People here think that they're much smarter than they actually are.

Another character drowns the journalist in a toilet.

It's particularly amusing because there are people quoting Neal Stephenson in this thread, ignoring the fact that when Stephenson tackles similar subject matter, he's very careful to make it clear that he's talking more about the cultural axioms which have a long-term effect on how people value learning and intellectualism. It's not even subtext, I've been reading The Diamond Age recently and very early on there's a line where a character clearly states that there's no coherent genetic theory of human intelligence, and the entire thesis of the book runs counter to that notion that intelligence is primarily genetic.

https://youtu.be/jbmq9P-8FiM

https://youtu.be/jbmq9P-8FiM

There is nothing in the movie that suggests that the decline in average intelligence is a result of cultural factors or education.

Wisdom is looking back at how much you liked Idiocracy and cringing at the fact that you gleefully and uncritically swallowed a eugenics tract.

Oops!

I think that if I were making something in 3D or I were more serious I'd use an engine, but I've found that I get more satisfaction from building tools than from learning how to use tools that other people have built.

I've never really been able to get into it either because it's sort of a paradox. If I agree, I feel bad enough about the actual issue that I'm not really in the mood to laugh, and if I disagree then I obviously won't like the joke anyways.

I absolutely do just "switch off" at 5pm. I sometimes work on programming things in my free time if I feel like it regardless.

I feel like, if your job is demanding more of you than a nine to five, and you don't thrive in that environment, you certainly have a right to complain or look for different work. I'm just surprised that it seems to be so common when all the work I've stumbled into in this field has been very reasonable.

And yes, obviously there's a difference between software dev and blue collar, or even other types of white collar work. I'm not blind to the fact that this is a particularly comfortable career, even if it's not as extravagant as it seems to have be a decade or so ago.

I guess I'm just surprised that there are so many apparently ground-down people in a place like this which you would imagine would be primarily populated with people in the software industry.

More stuff like that would be appreciated, though I don't know if their plans for the future will fit that definition.

Like, I don't live like a monk. I have a nice computer, a tv, my living space is furnished. But the transactional aspect of buying things always keeps me from just "shopping as entertainment" the way some people seem to enjoy doing. I don't like acquiring things more than I dislike spending money. I have to really want something, or need something to the point that doing without it is kinda a non-starter.

It's funny though, I realized that I generally don't enjoy cheating at games, even single player games, unless the cheats are amusing stuff like big head mode or whatever. I once actually cheated to reduce my character's level in dark souls because I'd accidentally allocated a bunch of points into a famously rather useless stat and, in that game, stat point allocation is permanent. To clarify, I knew it was useless, I had mismatched which row I was looking at when assigning points.

Which is still cheating, I suppose, given that it saved me the convenience of starting the character over completely.

It can be a bit wonky though, I regularly spot UI/UX decisions that seem to map more closely to what the developer is doing under the hood, or their own mental model of the problem, than what one might consider to be an intuitive way of interacting with the system.