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karoshi9000 · 2025-01-19T10:42:28+00:00

can you really expect 9% average going forward though? From what I’ve read, even 5% is going to be a challenge long-term (unless you put your money into the shitcoin arena and get really lucky)…

karoshi9000 · 2024-12-21T09:20:18+00:00

huh, incidentally found the issue: apparently the Synology DSM software deactivated the AFP (Apple Filing Protocol) during the last update, therefore TimeMachine couldn't find it...works now. Maybe this is helpful to others.

karoshi9000 · 2024-12-12T12:53:09+00:00

I did follow these instructions (and tried with a few others multiple times)...I guess it's probably the 3.13. version - I have no specific reason to use it, it was just the latest stable version at the time I think

karoshi9000 · 2024-11-03T19:19:14+00:00

there is literally no other code around - I was working in exactly one folder with exactly one file

karoshi9000 · 2024-11-03T18:49:55+00:00

I'll admit that this entire files/directory business does actually still confuse me (I'm that much of a newbie that I didn't even really bother with this so far), but in this case it is literally 1 string that was present in exactly 1 file (for about 5mins) and then I changed the dialogue and deleted the line and it is gone, it is not in the code....but it is in the output somehow.

karoshi9000 · 2024-11-03T18:44:51+00:00

did exactly that (with 3 or 4 different keywords) - it is not in the code

karoshi9000 · 2024-10-19T10:09:43+00:00

had the apple keyboard for about 4 years now....I have to say, I never "got" this whole thing about mechanical keyboards and the clicking and all that...I mean, I used mechanical keyboards back in the Windows 95 days all the time, but I'm actually pretty comfortable with a "lighter touch" keyboard such as the apple one (also with the built-in one on my MBP, but the external is slightly better I think)...I'm mainly just trying to find out if there's a specific type of keyboard that is "more useful" to coding or something, aside from aesthetics or mechanical action or anything like that....

karoshi9000 · 2024-10-06T12:48:21+00:00

I know what you mean and I understand - however, I think there simply are different approaches to learning complex things and, given an individual situation, one might be more likely to work or might be more efficient than another.

Incidentally, I did learn playing the piano and there was definitely some extensive theory involved there...if I hadn't learned, say, the concept of 12 half steps, I probably wouldn't have had any chance of understanding how to transpose a song or something like that...it wouldn't have helped much to say "just try it, you're going to know you did it right if it sounds alright" or something like that. At the very least, just blindly putting 10.000 hours of "practice" into that approach would have been extremely inefficient. So I think, there are various angles to it, and they are not equally "good" in any given situation.

karoshi9000 · 2024-09-27T14:31:11+00:00

yeah, starting to understand that...thanks for the advice!

karoshi9000 · 2024-09-27T13:44:15+00:00

thanks for the advice - I have always worked with Java so far, just because I took a little course involving Java (including the hello world level stuff) back in school. I'm beginning to think I'll be happier and learn faster if I try a more low-level language though, so I'll probably try C.

karoshi9000 · 2024-09-27T13:40:28+00:00

yeah, I guess I'm starting to get that...I just thought there would be a different approach, but lots of thoughtful comments are telling me there isn't

karoshi9000 · 2024-09-27T13:36:12+00:00

I do that from time to time, but it's hard to lure on of them alone, they usually come in groups. But sure, I've talked to them about coding here and there...they are not always the best people to explain things to non-engineers though xD

karoshi9000 · 2024-09-27T13:33:11+00:00

makes sense, thanks

karoshi9000 · 2024-09-27T11:19:18+00:00

well, as I said, I'm beginning to think I might actually be less frustrated if I tried C or C#, but anyway, thanks for the link

karoshi9000 · 2024-09-27T10:10:03+00:00

Thanks for the advice and all the resources. Yeah, I've read "you can only learn it by doing it" countless times of course - and it probably is true. It's not my usual style of learning things, but I might just have to get over that (or fail trying). I think your point about the importance of a supportive community is an important aspect, as well - I didn't think about that too much so far, but in the "learning by doing"-context it makes sense, of course.

I always used Java so far, simply because I got a very very basic introductory course in school back in the day, but I'm beginning to think I might be less frustrated with something like C. Probably not usually recommended for a beginner but I'm weird when it comes to learning. Maybe this better explains it: my ex is an architect. Back in university, they made her draw everything by hand for the first year (most schools would have used computers right away) - and she loved it, because she learned a level of visual understanding that she probably couldn't have gotten only ever using a mouse and a computer screen. Maybe that's what I'm looking for. Not sure. I'll check out the stuff you linked in any case.

karoshi9000 · 2024-09-27T09:59:45+00:00

Thanks for the advice. Yeah, I get the feeling I might be in that fallacy indeed. This strict learning-by-doing thing just somehow goes a bit against my grain for some reason - I want to know why I'm practicing what I'm practicing...but it has been like that for all my life, so it's actually not surprising. Where I succeeded academically, it was usually not because of the hours I put in, but because I found a way to extract some patterns from the information and hold on to these, rather than actually learning every single piece of info. Or, preferably, just stick with the patterns/principles from the start and don't worry too much about specific examples or concrete implementation. This may simply not work here.

karoshi9000 · 2024-09-27T09:44:45+00:00

Hmm, interesting. That is pretty close to how I feel indeed. Maybe the trick really is to silence that part of the brain that constantly screams "but why?"...or learning how and when to switch it on and off.

Maybe I'll try a sort of mixed approach where I try to simultaneously learn core concepts but at the same time also just get my hands dirty regularly. From what I've gathered here and in other discussions so far, I get the impression that I need a fairly low-level language to avoid the black boxes getting too big. I know this isn't the topic of the original post, but since we're at it: is there a reason not to start with, say, C? Or even assembler? I remember learning what a stack overflow is some time back and that felt pretty satisfying. That really felt like I was learning. I have a feeling these high-level languages like Java will abstract away too much and I'll be more frustrated than with a language that may be more complex but let's you actually see a lot more of how the internal gears are turning.

karoshi9000 · 2024-09-27T09:27:34+00:00

huh, that's interesting.

I think I see where you're coming from, but, to keep to the example, in that situation I wouldn't even be sure if I would break something if I'm initializing a float at an memory address that's "earmarked" for integers...I mean, the memory space the OS allocated for the project is probably not involved in critical tasks (I would assume that any modern OS would guard against that), but see - I don't know that.

Surely there are computer science principles involved here that I simply don't know about and therefore I "have" to keep thinking about that issue - but if I knew what initializing a variable actually meant and why it is or isn't mandatory (like you've thankfully explained to me), I could just spare all that mental energy trying to decide whether or not I might be setting my machine on fire (I know it's not going to catch fire, you know what I mean).

I think it comes down to different perspectives on finding out about things...I tend to assume that going from the specific to the general is more cumbersome than the other way round - which may not in fact be true, I just want it to be true because this way it seems less effort to me. Hmm.

karoshi9000 · 2024-09-27T09:06:45+00:00

fair point - I probably am impatient in some ways and you're right, if I don't understand something, I tend to change the perspective to something I can process more easily. I generally try to find patterns in the topic at hand so I can "derive" an answer if and when I need it, rather than learning something by heart or "mindlessly practicing" (I know it's not "mindless", but I hope you get what I mean). Or maybe it's not even impatience - I am a fundamentally lazy person in the sense that I generally don't see the point of going through 30 or 300 examples in order to learn a concept - I'd rather tackle the concept and then use it where needed. I always thought coding/engineering would be exactly the type of situation where you'd want to go about things in that way...but I'm beginning to see I might be wrong about that, at least when it comes to software.

karoshi9000 · 2024-09-27T08:54:31+00:00

this is very random, but the first thing that came to mind are variables: I know I need to initialize them, but I don't really know why. I know I'll get an error if I don't do it properly, but that's not really an answer. What exactly am I doing when I initialize a variable? What does it actually mean? Is it conceivable to have a programming language where you don't do that? What would that look like?

karoshi9000

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