Six months ago my girlfriend broke up with me...
BUT since then I've...
•Found the wonderful world of devRant
•Gotten back into electronics
•Taught myself PCB design
•Gotten back into programming
•Made a discord bot
•Started teaching myself calculus
•Began building an ai for said discord bot
•Designed a wireless mesh networking NIC for the TI84+CE

Sure I feel like shit most of the time but before I did anyway but I've been super productive and it feels kind of nice

I finally found it: proof that women are a distraction.

@JohnScott I can't say they aren't for me but I also have to say it's nice to have someone to trust and be able to talk to so it's kind of a win-lose situation for me

@Jornad You'll be fine. The thing about life is that the "perfect someone" can be anywhere from 15 countries away to 15 minutes away to the person in front of you in line. Maybe you'll find someone with your zeal for computers someday. It's not impossible.

@JohnScott yeah I know I'm honestly just turning 18 in a few months so I don't expect to any time soon but I mean hey I can hope

Feeling pain all the time is what makes us the most productive as a means of scape, be like Dr House.

@JKyll Dr.House also did drugs and hired a male hooker for his female superior. 😐

You can have an upvote, should make you feel less crappy.

@Jornad do you want family? If you do, get ready to spend some time building realtionship, much like you spent some time gaining your tech skills

@uyouthe
There's actually some really good vr simulators in the works for that.

Jokes aside, seeing other people's children occasionally is more than enough exposure to children for me.

Me it's the opposite. I'm a lazy bastard when I'm single. I've met my wife 7y ago and picked up coding again 2y ago.

Women are fascinating, but can bust your balls till you tear your hair out as well 8)

Anyway, since you're 18, there's no rush. You have all the time in the world! 🍺

@JohnScott you only live once

@basavyr thanks man and I will!

@uyouthe right now I really have no idea. Maybe a wife not sure about kids or any of that though right now probably not. Of course I can't be sure about that at all right now but at least I have a long time to figure it all out.

@Condor I'm the type of person who sees life more pessimistic and how we're all going to die(at least for now) but until then I just try to make it the best I can and a lot of my projects are the result of that mindset.

I really do love every part of the process of my projects though. I mean sure debugging can suck but in the end it always feels so nice to be able to stand back and be able to say I made that and see people using something I made and what it brings to them.

I'm distracted by you learning calculus

@Root oh umm... Oops?

@Jornad: That was a jab at @JohnScott. 😋

But more seriously: calculus is ❤

@Root ohhh that went right over my head I barely sleep anymore... 😂

And yeah calculus is ❤ if it's taught well. The internet is great for that though I've learned more about algebra and calculus in a week than I have in any classes so far

@Root Shit! I've been called out!!! But seriously I think having someone special occupy your most of your attention is actually worth it.

@Jornad I was never able to take calculus. 😞

It wasn't offered in highschool, and college wanted me to start at remedial "applied mathematics" first, for whatever reason. I tested out of the next two classes, but was required to attend them anyway. Waste of time.

So I dropped out and taught myself.

@JohnScott Truth!

@Root I can take pre-calc for my senior year but I have no idea if I will. I really don't think my school has any good math teachers and I heard the one who teaches it isn't any better... Plus I'm already past pre-calc and on to calculus on my own so there's that too...

@Jornad My highschool offered Trig/PreCalc. I had taught myself trig two or three years prior, and that's all we really covered.

I refused to do the homework (because boring), and aced all the tests. However, homework was 40% of our grade, so I got a D for the class. Didn't matter that I got a 90%+ on the final exam and all other tests. 😞😧

School is bloody stupid.

@Root I did trig/geometry last year and was the same way but the homework barely counted so I passed with around a 90%. I also had a great teacher though too we pretty much reverse engineering equations then used them for realistic examples.

This year I have to take algebra 2 but can't learn if I don't have real world examples and don't know why something works... which with my luck none of my algebra teachers have done. My favorite quote so far this year is "don't ask why it works it just does so do your packet"

Anyway I can't agree more school is stupid. So few of the classes teach me things I didn't already know or can't learn myself better but we have to do it to get the degrees we so desperately need to show we know stuff...

@Jornad I dropped out. 😊

@Root I'm already mostly self taught but my parents would react really bad if I didn't go to college so I probably will... I'm so excited to be paying loans for the rest of my life...

@Jornad That sucks m8. The debts I mean. In Belgium most of it is free. To me it makes more sense. As a society you want well educated people right? The more the better. And preferably based on merits, not social class/money.

@FunkDelegate Well of course, but if the schools are all funded by the government, that typically means they must teach in a certain way. Here in the states, that means "no child left behind" -- or, in less politically correct language, "to the lowest denominator." Publicly funded schools here are bloody terrible.

I'd rather pay quite a bit to actually learn, instead of being "taught" material i already know that's significantly worse than what i could find online for free.

@Root I see. No such thing here. It's a waterfall model where you get sent to another school when your grade's too low. Some kids get a burn out though. The "no kids left behind" thing is seen in some schools now, around the age of 6 - 8. Didn't exist in my time.

The best schools here are catholic schools, but they're free as well. When I went to college afterwards, the first year had the same level of math.

@FunkDelegate All of the public schools here are roughly the same. I mean, sure, some schools are significantly better than others, but they're all required to teach the same material over the same grades, so, overall the content is about the same. The only real difference is a) the amount of funding, and b) the faculty. More funding doesn't have any positive effect if the faculty are awful. Likewise, if the faculty are great, the funding doesn't matter very much. but teachers aren't paid very well, either, so it tends towards "if you can't do, you teach."

I would have absolutely loved it if I could have gone to better schools and actually been challenged. Instead, i was forcibly shoved back towards average, and 'earned' horrible grades because I was so bored to tears in every class.

asldkfja;sldk.

Schools.sort_by!(quality: :desc)

vs

average = Schools.pluck(:quality).sum / Schools.count
Schools.each do |school|
school.quality = average + random(-25..15)
school.save
}

@Root Sounds terrible. I feel you. I was mostly bored in French class as I spoke it already. Still, I hated studying stuff by heart as I didn't see any sense in that. And boring as hell. I liked exercises though. Hence the programming I guess. 😊

I’m interested in the TI84+CE network thingy, care to share?

@Gerrymandered the idea is that we have a PCB that has an ftdi chip, an esp-12f and some eeprom. My friend found out how to directly write to the data bus on the calculator so then then we can do that and push that data to the esp to be formatted into a packet and broadcast along with an id from the eeprom chip(kinda like a mac address but a lot smaller).

When another module picks it up it rebroadcasts it but remembers the message(until it's power cycled or at the end of an array and removed) as to not broadcast it multiple times then sends it to that calculator to be used.

We're hoping this will let us do things like chat chat rooms and maybe multiplayer games eventually.

Hopefully some time I can also design a board that has two esps on it, one for the mesh networking, another for WiFi then connect to a raspberry pi running a server at my house and connect multiple networks over the internet.

@Jornad sounds exiting even though I mostly have little idea what’s going on. Understood the idea though. Good luck! :)

P.S. now is when I wish I knew actual programming lol

If I'm ever playing video games and my girlfriends in the room, I seem to do a lot worse...

You need to be happy on your own before you can be happy with someone else and crucially, make them happy too.

When I broke up with my second gf (I have 2 exes and are now happy with my current gf) I felt like a whole new world had appeared...
Finally nobody that complained about me liking gaming and coding :o

@FinlayDaG33k You lucky bastard! 8)

@FunkDelegate ikr :p
current gf does complain a bit, but she often joins me while gaming xD

Every Dev I talk to who's SO isn't a coder herself has the same problem.

"Why are you spending so much time Infront of a computer?! You stare at that screen all day, come home and stare at another screen!"

The concept that coding is fun for us, and it's something we get tondo at work for money and at home for pleasure, seems so foreign to them.

@polaroidkidd SO= Senior Officer? 8)

@FunkDelegate in a manner of speaking, yes.

Mine is great after we got accustomed to each other. She notices when I'm stuck of a problem and get frustrated. She gets me out the house and my mind off of things, which in turn throws the problem in my head on a background thread. Usually when I get back I have a solution :D

You go man! I’ve also come out of a long relationship and finding a lot more stuff to do than before.

I have been single since last year and since then I have been undistraced too. I have switched cities and worked on some awesome projects.
I am not against relationships. It's a luxury to have and you have to pay a price to have it. Most of the times the price is your time.

@Root If you have the time have a look at analysis you'll like it.
Might wanna start with baby Rudin or Spivak.