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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2020

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  • Those house prices sounds absolutely insane to me.

    I’m also in the UK, but I’m in the South East, so house prices are very high. Still managed to find a “cheap” house recently due to the location being a bit rough.

    For comparison, my house that I’m buying is £345k (it’s 2 bedrooms with a separate garage and 2 bathrooms). I saved up a £125k deposit by living with my parents for the longest time (I think it took me about a decade). The exception being for 3 years when I house shared - the rent was £325 per month with bills included, but my room was effectively a glorified cupboard.

    I will also say that I was saving lots and lots of money with my old job. I’m a software developer, so my salary was good (started off at £22.5k, went up to £45k with about 10 years experience and being a senior dev, then our company got bought out and my salary went up to £55k). A year later and I switched jobs as the annual salary increase was £150 (for the whole year). Ended up with a £75k salary w/ bonus, private healthcare, etc etc. I really lucked out at that moment.

    As to why I didn’t buy a house earlier with my deposit, there was two reasons:

    • I had saved up about £100k before for personal savings, then that money went to help a sibling (call this sibling A) with their property. My parents sold a property aborad to effectively give me back the money, but the money was split between me and another sibling’s bank account (call this sibling B) because of financial advice given by my uncle. What then happened was sibling B didn’t give me back the money and was being incredibly difficult about the money, and since they have a history of being difficult in general, I decided I was going to save that money instead.
    • Sibling A wanted to start their own business, but it effectively flopped for all sorts of reasons. They had amassed a loan of £15k, and I helped pay that off. This was while sibling B was being incredibly difficult.
    • Main reason: At the time, I didn’t know if I really wanted to stay at the job for so long, and if I did want to stay, I didn’t want to move into the area where my job was - despite the convenience, the area was incredibly rough - almost GTA like (and that is no exagerration). I didn’t know where I wanted to live, and the places I would be interested in, I effectively had no clue as I was living with my parents at the time.

    So yeah, buying a house in the South of UK isn’t easy at all. It requires a ton of patience and luck.





  • I have a MacBook Pro which is stock macOS.

    Doing software development for nearly a decade, macOS combines that ease of using widely used software tools with the stability of macOS that seems quite rare with Linux (especially in the long term, when upgrading across new OS versions). Also, things like being able to consistently sleep and wake up and my m1’s battery life keeps me on macOS.

    With that said, I also have a thinkpad with pop! OS on it. It’s nice, but I have this issue that I can’t alt-tab like I can on windows thanks to gnome. It only alt-tabs the window group, rather than individual windows, and it drives me up the bend.




  • Several things:

    • Owned by for profit company
    • Browser engine is dominant
    • Said company is in the ad business, so they don’t have the best incentives for privacy
    • Said company are well known for pulling stunts to get people using their browser (i.e. using web rendering techniques that is fast on their browser but painfully slow on others)
    • Having a monopoly in an area is bad for us users

    Meanwhile, I’m glad folks on here are very pro-Firefox as well as not shitting on Chrome users. I was afraid it was going to be thls (except replace “invented Comic Sans” with “uses Chrome”) https://achewood.com/2007/07/05/title.html



  • Lots of engagement. One of the things that kills communities is people too shy/afraid to say something, and/or they just read posts and not contribute “content” like comments.

    One of the smart things Reddit did was gamify the whole posting/commenting system with karma. Sure, it lead to a lot of really stupid and petty online drama, but it helped build the website where people engaged in it more because folks like seeing numbers go up.

    I feel like lemmy needs a similar system, but I am aware that it can and will lead to some low quality posts/comments.










  • I know there are a lot of naysayers about the AI powered writing, and honestly for Ubisoft I can 100% get it, but if it wasn’t for GTA Definitive Edition I would be seriously worried about AI in art.

    I don’t think AI will come close to replicating a decent script written by an incredible writing team (like GTA/RDR’s writing that blends personal issues with politics and philosophy amongst other things). But for things like barks? Sure.

    Hopefully, AI powered tools will also help reduce crunch. I don’t think it will, but I hope it does help.