OpenStars

Regexps are awesome! And also not at the same time:-P. 🎉 Congrats👏!:-)

Keep in mind that many math teachers are incompetent at their jobs - some of that may have had little to do with you.

Though you are correct that math does involve patience, a willingness to fail often until you eventually get it right, and a logical progression of steps where at each stage you keep track of the results of previous steps.

I’m saying that you can most likely do it! Though it may be frustrating, especially at first, while you sharpen those skills that math should have taught you but bc of cheapening out in education, you may have skipped over. It’s all up to you now though… my advice is that even if it takes you 10 to 100 times longer than someone else to do some little thing, so the fuck what, the important thing is that you can do it! (And if you practice, it gets a heck of a lot easier over time) I love this quote (from C.S. Lewis):

Don’t judge a man by where he is, because you don’t know how far he has come.

:wq will save and then exit, while :x will save only if the file has been modified and then exit, and then there’s ZZ that does the same as :x, plus there are probably others:-)

Also, submit daily hourly progress reports providing a detailed accounting of the steps you are taking to work on this. But please, no more than half a sentence, bc I won’t be reading them anyway.

It is good to start with something other than a daily driver, so that such problems don’t hold you back as much - e.g. an older machine, or as others mentioned dual booting.

Some thoughts:

If there is something you see that is missing - particularly documentation - then perhaps that is an excellent place to start? The older devs may have just been waiting for someone like you to come along and could be ecstatic to hear that you want to make that. Maybe they used/continue to work together in a company or are old friends or sth and did not need that, so you could break the project wide open, making it easier for everyone who comes after you, possibly also changing the very culture of the project and encouraging the more senior devs to write documentation as well, as they make new things or solidify an existing foundation before extending into new territory. And there are so many forms of documentation - Pre/Post conditions, listing dependencies/interactions, plus overall description of assumptions made - that even if some of that exists, the project could perhaps still benefit from adding more, especially from the perspective of a newer team member.

Do not neglect the “people” side of things - maybe try to connect to some of the more senior devs on Discord or wherever they are first? Like on the plus side they could give you pointers, tell you what you can ignore, send you links to documentation that would have been hard to find on your own, etc. Seriously: imagine spending 6 months writing documentation for an enormously-complicated aspect of the code (like a major, central class + all of its dependencies), only to see the entire thing discarded & replaced, and you find out only then that it was always intended that way from the start. (still not a deal-breaker, b/c most of that “6 months” would be you learning stuff and getting familiar with generalities, so not entirely wasted, yet not entirely productive either if you could have been told to have picked a different entry point into the project) While on the minus side, if you see that they are just flat-out idiots, then you can abandon the project now and move on - that is a thing that can happen, and it is better to know ASAP than to only really be confronted by that a year or two in.:-(

Perhaps also consider your “fit” for the specific project. If you are good at many things, but not at the specific things involved there, then there will be a greater cost for you to work in that area, and you will spend more time “learning” and less time “contributing” (plus, how much time will people be willing to devote to helping you do the former, when you have done none of the latter yet?). Ngl, depending on the number and styles of languages involved - e.g. a script that calls an optimized C++ library that then feeds data into making an SQL query that uses a REGEXP into a database that has literally zero documentation anywhere… and so on - and your prior amount of experience with each of them, could take a good several YEARS to catch up, as only a side-project. Even if your expertise could help them - e.g. if you are great at UI/UX while the senior devs are more full-stack but almost exclusively focused on the back-end side - there is still the matter of you needing a way to deliver your contributions to them, i.e. understanding the existing codebase enough to be able to modify it to implement your ideas.

I hope this helps!:-)

Why does that look like the longest handgun I have ever seen in my life? :-P

Your comment falls prey to a binary fallacy, aka false dilemma. It is possible for both to be true at the same time. The immediate issue is that OP feels bad. The is indicated by the very first words in the very first sentence, as well as the start of pretty much every single sentence after it:

I am fucking scared of the … nightmare … Im also sick of and hate the … I dont wanna know how…

So instead of assuming that I had not heard any of this from OP, and was responding to part (the major aspect imho) of what they said, you instead flew off on a tangent, assumed that I had missed all the emotional language entirely, and redirected (ironically, exactly what you accused me of, it is amazing how often that occurs) into how I somehow do not believe that privacy violations so much as exist anywhere in the world… really? I suggest that you reexamine your premise. But do as you please, ofc.

For the record, I never used words remotely close to “stupid” (in my mind I was envisioning things like “take charge of your destiny!”), I never suggested that OP take drugs to escape/deal with the pressures of life, nor did I offer thoughts of suicide, I never accused them of personal health problems, nor did I mitigate the seriousness of the situation, etc. Instead, I offered practical solutions for REAL-WORLD issues, and advice on how OP can reclaim their sanity.

Maybe you simply blocked anyone that ever disagreed with you on Reddit? Or else your mod did that for you in all of your “safe spaces”. Feel free to block me too btw - I think we would both benefit from that actually, if this is how conversations with you would go in the future.:-)

My view of this conversation, fwiw:

OP: Lions exist and keep eating people!

Me: Have you thought about carrying a gun with you whenever you go out into the jungle… or just do not go there anymore?

You: Stop bullying OP, you big poopy-pants meanie!!:-(

(Also, speaking of redirecting the conversation, I see that you offered no advice to OP of your own so… yes actually, it is odd, weird even, how I have seen several of these kinds of comments on lemmy recently, responding to a post that talks about real issues with severe social/political/economic ramifications by reducing the commenter to having somehow ignored the OP and being extremely unproductive in their response, while simultaneously offering nothing productive of their own, thus taking the issue off on that weird tangent - I really wish people would stop doing that, you know what I mean!?)

hacking itself into…

If you will take a friendly criticism meant to be helpful? As the ancient philosophers mentioned, you cannot control the world, only yourself. Language such as this is biased and shows that you lack understanding of the phenomena involved. You hate it bc you fear it, maybe, even while you do not know precisely what it is. Like what exactly can they do with a phone once they have access, what are the limits, what are the supposed benefits even, and most important, what are the ways around it, and yet what hidden costs are associated with circumventing it? You seem to feel that you are trapped, that you lack power - and yes, you are and you do, but also… so very much not at the same time!!!

Like for protesting, simply do not take a phone, and instead bring something like a walkie talkie, or even arrange visual cues such as flags, bandanas, a particular style of hat (red = cops are near, whatever), done, problem solved. Spend some time learning about the things you care about, and separate yourself from the “sheep” mentality that expects everything to be spoon-fed to you 100% of the time.

Or else go the other way and lean into it, realizing that using a mobile device is nothing at all like using something you “own”, and instead you “rent” your time on the cell tower network, so whoever owns & controls that gets the ultimate say in how they want it done. “Engagement media” aka click bait articles never seem to get around to presenting the full picture of what is happening. Like, you do not control that, and never ever will, but ultimately they do take fairly good care of people. People that do not go to protests even have little to fear, unless one springs up around them, and even then all that happens is…what? You still have full control over your device, except they can also ping it, maybe turn on the camera? (Inside your pocket what will they see or hear?)

Either way, you will be happier once you’ve resolved your intention of how you want to live your life. Right now you feel the stress of being on the fence, wanting the best of all worlds, but it will take sacrifice and effort to achieve a fraction of what you want, so defining what that even is can be the first step towards achieving your goals. e.g., coming here rather than Reddit should have helped:-). Now, spend time reading to help you define your next actionable step.

Nice try, bot! :-P

(Edit: I want to boost your comment, but I don’t want my record to show that I boosted a comment like THAT!:-D)

Test: if it says “hey guys, remember how great Reddit was, we should totally go back!?” - then it’s a bot:-P.