I once interviewed at the London office of a US based company. The best part was when they took me to lunch... I asked the young American what he was going to do on the long holiday weekend. He said they have to work. Lol. No thanks!
Hobby projects on super old / free hardware was/is fun. I remember using dumpster desktops as a student. I could SSH to my home PC from school. Ran a webserver. Even wrote C code to generate HTML for a website to host my photos. Fun times.
All my current desktops are ~8 year old corporate cast-offs.
I've seen a few stories of murders where the "smart" criminal turned their phone off during the exact window the crime took place. That and being seen at the scene of the crime was used as evidence.
So the intent part is definitely a thing if they simply turn off their phone.
My wife is also T1, diagnosed a couple years back with a week in ICU. She pulled through and now has a CGM and pump.
What really surprised me was her blood sugar rockets up when she has video meetings with a certain difficult colleague. While other chilled colleagues have no such effect.
That made me wonder if interacting with difficult people causes more physiological changes than I realised.
Epinephrine causes the body to release sugar into the bloodstream - it's one of the reasons you get shaky when your blood sugar gets low (if you're not T1DM at least) - your body is attempting to increase blood sugar by epinephrine. So in reverse, stressful situations that cause the release of epinephrine increase blood sugar.
There's a similar issue with e.g. running as a T1DM (as I understand it, not being one) - when you're running, your body will pump out sugar, but when you stop running, it doesn't stop instantly, so your blood sugar can spike high post-exercise. Or you can run out of sugar and crash hypoglycemic.
It's amazing that CGMs exist that can, to some degree, compensate for these things, but man the body's autoregulation on 50 different axes is fascinating.
There are observable changes in the structure of the brain when people take up meditation. Not to get too crass, but we are the meat in our heads and bodies.
I'm not into mediation, but I watched something that said the brain scans of meditating experts resembled someone having a seizure or something. But the person with sat quietly.
I'm not drawing any conclusions. But I found it fascinating.
Sorry to hear about what happened to your daughter.
I read a really terrible story years ago, a daughter was sunbathing in the driveway on a lounger, father comes home and parks... on his daughter, who is then paralyzed.
In games QA, the deadlines are fixed and development creeps into QA time. So you get less QA time than you originally planned. If you're lucky, a patch will fix some bugs.
In non-games QA, if development takes too long, you typically get an extra sprint to test the changes.
In the games industry QA is considered an entry level job with little respect from other departments.
In non-games testing, QA is a career that pays double and is usually a respected part of the development process.
Basically, I would support the claim that QA could be improved generally across the board in the games industry.
Well, the places that have QA people tend to respect them. But having QA people at all is not very common.
Also, I have never seen any place where they get double of a developer's salary. They usually get a bit less than a developer of the same seniority, with enough variance for some places to pay a bit more.
I have no idea why games have those fucked-up development practices where dropping features or extending deadlines are prohibited (ok, I have some ideas, but little confidence on them). But it's not only QA that is degraded by them. Every single aspect of the development suffers.
Sorry about the confusion.
Games QA tends to pay around minimum wage. So similar to working in a supermarket.
Testing any other software tends to pay atleast double minimum wage. But less than a developer salary.
Obviously this is a very general statement but that has been my experience.
I'd heard deadlines couldn't be extended due to console certification timelines. But I think a bigger problem is poor project management and waterfall development methodology... add the fixed deadline and you've got a recipe for a buggy under tested game.
Relative to QA in the gaming industry I assume. I'm pretty sure (though I'm making significant assumptions, apply pinches of salt as appropriate) our testers are on less than our “standard” developers, certainly not more (though I think more than the junior/grad level), and that this holds for places friends work at.
How much “a respected part of the development process” holds true varies a lot in my experience, and depends on your PoV. A lot of places consider QA to be much less skilled work, a step (maybe two) above shelf-stacking, but still consider it vital to project success and needing enough thinking & understanding that it is far from all automatable.
> QA is a career that
In terms of career, I get the impression that QA management is much more respected and paid, but that there is comparatively less demand for people of those higher positions so upwards movement can be slow/difficult. This is one of the reasons why a lot of people who start in QA move sideways into development: there is greater opportunity for moving up.
I had a conversation with my wife a few years back, about how a lot of things that are deemed acceptable or situationally appropriate are cultural. And sugared-breakfast-cereal vs real food came up.
My conclusion was, cereal is cheap and sugar is addictive. Better to take the time to eat a good non-processed-food breakfast.
Until many years ago, I had been obese for many years and I had been believing that nothing that I could do was able to change that, due to many previous failed attempts.
Then I have made a very detailed analysis of everything that I was eating and I have begun to weigh myself every day at the same hour and in the same conditions with high resolution scales, to be able to assess the effect of the changes in my diet.
After replacing the junk food that I was buying with food cooked at home from raw ingredients, after a year I have reduced my weight to two thirds of the initial weight and then I have kept it constant for the next two decades.
The worst offenders among the junk food that I had to completely eliminate from my daily intake, had been fruit juices and fruit yogurts and breakfast cereals, all of which contain excessive amounts of sugars, regardless of producer.
Now, instead of breakfast cereals, I eat at breakfast home-made bread (baked quickly in a microwave oven), made of pure wheat flour, without any additives.
I was a very obese guy in my early twenties and had never actually looked at the caloric content of what I was eating. Realizations like "the fries at in and out can be more caloric than the burger" blew my mind. Same for the tortilla being a huge percentage of the calories in a burrito. In Scott pilgrim Vs the world his exclamation of "bread makes you fat?!?!?" Was very relatable! Glad you found a system that works for you.
> cereal is cheap and sugar is addictive. Better to take the time to eat a good non-processed-food breakfast.
Cheap/easily available, tasty/desirable thanks to sugar, trivial&quick to make and eat when time is at a premium - that sounds perfect in general, doubly perfect when you're trying to ensure kids eat something relatively nutritious before school. I imagine that's why cereals stuck around - it's the "trick kids into drinking milk" plus energy booster for school children.
(Also, sure, it's "better to take the time to eat a good non-processed food breakfast", but most people have neither the time nor money for that.)
Traditional bread or a cereal porridge microwaved in a few minutes from pure unsweetened cereal seeds or flakes are more nutritious and much cheaper than breakfast cereals.
Unlike breakfast cereals, they do not contain sugars, but when eaten simultaneously with sweetened milk, there will be no noticeable taste difference. When you sweeten the milk yourself, the amount of added sugar is normally far smaller than the unbelievably high amounts typical for breakfast cereals.
Why do apple charge a premium but give the lowest storage and ram they can get away with (at least for the base models)... I would genuinely like to know. Especially now that it's all onboard.
If I was charging through the nose I'd at least solder a few extra nand chips out of an ethical desire to give a full-fat product for the premium price.
I know Dell do the same thing though. If you want extra ram... it'll be 3x what Amazon will sell at. But apple charge a bigger premium for the base product I feel.
