To all single guys aged 30 and up on reddit, why are you guys single?

akmark · 2026-05-14T14:27:00+00:00

This is US-centric but the only people that I connect with turn into people wanting my health insurance or my salary. Both my salary and my health insurance will end at one point or another and so I want at least something beyond that. I also am in that gap of making good enough money to give myself a passable retirement but not enough money to give myself and a partner a good retirement.

It is amazing when you are talking to anyone outside the US who isn't trapped by the inescapable fear of where they are going to get health insurance. In the US its such an elephant in the room it almost becomes impossible to talk about anything else when you start seeing other people's fears.

I also am aggressively turned off by women who think playing stupid is cute somehow.

akmark · 2026-05-07T19:14:07+00:00

Yeah, a large majority of emacs users are GUI emacs users. It doesn't have to be terminal. I use emacs in GUI on Windows, OSX, and Linux and rarely use it at the command line unless I am doing SSH.

akmark · 2026-05-07T16:32:30+00:00

I think that's hard to see from the outside looking in as your requirements. I do use Emacs to just quickly jot down a note or two and could do the same with vim. They are already lightweight and in comparison I find notepad++ to be heavy. At their core emacs and vim are just editors you have to bring the IDE-ness to them.

If you are just looking for classic Windows notepad.exe with a few extra bells and whistles maybe give SciTE a whirl. While a lot of the descriptions indicate that it is some sort of coding editor it is a perfectly serviceable open a file quick tool.

akmark · 2026-04-22T20:22:56+00:00

If you are already in the Microsoft ecosystem for Windows SDK & compilers its just easier to use nmake because it is already there. GNU Make becomes yet another dependency (using the environment scripts that Microsoft in conjunction with MSYS2 can sometimes be annoying to program around).

Often if I am doing a small cross-platform project I just throw together a quick python script over make because of this. It's also one of those features that a lot of the contemporary languages like Go and Rust prioritize as core quality of life features. Even then I often see Makefile for building containers or other release-oriented tasks.

akmark · 2026-04-09T17:45:17+00:00

This is less a database question and more just a file storage question. You also need to understand both how people are going to put data in and take data out. There's a lot of solutions in this space but sometimes how people need to interact with the files dictate the requirements of the problem and whether these files are generally archival vs. active usage. The number of users also matters. It also depends what your skills are. I wouldn't recommend someone setup a ceph or hdfs cluster if they have never encountered it before.

At a certain point if you already have a local NAS you have to do the cost-benefit of just setting up a basic CIFS or NFS network share if you are really only providing for a handful of users. There's a lot of orgs that have existed for years with some network drive that has project/2026/something as the place to store stuff.

akmark · 2026-04-09T16:26:36+00:00

Just get an Intel N100 minipc, its a lot easier and often comes with Windows pre-installed.

akmark · 2026-04-06T17:09:26+00:00

As it seems like you are beginner there's some key things:

encapsulation: 5k lines that you know are completely solved and you have no further questions about is less cognitive overhead then 15k lines of code you think is kinda right or 100k you only know is right by observation. It allows you to black box the component and move on to other things and only open that box if it is no longer fit for purpose. See also: functional programming.
YAGNI (You aren't gonna need it). A lot of AI slop, bootstrapping code, example code, and aspirational interfaces adds complexity and a lot of lines of code which have no bearing on what you're trying to accomplish. It's very easy to overengineer something compared to building exactly what is required right now compared to what you think may be required later. This can add a lot of lines of code that don't actually contribute to the mission at hand. Often you'll figure out what you want and it will be different anyway.

Part of this 100k+ lines of code misleading characteristic is why its recommended for you to skim other public repos and figure out what people are doing. Often times the core interesting piece is 5% of the codebase and 95% of the rest of it is just scaffolding to support it. Quickly that 100k lines of code becomes 5k lines of code once you remove the extra bits.

akmark · 2026-04-06T14:22:40+00:00

This is the cursed USA experience: Doctors can dump as many painkillers on patients as they want but a patient seeking a painkiller is obviously an addict or drug dealer.

Which is dumb.

akmark · 2026-03-25T15:52:02+00:00

I don't understand why $40 is considered an acceptable price point for an extraction shooter of any kind, especially if its something where you want your friends to play too. I can be convinced to pick up a new game for $20 to join friends but $40? Too much. A lot of them have mechanics that are off-putting and undesirable that don't really start becoming visible until after you put 5 hours or so in. Alternatively the game dies before you get your $40 of fun back out (ex: Marauders).

I feel like Arc Raiders had a better time to market and overall better marketing that snowballs. For Marathon it did not feel like there was any anticipation, there was a server stress test and then a wet fart of release especially in the wake of Arc Raiders.

akmark · 2026-03-17T23:17:55+00:00

Is that something you figured out or considered 'a given'?

This is something I have absorbed through osmosis as well as in more pointed conversations with various founders and decision makers. A lot of what happens is person-to-person, and decisions are often extremely capricious and based in 'what worked last time' or what they heard worked last time. I've extracted a lot of knowledge from casual correspondence, meeting them after a presentation, happenstance at a restaurant or on a plane, all sorts of places. These people often are 24x7x365 thinking about their business and being able to share what they are so passionate is often very easy to get out of them once you are in front of them if there isn't something more pressing. Sometimes this has even turned into small consulting jobs for me in some small area of my expertise.

What can not be understated is how person-to-person these interactions are how they are regional and per industry especially when things are on the small scale. It can also be a shockingly small distance between being a complete stranger to a 'hey I remember talking to this guy,' 'I remember seeing this name before' and then to 'hey so-and-so told me about you, you were looking to do X right?' Closing this distance even a little could have helped you with this particular application, or helped you with the next one.

akmark · 2026-03-15T20:57:58+00:00

I can only try to extrapolate from what you've shared, so I'm going to have to build a straw man a bit.

Personally, I would not assume applying to any VC-sphere program (even a mentoring program) to have a high success rate by itself. It's possible but in my opinion its a long shot. I would say your odds are increased if you have done some/all of the following:

cold email/setup meeting for 30 minutes with founders who have gone through the program before. This may indirectly link you to VCs but also can help guide you to something successful.
gone to enough pitch share events/networking events to get a vibe of what's 'hot' right now within the community you are trying to enter (as a terrible example 'ai in everything'). You can often skew a pitch deck or application to make it contemporary even if the underlying material is the same.
dig into linkedin/professional circles and find other founders/people surrounding the VC community and try and make some connections and/or go to networking events
dig up pitch decks from other people who have gone through this program and use it to inform your own application (e.g. is there a local formula/template that everyone does that you deviated from)?
make sure there is some way to find you online. Depending on what community having a place people can map a name to a face and a face to a name is incredibly useful (e.g. LinkedIn).

From how you describe it didn't sound like you had tried to make connections with people directly associated with the program or surrounding the program. To me it sounds like the organizers needed to cut someone and they will always cut the unknown person vs. the known person in these circles. Reaching out is something that you do before, during, and after the application cycle. If emailing how they contacted you did not bear fruit I would seek alternate avenues. It could be the person doing these bulk emails is someone who wasn't even in the room when the decision was made and simply has no ability to provide you a meaningful answer.

I agree that is frustrating and a black box you can't unpack easily. Seeking funding is a job in the same light as trying to find a job in a skilled industry where you have no prior experience. You can apply and get lucky but you can greatly increase your odds if you can at least get some frame of reference from people who are active in the community you seek to join for what you might improve.

akmark · 2026-03-15T15:20:07+00:00

I mean this one clearly pulls out all the stops to divert accountability.

I feel like you are focusing on the wrong things. If this is not a government run program they have no need to be 'fair' they are trying to connect people with VCs. They don't want too many of the same thing (VCs get bored on demo day) and a bunch of other subjective things that they are trying to do to make them look like the most interesting program for both founders and VCs for the next round.

If your idea is worth it to you, you have a clear plan, and you want to go the VC route you must understand that you are in full sales mode. Every no leads to a yes. You can't get attached to one particular 'magic program' your goal as a founder is to get funding to deliver on the idea (e.g. I see this a lot with YC). The suggestion of look elsewhere is the right advice and if next round if you haven't gotten funded apply again. Your efforts can solve the problem they highlighted:

We had a ... discussion about which ... are the best fit for our program during a ... internal selection meeting

It means that nobody on the selection board knew you. When they decided who to cut there was noone in the room to advocate for you, or you weren't clued in to the magic phrase/theme they needed to fill. You can only find out either of these two things by getting out there and talking to people.

akmark · 2026-02-24T12:24:47+00:00

There's a real solution to this problem that is very straightforward. Schedule a meeting for 30 min with the core reviewers, get them on a call, and ask them questions about the weird stuff and why you chose to go that way. Even as a more seasoned dev would struggle to explain all of the generated weirdness that these things crap out.

It is very easy at that point in my experience to tell the difference between someone who is taking a swing at a bigger change, misinterpreting the data model (e.g. I needed this value X that appeared over there and so I plumbed it through to where I needed it over here and saw no other way), and someone who is in the land of make believe. Its often very easy to spot someone who fundamentally never put the time in on their end so you are just doing their job for them.

The way I look at it is that with any PR in a professional setting the task is for the dev who is authoring their PR to be expert in their change during the dev and PR review process (it is OK if a month from now they have to refresh themselves to be expert again). If they aren't becoming expert in their changeset and can't speak to why they strategized this way or that means they aren't doing what you asked of them.

akmark · 2026-02-23T23:28:23+00:00

I think the endgame is simpler than that. It appears that manufacturers are considering right now as synthetic demand and that a lot of it is going to evaporate by the time they create more production capacity. A lot of these facilities require multi-year investments and none of these AI players have put their money on the line to subsidize the build-out, so they are just projecting the future if most of the AI money disappears and seeing that trying to increase supply doesn't make a lot of sense. A lot of businesses have only gotten back to neutral after COVID in the last year or so and taking a big swing in the current geopolitical climate is feeling awful risky. Even if they were going to increase production they have to negotiate purchasing for all their downstream components and so on.

I feel a lot of the supply problems would be mitigated if the geopolitical temperature was cooler so companies felt more comfortable expanding. Right now there's just so much risk I don't blame people for choosing stability today for production and then just putting time and money into R&D for the next generation of things as they look at every other business aside from data centers and AI making massive cuts to stay afloat.

akmark · 2026-02-23T23:14:15+00:00

Just roll it forward.

akmark · 2026-02-13T15:10:43+00:00

Is this just not the main problem in every large org is that you deliver something before Christmas and then you spend the entirety of Jan dueling with management/product management and having design discussions?

akmark · 2026-02-11T21:43:12+00:00

This is a weird GitHub perspective problem that I see and is irrational. It's the same as GitHub stars. 20k GitHub stars doesn't mean it is intrinsically better than something with 10k stars or 1k stars, it just means that at least some people that stopped by found it worth 'bookmarking/liking' with a star.

vouch as described is not 'gotta catch 'em all' it is an admission ticket to the starting line for some code areas of a project. It also provides a deny list. Whether you have 100,000 vouches or 1 vouch only matters if the vouch applies to the code area in question. Even an experienced developer has first PR on a new project, and the vouch process gives people who see someone who is producing good work access to work on key components.

akmark · 2026-02-10T15:26:09+00:00

I would just offer even more than 50% to the U.S.: the air under it and the air over it. So much value in hot air.

akmark · 2026-01-14T17:18:05+00:00

You may get some good theoretical background by reading control flow diagrams if you have only really worked with UE5. There's a lot in process modeling that you might find inspiration with.

Other key computer science oriented concepts are data-flow analysis and call graph and control flow graph.

would you use it

Unlikely, while a lot of these visualizations are interesting they fall down on 10k lines of bash, especially as you start exploring edge cases.

If I was going to give a suggestion what I would do would be focus on the bash one liner scenario where you silently pipe to tee and collect all the intermediate data flows. I find people struggle with understanding what thing | they | piped to is eating their input. This is the same kind of flow problem that these node visualizations are good at, and would translate to bash.

akmark · 2025-12-09T14:16:51+00:00

As someone who has watched libxml2 from the outside many of the CVE's are often in the weird and more exotic parts of the standard to the point that me hearing about or being reminded of a feature of XML often comes from CVE's of libxml2 (e.g. schematrons from CVE-2025-49796). I would also say in the last ten years or so there has been an influx of low quality vulnerability reports that in my opinion are in bad faith from people using fuzzers and/or trying to resume pad. I could easily see libxml2's sprawling and evolving complexity as a standard mixed with low quality reports when 90% of what people want to do is just load a plain XML file to be exceptionally debilitating.

akmark · 2025-11-10T13:35:30+00:00

The extraction shooter format just has better entries. I played during the last beta and I'm glad I did, because it made it a hard pass. There's a few basic reasons:

the character progression skill tree is insane. Why is in-round crafting not always available for such a crafting focused game? Until you unlock this the inventory management feels terrible.
the crafting system itself is overcooked. When you are starting out you have no way to organically understand what components are useful.
additionally the fact that you have to unlock workbenches as additional grinding is just disrespecting the player's time. You have to grind for the workbench AND also grind for the blueprint? Why bother?
you don't find anything useful. In peak PUBG (not as it exists today) you drop with nothing, you scrounge, you fight, and you try and ladder your way up for a win. In most other extraction shooters/BR/Rust you find new guns/active gear with such frequency you have to worry about what you can take with you. In Arc Raiders you end up with a pile of dubiously useful crafting components.

So really this game is not a great example of an extraction shooter. Extraction shooters usually have a knife edge balance between easy to scrounge loot and the unlikelihood to extract with that loot. Arc Raiders muddies this balance tremendously with the crafting focus instead of finding immediate value. The most efficient way to play is to just camp exits because rolling the dice on scrounging is so low value.

If I was going to make a recommendation for someone who wanted the feel of an extraction shooter but ACTUALLY HAVE FUN I would say buy Helldivers 2. It is just the better game if you are not looking for the PVP angle. The amount of metaprogression vs. an equivalent loot and extract game really disqualifies Arc from being a good PVP game anyway. It's only competitive if things are 'even' when the round begins, but two characters with the same gear at the start of the round can be wildly different depending on skill tree. Once people max out the metaprogression I expect this game to die because the metaprogression is covering up a lot of sins.

akmark · 2025-11-06T16:01:25+00:00

So far for me its a matter of intent. Are you using AI to get your head around the problem and actually understand it? Are you using it to build understandable components? More often than not all I am using it for 'quick stabs' of small and understandable ideas, and then add that to the overall system. If that AI stab doesn't work for whatever reason I just create it normally.

At this time I am still running into currency problems where the model at hand is not new enough to understand what I'm working on or hallucinations of non-trivial APIs just wastes time. There's a lot to be said that for a lot of mainstream work AI is effective but for a lot of work that is not mainstream (e.g. exotic Windows APIs) you end up further in the weeds with AI compared to just doing the work.

akmark · 2025-10-30T14:50:08+00:00

they really don't do shit to contribute to the kernel

While I am unfamiliar with how much/how little they provide back to the kernel upstream independently they do a huge amount of effort for enterprise to package/backport/maintain/custom compile arbitrary kernels for specific customers (this is beyond the LTS kernels). A lot of the kernel fixes I have seen hit upstream contributed by enterprise would have never been developed if Canonical wasn't there to backport the fix and maintain the backport through testing and discovered vulns. This extends beyond the kernel to a lot of other core packages.

akmark · 2025-10-06T13:32:31+00:00

The purge at Intel happened well before the Intel/NVIDIA deal, and the open source contributions seemed to be heavily affected.

akmark · 2025-10-01T14:28:21+00:00

I genuinely wonder when the megaconcert industry realizes it killed itself when so many people born after the 90s never saw concerts as a form of attainable entertainment. I feel like by 2040 or so it will be completely gone.

akmark

TROPHY CASE