I am an all-rounder programmer with decades of experience in many areas, available for freelance work. I'm up for:
- game development
(I would love to help out with weird custom engines and games)
- server-side code
- scientific applications
- core languages: C, C++, PHP, Javascript, some C# and Lua
- experience with: OpenGL/WebGL/HLSL, Cuda, SIMD
- performance optimization of existing code
- working in custom codebases
- researching solutions to algorithmic challenges
- web stuff: Websocket brokers, server-side rendering, vanilla JavaScript web apps, Three.js, Pixi.js
Hi Udo, ich bin ebenfalls Freelancer in Deutschland! Eine Frage: Deine Tagesrate erscheint mir als Anfänger sehr hoch, kriegt man sowas wirklich bezahlt?
Hi, well it's probably not a good rate when you're just starting out. But I'm in my forties now, and it's basically an ongoing auction for my time that's driving up the price gradually. I have no opinion on whether or not it's "worth" it, it's merely what I can get.
Since I'm also working on my own projects, I don't usually work a full time equivalent or anything like that. Pricing might be different if I had to fill all my time with work.
Let's say I can fill 10 days per month with freelancing, that's 50% occupancy. After taxes and costs that boils down to about 3k per month of income - roughly equivalent to a mid-tier job in Germany. Again, if you're just starting out, your calculation might look very different.
But if there is one piece of advice I can give: gravitate towards higher-paying clients, even if the work is not as interesting or more demanding. Higher-paying clients in general tend to be more appreciative and more competent, on top of the immediate advantages for your wallet. Only take on jobs where all parties can feel satisfied afterwards.
If you make a game for a given platform, it makes sense to target the most common configuration, which in this case was 512k (not 512M btw). Even though RAM expansions eventually became popular, I guess publishers would be hesitant to put a "requires 1M+" sticker on their boxes. But man, 512k seemed like a blessing in those early days, too...
I admit I failed that question, and I understand the impulse to then challenge the way the question was constructed. In school, it's something I did regularly, partly because some of the questions were indeed weakly constructed, but also partly because I was reluctant to admit I actually misunderstood.
In this case, it's not a trick question per se, but it certainly does something to trick the mind into not enumerating the possibilities. It would be interesting to see how the majority of programmers respond to it, as compared to say the majority of mathematicians. I suspect the question tricks people into abstracting too early: 'one variable in this system is undefined, hence I can't say!'
Say you're getting mugged and the mugger opens with "If we accept that you don't have any right to your possessions, don't you agree that I'm justified in taking all your stuff?"
It is not an intellectual or rhetorical shortcoming to then answer with "No, I agree neither with your premise nor with your conclusion."
On the other hand, if you do D-Decouple and agree, then the mugger will either proceed to rob you immediately, or if an audience is present, they will first read aloud a well-prepared statement that 'proves' how you indeed don't have any right to your possessions - before inevitably proceeding to rob you. Not robbing you was never in the cards, they just made it seem that way by phrasing the question to provide an illusion of openness to discussion.
People who accept D-Decoupling during a debate get steamrolled by bad-faith counterparts, and the audience on average will never remember that there was an "if" hypothetical in front of the question to begin with.
In practice, the "If we accept X, then we must do Y" maneuver is seldom performed in good faith. It's merely a vehicle to move on to the Y part without concerning yourself with X, and it's mostly performed for the benefit of an audience who will only remember the Y part, or those who already agree with X. A side effect is also the gradual normalization of X through repetition.
People who already agree with the premise will see nothing wrong with this, and that's not necessarily unethical. It only becomes unethical if the proposition has negative consequences and the "hypothetical" becomes a deniable position that allows the speaker to retreat behind if challenged.
In other words, I do think the implications of the hypothetical part matter. Not all "If we accept X, then Y" have X's or Y's worthy of consideration. I would also argue that it's probably valid to look at the Y part in isolation. If Y is unethical or nonsensical, I believe there is no intellectual duty to consider any part of the argument.
This is wrong on so many levels. I've been writing code commercially for more than 30 years.
> This is also what Software Engineering has become: you memorize, regurgitate and participate in agile the masquerade. Creativity is shunned. Tried architectures/patterns are what is expected.
Not necessarily. If it feels like this, you may be in the wrong bubble. And that bubble is going away, too, because these tasks are the first that will be replaced by AI-assisted code generation. In the meantime, you can always Google an algorithm if you know what to look for.
There is almost zero usefulness in an ability to regurgitate boilerplate patterns, but there is tremendous usefulness in executing good judgement, creative problem solving, and a solid understanding of fundamentals.
Programming is about solving problems that are interesting to you personally, in a way that satisfies you (and ideally your customers). The hard part is finding that niche.
> I used to think this job was a creative one, since writing frameworks and libraries for further use, documenting code and extreme programming made me think that I was building something new and useful.
You had it right the first time. If you enjoyed making these tools, that means there is still an internal drive in you to solve those kinds of problems. Even if those tools happen to be terrible, apply lessons learned and repeat! Spoiler alert, everyone else's tools also make trade-offs at the wrong points, even successful ones. Don't be fooled into thinking that the big things are already solved.
In the end it's about finding gainful employment doing something you enjoy. The good thing about programming is that you get to choose your environment and the nature of your work from a very broad spectrum.
> I wish I had practiced law for the past 7ish years instead, because at least all of my skills would still be relevant.
If you chased framework specifics and arcane patterns for the last few years, then yes, some of that work is not relevant anymore. Learn from that, stop chasing ephemera. You may be better served by doing deep work on a specific thing for a long time, as opposed to perpetually playing catch-up with JavaScript frameworks to impress the next fickle startup that thinks it'll change the world by selling ads.
I would advise anyone who doesn't absolutely need it for an interview to stop spending time on LeetCode and such sites. Instead, invest that time in a project that is relevant to you, and learn everything about a specific domain as deeply as you can. Pushing up a score counter on LeetCode doesn't compare to actually making something competently in the real world. ADHD can trick you into believing that solving artificially parceled-up and pre-defined problems for points in a few minutes at a time is progress, but it's not. Work on something meaningful that doesn't leave you with an empty feeling.
I recently went from my full time programming job - doing mostly business and scientific software - to a freelance setup. I'm up for:
- game development
I would love to help out with custom engines and games!
- server-side code
- scientific applications
- core languages: C, C++, PHP, Javascript, some C# and Lua
- experience with: OpenGL/WebGL/HLSL, Cuda, SIMD
- performance optimization of existing code
- working in custom codebases
- researching solutions to algorithmic challenges
- web stuff: Websocket brokers, server-side rendering, vanilla JavaScript web apps, Three.js, Pixi.js
My current hobby projects are rolz.org (an online tabletop/pen&paper roleplaying site) and I'm also currently working on a C++ based web programming server with the goal of ditching both PHP and Node.js as my go-to server-side solution.
Could you elaborate a bit on what you mean by "as bitter as this"? Reading the story with no context, it seems almost reverential to Christianity:
We're in the far future and space-faring humans still worship the old religion(s). A supernova that occurred roughly during the time of a key event in the religion's history turned out to have killed off another distant civilization. There is an observation that bad things can happen to good civilizations and how that doesn't square with a benevolent creator deity.
Do you perceive one of these as harsh criticism or was there some other issue in the text that I missed?
He’s not accusing god of anything, he’s pointing out that what one primitive civilisation saw as a sign from some supernatural being was a cosmic event with local consequences for another civilisation. He also shows how those beliefs, which in part survive from that early civilisation, are dissonant with our understanding of the universe.
It’s like a child’s belief that heaven sits on the clouds flying in a aeroplane for the first time.
The story merely describes a cosmic catastrophe, that some people in a primitive tribe that had not discovered science yet would interpret as a sign of god, much like lightning.
And the irony that this event that became so central to this religion was in fact a stellar cataclysm that had nothing to do with earth.
Have you read the Bible? It's full of stuff like this. The story of the children who teased a priest so God sent a bear to kill them is a good example.
Also God letting Satan ruin Job's life (a canonically righteous man) over a bet on whether God was as awesome as He claimed. When God shows up in the last act to rebuke Job's friends for complaining about His - again, canonically unjust treatment of Job, His reply is an extended monologue about how awesome He is.
... although to be fair, Job 38 is one of the most epic parts of the Bible, hands down. When YHWH goes in, He goes in.
Also God hardening Pharoah's heart when he already wanted to let the Israelites go, in order to complete the plagues and flex on Egypt and its gods. Said plagues ended, remember, with the first Passover event and the murder of every firstborn child and animal in Egypt.
And Sodom and Gomorrah, particularly the part where God and Abraham haggle over the lower bound of righteous people it takes to avoid genocide. This is apparently at least ten.
... speaking of which, that time God commands Ezekiel to lie on his side and eat bread baked over human shit for over a year. Ezekiel objects, because the latter would be against God's own law (while the former is just sadistic torture,) and God says fine, he can use cow shit instead, just get on with it.
And the Tower of Babel. God sees that humanity united and speaking a single language is capable of anything as they try to build a tower that reaches the heavens, so He curses humanity with multiple languages to confuse them and impede human progress. This was a particular dick move on God's part, and we're probably lucky Heaven was moved somewhere less easily accessible before we learned how to build skyscrapers or go into space.
And Jesus cursing a fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season. Not as much death and suffering as in the other cases but still petty AF for a guy who can literally create food from nothing.
Job is more of a story about motives, and uses the "wager" (which one could see as an abbreviated account of the rebellion of the devil) as a background for the main question: Is it possible for a man to submit to God & truth, for their own sake, rather than because he expects success/reward? The answer we are given is yes, it is possible, even when times are hard, and that it is often not the victim's fault when times are hard. These moral questions were the primary subject of the book.
The hardening of Pharaoh's heart is described both ways, as God doing it and as Pharaoh doing it. The idea seems to be emphasizing agency, rather than the reverse: God took some actions to free the Hebrews. Pharaoh responded to these with (varying degrees of) opposition, anger, and pride. God's actions were the proximate cause, sure, but Pharaoh was not a puppet.
For Sodom, the dialogue ends at 10 because, as with Noah, we then get down to the number of the last remaining righteous (or less-bad) family, and they are commanded to leave. The indication (made explicit elsewhere in the Bible) is that God would not destroy even one righteous along with the wicked, when it's a direct action. In the Gospels, Jesus then answers another charge related to this, when he says that things like a building collapse or other random accident can and does happen to both good and bad alike.
Ezekiel and the other prophets had it rough.
Babel is about pride and evil culture, not about feats of engineering.
The fig tree was a metaphor for Israel: "All leaf, and no fruit". Not a good day for that plant, but... It's a plant.
I had to look that one up. To be fair, the text says that the two bears attacked 42 boys after Elisha cursed the boys, and doesn't mention if the attack was fatal.
Straightforward answers to your questions: No. No.
But, I believe you have missed the point.
It's problematic to send a bear to attack someone -- particularly if you are the all-powerful, all-knowing creator of the universe with other methods at your disposal. Whether or not the victim dies is besides the point.
well, as i understand it, it is the star of betlehem which showed humanity that its saviour is born, the saviour which saves mankind and with that god destroyed another sentient species which is very similar to us.
how would you feel about that, if your believesystem said a genocide of another race of sentient, potentially benevolent people by god had to happen, so that you get the message your saviour came around?
The theological ramifications cut even deeper, given that said saviour is predestined to "die for your sins" - yet billions are to die just for his general announcement to happen.
The story's narrator is not a sudden unbeliever - he was obviously very religious, he does not apostate, he "falters in his belief", he realizes his blasphemy even - yet he feels unable to connect such a horrific, monstrous act to the message of an ultimately all-loving deity (and if you put it a bit further - the fact that deity choose to let them find evidence for this). In many ways, that story follows the classic catholic trope of the "Temptation of $holyperson".
This is something I've never understood.Are there any reasonable theological arguments for why he had to resort to what amounts to an elaborate ploy, in order to work around his own arbitrary rules of who gets saved?
A character asks that question in Hyperion, by another sci-fi author (Dan Simmons).
The answer he arrived at was that God was not testing Abraham. He was allowing Abraham to test God. When God stayed his hand at the last moment, he knew that he'd met a god worth following.
(I'm not religious myself, but I did find this to be an interesting-enough interpretation to parrot it back to you on a web forum)
No, I was talking about Jesus (I believe the GP was as well).
The Jesus situation is an interesting inversion of the Abraham dilemma though. This time God is prepared to sacrifice his own son – but we sort of failed the test by design, executing the sacrifice as planned even though we could have just let Jesus live. Not sure what it says about us or God.
We seem to judge God, which is probably unwise in light of us knowing so little about the universe. Imagine that God saw the timelines of those two sentient species, and saw both devolve and lose their way, ultimately to their doom. So then God had the choice of saving one by sacrificing the other, because even God has to take when he gives, because there's a balance in the Universe, every positive thing has its negative created and annihilated at the same time.
In this case it was a choice of God letting two species die by their own hand, or kill one to save the other. It's the Trolley Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
Of course, I'm not saying Christianity saved us per se. That's the thesis Christianity would give of course. But we also know that the Christian churches imposed a thousand years of intellectual darkness on the world, by fighting science every step of the way. Is this God's mistake or do we again speak in ignorance?
Because imagine we discovered nuclear bombs a thousand years ago. Would we even exist today? Knowledge is good, and I don't think any fair deity would oppose knowing unconditionally. But there's such a thing as "knowing just enough to be dangerous". If our morality lacks severely behind our knowledge, then we'd die by our own hand.
Again, it's hard for us to judge such actions when we can't see the consequences of our actions. We predict, but don't see. A being like God which exists outside our subjective timeline would know precisely what's the effect of their interference.
If I can borrow a popular meme, "would you kill baby Hitler if you go back in time". Well, would you? Of course, there are alternatives to killing a baby, so this is a false dichotomy. You could take care of the baby so it doesn't grow up to be a militant dictator. But in some cases fate gives us the Trolley Problem and no alternatives. And then the wise decision is to make a choice, not let the choices be made for you.
I'm quite aware of this. The question is did God condemn humans for knowing, or condemned them for knowing before they were ready to know, and disobeying his direct orders.
Think about it like a father, who has a 3 year old toddler. You tell him "don't touch the car keys". The kid turns on the car, crashes in the garage.
It becomes pathological only if you still ban your child from driving when he's 40.
Religions are full of stories where humans tried to reach to the Gods too quickly and were punished for this. What about the Tower of Babel for example? Is this God (or Gods) trying to maintain their power by not sharing knowledge, or is it them being highly cognizant of how dangerous it is to know before you're ready? Maybe a bit of both.
There's another story from Hinduism where a person who died saw Shiva, but using a human form. The person prayed "I know this is not your true form, please show me your true form, I'm ready". Shiva tried to persuade the person that's a bad idea, but he persisted. So Shiva showed him his true form, horrifying and multidimensional and all-encompassing, filling every sense, he was a lion, and a tiger, and a tornado, and all beings at once, and the human could see Shiva in all moments from the beginning of time to eternity. And the human was horrified and begged Shiva to turn back to a human form.
We think we're ready, but we're not. The universe is a horrifyingly complex place. Of course, we should still strive to understand and learn.
The problem with this test is I have nothing to compare it to, and the answer spectrum provided is not helpful because it seems concerned with things like how vivid the colors of mental images are.
If I don't actually "see" the object but I know exactly what it looks like to the point of having a clear but abstracted version of it in my head, do I still put the slider all the way to the left, or to the center, or what?
I would say that me "visualising" an object kind of feels like watching a GAN paint an image, only the image is never as explicitly shown as if it was on my retinas. Does that count?
When I close my eyes and I think of an object there is never a danger of me not realizing that my eyes are currently closed. Am I an aphantasiac because of that? Was I supposed to literally hallucinate scenes all the time?
> When I close my eyes and I think of an object there is never a danger of me not realizing that my eyes are currently closed.
Hallucination and visualization are distinct things. People without aphantasia who talk about "seeing" things in their mind are not confusing the mental images with the scene in front of them, that would be a hallucination.
I know they're distinct things, I just wonder about the way visualization is described.
From the way non-aphantasia is characterized here one could assume that the difference is just how much control people have over the content of the image, as opposed to the degree of realism.
A hallucinating person may have an experience that feels indistinguishable from reality, but they can't control what the experience entails. From this test, I gather that a non-aphantasiac person has an equally-as-realistic image in front of them, but they are completely in command of what is shown.
I do think there's a difference between visualizing something clearly and not clearly, though, and this is what the test is asking.
The test asks me to visualize the face of a close friend or relative. I can quite clearly bring to mind my wife's face. I can imagine looking at each individual mole, or different facial expressions she makes.
If I were asked to visualize the face of the barista who served me coffee 20 minutes ago, I could only come up with something vague. I remember he was wearing large earrings, because they stood out to me, but his face is a blur. I mean that literally: when I imagine looking at his face, there are parts that simply won't come into focus or even into view, like they're missing -- in the same way that the dot disappears when you find your blind spot (i.e. not in a "argh, he's missing a nose!" way, but in a "it's just not there, but that's not weird" way).
So I have a pretty clear phenomenological distinction between visualizing things clearly and not.
That's also just memory. I couldn't describe most servers I've had after a few hours if it was the only time I saw them. Try to imagine a barista. Imagine a scene in a coffee shop, it will get filled in with your actual memories of places you've been and people you've seen. Can you produce a detailed (but not accurate to reality) mental image of such a place or a barista working there that is comparable to your recall of your wife's face? (maybe not as detailed, but not as fuzzy as trying to recall a specific barista)
No, but what I'm describing is that I have a phenomenological experience of both non-clear images and clear images.
It was in response to the complaint that the "Vividness of Visual Imagery" test is ambiguous, because people can't decide whether their visualization is clear or not. I'm saying that, for a person with a good ability at visualizing, the distinction is fairly clear.
And it's not just fuzzy memory, the fuzzy memory causes a non-clear picture. But I can't transfer my phenomenological experience to you, so you'll either have to accept that some people can have both clear or non-clear imagery, or not.
In answer to your question, I can certainly produce a mental image of an imagined barista. I can imagine very fine details in, say, the handlebar mustache I invent. Yes, those details will probably have come from reality, but I don't know from where, and I can visualize it very clearly if I choose to.
In answer to a question you didn't ask, when I read books I rarely have a detailed image of a character. They're kind of faceless people, roughly sketched. I actually discussed this last week with my either-year-old, and she had the exact same experience, but had never really stopped to think about it. (Like what I was saying before about the nose missing not being weird.)
Same here. I didn't think I had aphantasia at all until I tried this test and then realised that me "visualising" something doesn't really bear any relation to being able to see a visual representation of that thing. Mostly it just felt like pulling up memories, and in fact when it asked me to visualise a rainbow I simply couldn't, though I could "see" one when I thought about a photo of a rainbow I took not so long ago. But again, that feels more like simply remembering.
Hallucinations and visualizing are completely different things. Even in my worst psychotic episode, I knew the difference between real and not-real.
The issue was I couldn't filter out the imagined from the real. I knew the source of sensory input but the source didn't matter to the rest of my brain.
People who visualize know what "channel" they are focusing on.
Similar problem here. I actually notice that the imagery is a fleeting caricature trying to capture what Im attempting to observe, some kind of CGA resolution image of a lake, trees and so on. It’s also very confusing that I can actually transpose myself within my imagination where I barely notice Im blind because I can feel it all around.
I'm transitioning from my full time programming job to a freelance setup over the next few months. I'm up for:
- game development
(I would love to help out with weird custom engines and games)
- server-side code
- scientific applications
- core languages: C, C++, PHP, Javascript, some C# and Lua
- experience with: OpenGL/WebGL/HLSL, Cuda, SIMD
- performance optimization of existing code
- working in custom codebases
- researching solutions to algorithmic challenges
- web stuff: Websocket brokers, server-side rendering, vanilla JavaScript web apps, Three.js, Pixi.js
The ASKAP scans at 888MHz. From the paper, which luckily is publicly available:
> It exhibited
a high degree (∼ 25%) of circular polarization when it was visible. We monitored the source with
the MeerKAT telescope from 2020 November to 2021 February on a 2–4 week cadence. The source
was not detected with MeerKAT before 2021 February 07 when it appeared and reached a peak
flux density of 5.6 mJy. The source was still highly circularly polarized, but also showed up to 80%
linear polarization, and then faded rapidly with a timescale of one day. The rotation measure of the
source varied significantly, from −11.8±0.8 rad m−2
to −64.0±1.5 rad m−2
, over three days. No X-ray
counterpart was found in follow-up Swift or Chandra observations about a week after the first MeerKAT
detection, with upper limits of ∼ 5.0 × 1031 erg s−1
(0.3–8 keV, assuming a distance ∼ 10 kpc). No
counterpart is seen in new or archival near-infrared observations down to J = 20.8 mag.
I am an all-rounder programmer with decades of experience in many areas, available for freelance work. I'm up for:
Contact me at: udo@udven.comhttps://ud0.io/