For example, generally you'll be fired if you're not on time, regardless of whether "on time" is meaningful or connected to any real constraint. If there isn't a hard deadline, someone will pick an arbitrary one and decide that's what they need to be mad about that week. It could be that you just weren't on Slack at the moment they said "hey".

If it's not immediate, they'll note it down and weaponize it later. There's seemingly always someone like this in charge and there are only limited, temporary, or lucky ways around it.

If it's not specifically time, it's some other aspect of visibility that's never sufficient. Controlling people and organizations are built on an insidious lack of trust and the pursuit of measurability. This is why, imho, it's rarely worth doing more than the bare minimum, because you need 100x positive extra credits to compensate for even one petty mistake. Not being available in the middle of the night to fix a bug in the system gets you a negative mark in a performance review, while staying late to fix the bug gets you 0.01 positive marks.

Seems to me like if it's the option on the table, and you have a family to take care of, then it would absolutely be a starter. If there are other options, then there are other options, but if you're just starting it's fairly likely that you need to prepare yourself for a battle. I don't see how "this economy" makes that anything but more true. I don't even have kids but I sure as hell wouldn't be picky if I did and was just getting going.

What would be a non-starter is no job or no pay for work.

Problem is, I just don't have enough old crap, and if I did, I would have a hard time justifying the expense, because that money could maybe just go toward a more intimate tinkering process.

For everything else, I either haven't had any sufficiently interesting ideas, or they ended up not being worth pursuing with those tools or at all.

When I do have success that I'm happy with and care about, it's a slow process that I ultimately need to know the details of anyway, but otherwise it's a bunch of luckily narrow work-related scenarios with well-documented constraints. Nothing's really been that shocking though.

The shocking thing to me is how unrewarding most of the successful tasks have been, partly because they often create unnecessary work and partly because the type of thinking required to massage or evaluate the result is much less stimulating, and there's much more of it in aggregate. It's fine if it's something like generating a UI from scratch because that hasn't produced dopamine in a long long time anyway

Yes, but also some people are shockingly incurious and approach academia and life through a depressingly hollow transactional lens from the beginning. Though if it was there to begin with, there's a good chance it'll be stripped away through the structuring of courses to be measurable first and intriguing second

A job is one way to make a living, in which these ways may apply, but a job doesn't necessarily have to pay at all and can be entirely volunteer, if we're being pedantic. Jobs are often very bad ways to make a living these days.

Recently I upgraded my motherboard and tried reinstalling Win10 Pro, but couldn't activate it despite saving the product key. They have at least THREE obscure flows for re-activation depending on how it was originally activated. The license in my flow needed to have been bound to a Microsoft account that I never previously needed, because it ties itself to the hardware. I had to dismantle and rebuild with my old installation, activate it with my old motherboard on a Microsoft account that I wasn't planning to use to login with, then rebuild again with my new components, sign in to activate, and then disable sign in to be able to use a local user account. Insane.

152km/hr in a 60 zone, drunk, on film saying "I ain't stopping for no red lights", deliberately sped up as he was about the hit the guy, didn't stop afterward, left the scene, then called in to falsely claim the car was stolen, and had been previously convicted of sexual assault. 5 years less time served, 5 years after with no license. I guess the only way you could really top that list is if he continued on to say "hey lets hit that guy and see how far he goes"

True, but if you're only in the ecosystem as a mac user, in many ways it's felt like a mixed bag. I still wildly prefer mac over other operating systems, but if upgrades had a price, I think those sales would mostly go to iPhone users. Even at free, I'm yet to find a compelling reason to install Tahoe, and will probably just continue waiting until the next one.

For me, rather than cling to the notion that these are things I need to complete and should feel guilty about not having done so, I just started accepting that they either will be completed when the time is right if they're worth my focus, or they weren't meant to be completed and there's probably something better that's come along since starting. I usually keep them all in an archive as a timeline of tinkering and a record of how much time I didn't waste on trying to complete them

The opposite, but it doesn't mean the attention is held.

> ...or are these just difficult kids to manage in a room full of kids...?

If you remove "just", "to", and "of kids" then yes.

People—kids and adults—with severe ADHD struggle to manage in all sorts of rooms that others struggle dramatically less in, if they're undiagnosed and have no resources for dealing with it.

Sounds like something my Gen X dad, who put zero effort into helping me succeed, would tell me as I failed my way through all school with zero direction or ambition and convinced I wasn't capable of anything useful.

I won't claim more people probably think they have ADHD than actually do, and being bored disproportionately more than most in most situations is absolutely one of the symptoms, but it's a wildly incomplete trivialization of a set of debilitating difficulties that can/do carry long into adulthood. and is heritable.

I'm yet to experience this, but it reminds me of an interaction I'd regularly have with a younger friend I no longer spend much time with, who would take my in-real-life casual conversation prompts that attempted to engage him in inconsequential curious dialogue, and simply google the answers in front of me.

He'd sort of deliver that response in such a way that it seemed like he assumed I either didn't know the definition of some common term or fact and he was unlocking new information on my behalf, or that I thought he didn't know and revealed a possible weakness in his knowledge of trivia. In reality I was embarrassed by proxy because I had unintentionally provoked a smug, emotional response from someone who wasn't able to contend well with ambiguity, revealed how dependent they were on their phone, and who's first instinct was deeply uncharitable and lacking in curiosity. It led to some awkward situations where I had to explain that I wasn't trying to test them in a battle of intellect, but rather ask what they personally thought or how they used a term who's actual dictionary definition is rarely relevant to it's usage. I tried to find a way to adapt to this incompatibility by thinking about different ways I could communicate with this friend that would indicate my intention to basically just get them yapping more clearly, but never found a way that clicked.

I fear that dependence on various LLM chat tools will lead to more of this sort of problematic thinking and introduce increasingly challenging communication conflicts across otherwise not so distinct age groups. Banter that's intended to be playful will continue to devolve into two sides having no clue what the other means or if they're joking or exaggerating or what, linguistic flourishes, colloquialisms, or regional differences, will become more difficult to execute upon despite there being no intrinsic reason for an incompatibility to exist.

Less akin to knowledge of memes or slang, and moreso to the prevalence of new-irony among people under the age of 23ish who don't know any other type of irony and vice-versa with older -> younger. Things could get weird