Mojave

My mortgage is significantly less than my last apartment down the road. $2700 vs $2100. Same size living space (1000sqft, 2bed), an extra basement, and I get to live in a marginally more affluent area. That difference in monthly payments more than covers monthly housing maintenance costs. And property tax is already included in that $2100 mortgage, which is how it is usually handled in my state.

And you get equity instead of throwing away your income to a faceless real estate corporation for no gain. Owning a house is 100% better in every way, unless you need to quickly move for some reason.

But even then, it's rare to see a house be on the market for more than a month, MAYBE two before getting sold. You can move out on a couple months notice, instead of having to wait for your annual lease to run out.

But when you do move, you sell your house for ✨ profit ✨ because the housing market only goes UP for some retarded reason.

I've helped three friends and coworkers navigate buying their first house in the past couple years. They are all better off financially for it.

I don't, it's strictly better than renting

I am a tech consumer and enthusiast first. I am a corporate shill sellout second. I wish for bad practices in the tech community to die, even if it's my own company doing it.

My concern as an engineer is that the product gets made well. I have no say or control over how the business cretins and marketing scumbags decide to destroy the company through terrible unethical practices like charging SaaS for completely self-contained software.

The short term view is that you need to keep a company afloat. Businesses should fail if they deliver products in awful ways. Yes, if the company fails, I will lose my job, and that is okay. It would be through no fault of my own, or really even the customers who wouldn't pay for my company's product. It would be the fault of the business decisions that were made. And the product landscape would then open up after my company's failure. For example, if Adobe would finally fucking die then we may actually see better products on the PDF, and photo/video editing market. No more monopoly on sub-par creative cloud products.

The more realistic long term view is that software engineers will be okay if their company fails. The overwhelming majority are smart, get paid extremely well, and exist in a field that needs their manpower. They will be able to find a new job much easier than other fields. The tech community will not be okay long-term if bad companies cannot fail.

I am a programmer, and I get paid whether or not the product is bought. Shovel your dogshit somewhere else.

Ask your company to pay for the certs. At best you get free certs and can then leave them and make more money somewhere. At worst they say no.

Going from zero certs to getting my Sec+ landed me a better job with a new company and nearly doubled my income. (Cloud architecture engineer). Can't speak to any other certs.

For every hour of work/coding I do, there is probably 4 to 5 hours of waiting for shit to automatically compile, fetch, build, release, apply, get reviewed, approved, and deployed. The downtime is immense, I spend it helping other people with shit or planning company potlucks (I don't work for Microsoft).

It's hard to find an email service that doesn't ask for a phone number now a days. Even shit ass Proton mail does it now

It might not be generative AI, but it is still primitive AI that drives the mapping of the physical streamer's body to the animated cartoon body

Except companies have sued people for web scraping.

https://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/linkedin-sues-after-scraping-of-user-data

Even web scraping for research purposes, not for competitive purposes.

https://www.engadget.com/2016-05-17-publicly-released-okcupid-profiles-taken-down-dmca-claim.html

They obfuscate their traffic by randomizing user agents, so it's either add a global rate limit, or let them ass fuck you

Data, network bandwidth, and CPU/Processing time from essentially every website in the world, and when you're paying for cloud power to run your website the cost of webscrapers running a train on your digital asshole adds up QUICK.

It's why normal human being people get sued to shit for webscraping data from certain companies who care. But companies don't get sued because go fuck yourself. Kill bytedance.