For the latter, a good approach is to pick a project or idea and try to make it. If you’re familiar with the logic you can look up the syntax for the new language, but it you’re fresh off the boat then there is a bunch of good stuff on YouTube, Khan academy and stack overflow that are geared to newbies.

Some starting ideas:

• Make a text based tic Tac toe/card game
• Make a number guessing game
• Find all prime numbers under a number given by the user

Once you’ve got a decent grip on the logic involved, it can be quite effective to implement more complex approaches to the solution. Instead of guessing randomly, implement a binomial (1:N divided by 2) search algorithm, or have the game play against itself. Go back over how you wrote the solution, and add some good comments, improve the functions descriptions, even refactor some code to be more efficient and more readable. I learnt how to code through doing, textbooks are great for some people but my preferred approach is to make something, break it, and learn how to fix it.

Part of the identity crises that comes with(out) religion is the ultimate question of purpose: why are we suffering, surely it has a reason? Some of us are content to accept that there is no purpose, and therefore we must define our own; others need a purpose greater than themselves and/or to have one defined for them, and look to religion for that purpose. There is no right answer, and the struggle of identity and purpose are well documented in religion, fiction, history, and philosophy.

I was about to say something like this, hands on work is really satisfying when you can see the results in front of you, and even show them off as well!

Even for those us who fit into the straight/white/cis mould, learning how to create purpose and meaning for yourself is a really hard battle against expectations imposed growing up. Thanks for sharing a really wholesome story :)

Yeah ps4 works a charm, the hard part for me was figuring out why an Xbox controller didn’t. Turns out some of the older models had deprecated Bluetooth that it couldn’t connect to, so went with a ps4 one instead.

For secure data destruction, either pay for it to be done properly, or create your own way of doing it. A decent sized drill bit can do all the work for you, at the cost of a new drive of course.

Get some icing and draw the boss on it, would look awesome I bet

To anyone who believes this person is wrong, why are you not then moderating instead? Someone has to, and a good mod who knows nothing on the topic is better than a bad mod who’s an expert.

That’s more or less my understanding, a nerd knows a lot of useless random facts, but a geek will tell them to you whether you asked or not.

Been having issues with Google/Reddit etc. lately as well on Proton, managed to get around it by switching to a new IP subnet. It’s likely they’ve just blocked IPs with malicious users behind them, which sucks for the rest of us.