It’s totally a matter of age. Kids these days have no idea how good they have it, and don’t realize they need to get off my lawn. Shakes cain in the air /s

We’re working on promoting that Stem Bolt. It recently got an excellent recommendation from Admiral Janeway.

I was always a PC gamer, and think the old, often modded, independently run servers were much more fun than the soul-less matchmaking I see on most modern games.

Absolutely. If one was lucky enough to have a buddy with a server setup, that was by far the coolest option.

At least he still outranks Ensign Kim.

There’s a lot of gamers in this thread too young to remember how overloaded and miserable the free console game servers were.

Microsoft was like “chuck us like ~$5 per month and we will put up enough servers so the games are actually playable”. At the time, it was the best deal available for console gaming.

Honestly an argument could be made it was the most economical way to play online, in general, at the time. The console cost was subsidized, and the online servers were arguably at-cost, and you really only needed to buy one copy of Halo to join the fun.

You just know that’s the last thing somebody saw…

“Follow my path and you’ll be fine.”

Later, at a Republic Tribunal:

“… and obviously no sane pilot on a training mission would ever consider attempting to navigate those obstactles without weeks of study in advance. And so I exhort the jury not to consider leniency, but to find the defendant guilty of first degree premeditated murder of their wingman pilot in training. The prosecution rests this - quite frankly open-and-shut - case.”

“When… This song… Is gone…!”

Was reading this to my SO, and was given a correction for Quark: gets Rom to pay Quark for the privilege of returning Quarks cart.

Those are both excellent points.

Hiring people is a big risk. Anything you can do to mitigate that risk (evidence that you’re someone they should hire) will increase your chances of being hired exponentially.

That’s a great summary. Well said.

Let your mentors know you’re looking for work, and how many hours you can work per week.

New programmers provide negative value, so there’s not a lot of demand.

I’m very good and studied hard, but my first couple of programming roles I got entirely because a mentor of mine recommended me to someone who took a chance on me.

Also keep adding code to your public GitHub. Two of my top developers today I originally hired directly away from their retail roles. One had a ton of academic coding experience and had just not yet landed the right job. The other was just getting started, but posted a ton of low quality homework code to GitHub so I could read it and know who I was hiring.

Edit: In contrast, one of my other top developers has one of the top CS degrees in the world. So that works too.

And more than one of my top developers have IT help desk experience. I have had excellent luck when hiring folks with IT Help Desk experience.

Edit 2: As someone else mentioned - your long term goal is to connect with an IT Recruiter that you trust, and work with them to get your resume, and GitHub, and/or binder full of code you wrote into shape. I’ve hired more than one candidate who admits the simply presented themselves exactly as their recruiter coached them to. And I’ve hired candidates I would have skipped, because their recruiter was someone I trust and they asked me to take a second look at a candidate who made a poor first impression.

Edit 3: Since this is for newbies, some information about recruiters: we pay the recruiter in addition to what we pay you. The recruiter’s typical pay for a rookie hire is around $50,000.00, if you stay for a full year. Half up front, in case you don’t stay.

A few things you should know about recruiters: they only need to make a few solid placements each year to earn a living. As a rookie, you’re the hardest to place, and the lowest layout when placed. But, programmers that are easy to place don’t move often, so recruiters may still have plenty of time for you.

The recruiter is probably mainly placing you the first time in hopes that you come back later when you’re worth big money. The initial payent is nice, but the real payment will be if/when you have 5 years experience and still work exclusively with them.

Hiring managers like me have recruiters we trust and reuse. If you can get recommended to a great recruiter, they will get you interviews at better places to work.

In contrast, there’s lots of mediocre recruiters out there. Don’t be afraid to switch to a new recruiter, if you have the opportunity, and your current recruiter isn’t getting you interviews.

I second the folks who recommended a Raspberry Pi and RetroPi variant. For no frills, just-start-playing, it can’t be beat.

Another option I haven’t seen mentioned yet, is Ubunutu with Steam. Thanks to the rising popularity of the SteamDeck, lots of great games run perfectly, with no fuss, under Steam on Ubuntu.

But again, with your target including a lot of retro games, a RetroPi is the smooth path. Most of your PS2 games will work fine with some fiddling. Your PS3 experience will be more bound by the current state of PS3 emulation, than by the power of the Raspberry Pi (though you should certainly plan to get the biggest supported model, and get a big cooling kit and overclock it.)

I’ve played various PS2 games with relatively little fuss on an overclocked Pi3 with a cooling kit.

For PS3 era games, I would just make the leap to Ubutnu and then just buy any that are Steam Deck Verified, through the Steam store. Some won’t be, but the ones that are should be a good time.

I, personally, don’t have the life spare cycles to mess with emulating unverified PS3 era games. PS2 era was still very hit and miss last time I bothered for an arcade machine build. I’m sure it’s doable, and might affect your hardware choice. Your best odds are probably Ubuntu, again - thanks to all the investment by Valve.

Pi has the power to do up through PS2 just fine, though last I checked the state of emulation for PS2 and PS3 wasn’t good yet, for the average hacker.

If this is your first time emulating, you’ll have a nicer time learning the ropes on RetroPi on an actual Raspberry Pi. Statistically, you’re not really giving anything up, because anything that doesn’t require insane levels of expertise and esoteric knowledge emulates perfectly on Pi.

Contrarily, is this isn’t your first emulation outing, or you’re down to go all-in down the rabbit hole; then build the whole PC around whatever you find emulates PS3 well, and the rest should be trivial to add.

What I think makes good programmers is having the ability to bash your head against your desk while debugging, but still walking away at the end of the day loving the job and problem solving.

Just quoting you for emphasis here, in case any of our newbies missed it. Well said!

Just provide a decent place to work. People will stay.

Exactly. Any employer that intends to provide a fair wage for fair labor doesn’t have this kind of bullshit contract. A TRAP clause is simply internentional premeditated abuse, and it should be prosecuted as such in the courts.

What a fantastic redition of those tradgic orphans!

I’m sure it would bring great joy, if their story was any less unfortunate!

Kindness can be learned. The difference between being genuinely kind and just constantly successfully mimicing what a kind person would do is - no difference at all, really.

Ultimately, I think people who started as natural assholes make the best kind people - beacuse we don’t just do what feels kind, but we have to examine the results of our attempts at kindness, and adjust if needed.

I’ll wait to get my hopes up until we find out if anyone can replicate their results.

I love that episode!

… But… Yeah. It’s not good. It’s kinda great. But not good.