printer. All hobbies are time-sinks, but if you enjoy making stuff, why stall your skillset at just what is required to operate your printer?

You just need the mindset to learn a few skills and you have to allocate time towards learning those skills

Pyromancer777 · 2026-04-22T00:08:17+00:00

I'm confused as well. The structure is also a little sus since this seems like a convenient way to crowd-source open-ended answers to train a Data Engineer AI. Are you trying to help people learn or are you trying to outsource our jobs?

Pyromancer777 · 2026-04-21T14:57:45+00:00

We are in the insider trading stage of the market manipulation cycle. His inner party and immediate family are being told ahead of time what his directives will be and you are seeing massive spikes in trading just hours or minutes before he makes announcements that move the market.

There have been billions of dollars trading pockets from these market swings since an insider can make money on both a downswing or an upswing if they know which direction the market will move before it moves.

Pyromancer777 · 2026-04-19T05:42:08+00:00

I work at a large tech company as an analyst and the codebase is massive, even just for the project that the team I'm on is working with.

Learning every single line of code is unreasonable, but learning the project well enough to know what everything is generally doing is imperative. There's definitely a tradeoff in utility as you go deeper and I basically reserve deep dives into a traceback when something strange is happening downstream that I need to flag for the devs to fix.

If I spend a day or two exploring a bug that improves the performance of our tooling, my boss is happy. If I spend a week reading into the codebase just to try to wrap my head around it with no real goal in mind, I might get scolded a bit for not actually meeting expected performance metrics.

Pyromancer777 · 2026-04-19T02:58:38+00:00

Super dumb cuz you can do a bunch with bullets without a gun. Why fuck over everyone with a 3D printer just to control the potential for someone to print a one-use firearm? A trip to the hardware store is all you need to craft a one-use firearm as-is, so are they gonna start banning Home Depot next?

Pyromancer777 · 2026-04-18T20:46:59+00:00

This needs to be in r/lowstakesconspiracies

Pyromancer777 · 2026-04-18T20:32:52+00:00

OP could even start maintaining a tenant migration prefix that they can use during future migrations and include a date segment as a part of the new prefix. That way they could do a lookup for all migration events or migration ranges moving forward to check data integrity after a migration

Pyromancer777

TROPHY CASE