I'm quite the opposite: the more light, the better I am (especially now in the northern hemisphere December!). After painting my office walls with a reflective white and putting additional lamps on it, my productivity increased significantly (because the depression I felt inside the office went mostly away!).
In fact, my whole house has this problem: lots of rooms don't have light at the ceiling so I have to keep using these floor lamps that never seem to solve the problem for real, but if I want to add lamps at the ceilings I'll have to break drywalls and repaint everything, so I'm on an never-ending quest to improve lighting at my home.
While WhatsApp is not very much used in the US, in some other countries such as Brazil it is basically the primary form of "phone" communication. It is everyone's default text, voice and video message platform. People don't ask if you have WhatsApp there, they just assume it. You talk to your Bank/Investor manager using WhatsApp. You order pizza through WhatsApp. Customer Support for services is WhatsApp bots that send you to the correct places. If I don't have WhatsApp, I can't voice chat with my mom, she won't see her grandkids. If you have any sort of business, you need WhatsApp.
And yes, I do have Signal installed, and there are only 2 people who talk to me through it (one being my partner).
Phone carriers got too greedy charging for every single SMS message and phone call, WhatsApp took over when smartphones became popular.
But isn't it a timebomb waiting to blow up eventually? Like, Meta fucks something up with it and there is nothing you can do.
IIRC South Korea used to be fully depedent on a horrendous AcriveX applet running only in Internet Explorer for all their online services, yet they eventually managed to get rid of it. It should be possible here as well.
If WhatsApp does something really bad tomorrow, the population will probably migrate to Telegram very quickly, as it seems to be the 2nd most popular app for the category there.
There was a time where IRC was the most popular way to chat, and then MSN became IM default. Then people 'pinged' with BBOS. At one point, WhatsApp became the default, and just now Signal got popular, [1] thanks to Donald Trump.
Besides the arguments other people gave, delegating the 'everyday tasks' to this other person takes time. You'll have to invest some hours to save some hours. If they wanna do stuff for you, you have to give them the information and resources they'd need to do that. For a lot of stuff, it may be faster to simply do it yourself.
For example, I "delegate" tax preparation to an accountant, but the amount of time I spend giving them the information they need and answering their questions is probably 70% of the amount of time I would spent filling the tax myself. If my situation wasn't so complicated, I would deal with it myself (I hire them for the risk mitigation regarding my incompetence, not for saving time).
Perhaps it's just that xbox is irrelevant, when you have PC and Playstation?
To me, Xbox is that video-game you get when you ask for a Playstation and your parents don't understand video-games. Their versioning scheme even helps make sure the parents fail to purchase the latest generation.
C is still highly used for low-level system software development: OS stuff like drivers, libraries, compilers, databases, software that runs in specialized small hardware, etc. C++ is for those slightly-higher abstractions that still require a lot of performance, like video-games and some of the former. Some stuff is getting very slowly replaced by Rust, but it will still take a long time for Rust to corrode the C/C++ market share in the lowest level stuff.
Getting a check every 2 weeks (and other benefits, like Health Insurance) is what motivates me. I spend about 8 hours per day Mon-Fri contributing to open source projects.
(I mean, I don't do it only because of these reasons, I'm a true believer of Open Source, I believe it is the more superior development model for a more civilized age, but it's kinda hard to argue against a paycheck)
There is nothing wrong with getting a paycheck to be able to eat. I spent a roughly 2 year period after college between 2012 and 2014 where I had no job and just worked on OSS exclusively without any compensation beyond nerd credit (and a small credit Google sent me for their online store to buy swag after one of their employees nominated me for an OSS award).
My OSS work turned out to be a great resume builder that opened opportunities for me that far exceeded what I would have had if I had gotten a job as a junior developer straight out of college. The mentorship by the ZFSOnLinux and Gentoo communities was fantastic and helped me mature into a senior level developer rapidly. :)
That said, it is great when you can do worthwhile work and be paid for it. It is a double win.
Well, my local library has not only books, but also video-games, movies, series, board games, toys, pressure washers, popcorn machines, parachutes (!!!) and even a chess club.
In fact, my whole house has this problem: lots of rooms don't have light at the ceiling so I have to keep using these floor lamps that never seem to solve the problem for real, but if I want to add lamps at the ceilings I'll have to break drywalls and repaint everything, so I'm on an never-ending quest to improve lighting at my home.
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