If I really want to play Apex or Battlefield I’ll fire up my dual drive dual boot Windows, and in the meantime, no more Microsoft spying on me, forced Windows updates and reboots at random times, ads in my Start menu, Xbox apps and other bloatware, etc

As a kid who was a voracious reader, also called a geek by myself (cringily lol) and by others, some quotes that resonated then and still do now:

> Geek kids read many more words than they speak. As a result, when geek kids do talk, they talk like a book.

> They use fully formed sentences, complete with subordinate clauses; if you listen hard, you can almost hear semicolons and parentheses.

> Many geeks, though, speak with "-v" turned on

> In fact, many geeks are so offended by the very idea of telling others what to do that they spend all their lives in the declarative voice, and never use the imperative voice at all. These are the geeks who recoil from moving into management.

Dee's article "The Nihilism of the Mass Shooter" (written in 2022, even) (https://default.blog/p/the-nihilism-of-the-mass-shooter) provides more specifics than the generalities in this op-ed. I'm a regular reader, so it's easy for me to see, but I believe that her passion about investigating and reporting on these things is visible even to a new reader. It's clear to me that she actually spends time looking at the sources, e.g. there's a link in the article to one of her sources, a pdf of the law enforcement report on a shooter from Parkland.

The extent of my experience has been being able to replace functions like convert_uint32_to_float and convert_uint32_to_int32 by using templates to something like convert_uint32(input_value), and I didn't feel like I really got much value out of that.

My team has also been using CRTP for static polymorphism, but I also feel like I haven't gotten much more value out of having e.g. a Thread base class and a derived class from that that implements a task function versus just writing a task function and passing it xTaskCreate (FreeRTOS) or tx_thread_create (ThreadX).

Typed compile-time computation is nice, though, good point. constexpr and such versus untyped #define macros.

[0]: https://www.etlcpp.com/

I've definitely learned a lot, and I like the portability of CMake for cross-platform use (our team uses all 3 of Windows, Mac, and Linux). My experience sounds much like yours: there've been a lot of times where using the vendor's flavor of Eclipse-based IDE (STM32CubeIDE, Renesas e2studio, etc) would have saved us a lot of discovered work, or extra work adapting the "happy path" to CMake and/or C++.

Using C++ and/or CMake is fine when it's part of the happy path and for simpler things e.g. STM32CubeMX-generated CMake project + simple usage of HAL. For more complex things like including MCUboot or SBSFU, etc, it's forced me to really dig in. Or even just including FreeRTOS/ThreadX, we've created abstractions like a Thread class on top -- sometimes it's nice and convenient, others it feels like unnecessary complexity, but maybe I'm just not used to C++ yet.

One clear, simple example is needing to figure out CMake and Ninja install. In an Eclipse-based IDE, you install the platform and everything Just Works(tm). I eventually landed on using scoop to install CMake and Ninja, which was an easy solution and didn't require editing my PATH, etc, but that wasn't the first thing I tried.

In addition to the short checklist, the author has a lengthy blog post describing its implementation in his life: https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/

One thing I did recently was create a one-off script with functions to exercise a piece of equipment connected to the PC via USB, and pass that to my coworkers. I created a `main.py` and uv add'ed the library. Then when I wanted to use the script in the REPL, I just did `uv run python -i main.py`.

This let me just call functions I defined in there, like `set_led_on_equipment(led='green', on=True)` directly in the REPL, rather than having to modify the script body and re-run it every time.

Edit: another idea that I just had is to use just[0] and modify your justfile accordingly, e.g. `just pything` and in your justfile, `pything` target is actually `uv run --with x,y,z ipython`

Edit edit: I guess the above doesn't even require just, it could be a command alias or something, I probably am overengineering that lol.

[0]: https://github.com/casey/just

Thanks for the advice, I know there's not really a "perfect" solution, I was just curious about how you've approached it in your own life so I appreciate you sharing.

To your last point, I'm feeling much better when not pushing myself so hard to be social but the question I'm grappling with now is somewhat selfish but about how to make sure I have support? E.g. I had a friend who just went through a cancer diagnosis and a lot of us friends and his community rallied for him. It also made me wonder about what happens if I get very sick, or lose my job and don't have a professional network to reach out to or personal/friendship support, or just if my car breaks down at 1am or something, or just being very lonely without real close friends.

How are you reconciling this sort of thing in your own life?

Edit: the subtext I’m speaking of is of submission and domination through implicit or explicit coercion. I’m not speaking of sub/dom with connotations of mutual enjoyment and consent, as can be the case in real or fictional situations of romance in general or even specific kinks like BDSM. I may be called sexist for this but my perception is that women can and do enjoy the latter (as the popularity of books like you linked imply) and greatly dislike the former

Like I said, I can't recommend that series now that I have a more mature perspective. But I can't imagine that a book written by a misogynistic author with explicit themes of female submission to male authority obtained by use or threats of physical and sexual violence would be particularly appealing to women in general, let alone women who have grown up in a culture that has in recent times had much more acknowledgement of such things, e.g. MeToo, more widespread conversations about toxic masculinity, the oppression of women by physical force and the male-dominated hierarchy that projects that force.

If you disagree and think that young women (and enby people) would find such books appealing though, I'm interested to hear why.

I grew up obsessively rereading Redwall, Pendragon, RA Salvatore’s stuff, Ranger’s Apprentice, Enders Game, Tyrant of Jupiter, Maze Runner. Like you said, the me of now can’t recommend things like Tyrant, but still I can’t imagine that would have appealed to any of the girls I knew at that time, let alone the young women of today.

By the same token, although I read Twilight and Hunger Games, I never was obsessed like the girls in my classes were. I can’t imagine that boys today are particularly interested in A Court Of Thorns and Roses and the other spiritual successors of Hunger Games, Divergent, Twilight, etc.

To GP’s point, “guys” is interesting to me; it feels like a U-shape where people who don’t “get it” think it’s non-gendered, as do people who are very tuned in online (streamers, gaming spaces -which lean heavy male anyway -, highly online twitter types, etc) where cultural trends move and spread quickly. Then there’s kind of the middle I see, think HR activist types (acknowledging that HR does not always mean activist and vice versa) - clued in enough to follow the ideological trends, not quite enough to sense the ongoing shifts in real time. To be a bit reductive, I’d sum it up as something like people carrying the cultural context with them of the 2000s, the 2010s, or the 2020s