>>12452 It's the greatest invention in the history of mankind. Fucking use it. Reconnect with friends, learn a new skill, sign yourself up for a clinical trial. Anything.
I'm a bit of a workaholic so when I was heavily involved with it and working all day and that I always felt as though I was missing out when I was back at home, despite having loads of hobbies too.
Now I'm taking time off to do those hobbies and such and I just feel like I'm not being productive, even though I'm doing loads of shit all for myself, just not making someone else some money. It's a weird way to think and I need to snap out of it, really.
>>12453 Buy suspect drugs in mass quantities from Chinese laboratories. Get involved in digital pyramid schemes. Track the deaths, last meals, and final words of death row inmates across the united states. Develop a new, entirely disturbing, and potentially illegal sexual fetish. Hail an Uber and visit a strip club. Don't forget to buy some coke off the bouncer on your way in. Meet vulnerable young single mothers on Tinder, fuck them in a vaguely disinterested way then make off with their purse before they're properly awake, not because you even need the money, just for the fucking hell of it. Try "The Internet" today!
Play a little racquetball.
Or wash your car.
Or cook dinner.
Or join a funk band.
Or travel to a foreign country
Or run for president.
Or talk to a member of the opposite sex.
Or lube your car.
Or host a weenie roast.
Or dig for buried treasure.
Or milk a cow.
Or have a yelling contest with your neighbor’s dog.
Or perform brain surgery.
Or paint a yellow line in the center of your driveway.
Or write your name in the snow.
Or teach basket weaving to clams.
Or sing Welsh folk songs at the bank.
Or plant trees on public property.
Or confuse the person next to you.
Or make a triangular table.
Or hop, skip, and jump.
Or ride a train.
Or organize your sock drawer alphabetically.
Or go bowling with you mom.
Or train potato bugs to do tricks.
Or make a quilt.
Or publish a magazine about pencil shavings.
Or eat lime jello with pineapple in it.
Or pave a freeway.
Or learn to draw.
Or take up photography.
Or learn to tell time.
Or photocopy money.
Or got out for pasta.
Or sew a dress.
Or bathe your iguana.
Or go fishing.
Or paint a stranger’s house in the middle of the night.
Or take up windsurfing.
Or change your hairstyle.
Or sharpen your whiteboard markers.
Or feed a toucan.
Or enjoy the sun.
Or do a crossword puzzle.
Or buy some cool clothes.
Or go to the beach.
Or play croquet with your dad.
Or water your plants.
Or build a dollhouse.
Or invite some friends over for salmon and white wine.
>>12459 These suggestions were just as annoying in the game as they are when the mods post them on /shed/ as a way of dismissing complaints about the site.
I get bored when I'm at work. Mostly because no root access at the work machine still managed to set up a pack of libraries for Python and Perl in ~ and automate a few tasks.
But then, working at a NOC, 'not boring' usually means stuff like half of the network unreachable, massive power failure at some beefy network node or something worse. Nay, I can see the value in boredom.
>>12467 I'm not heavily into programming so can you tell me, for example, why you've referenced Python and Perl in the same context - by which I mean, you've used two languages to do the same thing, so why is that? Can you not do everything in one language? Why do you need both?
Programming languages are designed for different purposes, have different design philosophies and have particular strengths and weaknesses. A large proportion of programming involves working on existing code rather than writing stuff from scratch, so you need to know a variety of different languages. If you're working with a team that prefers Perl, you need to know Perl; if you're working on a project that was written in Python, you need to know Python.
Python and Perl are both scripting languages, meaning that they're relatively easy to write but not particularly efficient in terms of processor power. They're generally used for small bits of "glue code" that join together different systems. Python is a relatively modern language and has a reputation for being very clear and easy to read. Perl is a more terse language, which allows expert users to write useful one-line programs but makes it harder to read.
If you're writing a program that needs to be as fast as possible (e.g. a computer game or an operating system), you need to use a low-level language like C or Rust. These languages are designed to closely match the hardware of the computer, so they're easy for the computer to process but harder for a human to understand. Languages like Java and Go split the difference - they're much faster than Python, but easier to write than C.
If you're writing a web application, you have to use Javascript (or a language that can be translated to Javascript) because that's the only programming language that web browsers understand. If you're writing an iPhone app, you have to use Objective C or Swift.
Fortunately, most programming languages use fairly similar concepts, so it's not very difficult for an experienced programmer to pick up a new language. The specific syntax of a programming language is relatively simple compared to the underlying abstract concepts. The core challenge of programming is figuring out how to break down a complex task into lots of small, precise, repeatable tasks; everything else is really just admin.
>>12468 Mostly because the interpreters were available on that machine and it's relatively easy to add more modules without root access if I need them.
The second reason is that I didn't know how to bootstrap pip (Python's package manager), how to install modules into my home directory and if the modules I needed were even available. Quite contrary with Perl.
The third reason is that I'm not really a programmer and don't know both languages even mildly decently.
