My background is not on STEM and I was always passed the notion that without roots in hard math I can’t go far in programming.

I swear this is some BS repeated by people who have no idea what they’re talking about. I got told pretty much the same when I was younger - don’t believe it. It may have been true to some degree at some point in the distant past, but it’s outdated advice at best.

Your main general skills when it comes to writing code are the ability to think logically and to think about abstract concepts. Creativity and imagination can definitely help. The ability to keep organized in your thoughts can also go a long way. Just about everything else comes in the form of knowing the language you’re working in, exposure to common coding and software design principles, and knowing your coding environment.

Math can figure into a lot of different types of programming careers… Shit like writing video game engines and other complicated things that model physics and stuff come to mind. But it’s not so much that math is intrinsic to programming, but rather that those types of software just require a lot of advanced math.

For example, I’m an automation engineer. It’s just a sysadmin who writes a decent amount of code. Most of my programming work revolves around sending requests over our company’s local network to servers or internal websites to do shit like remotely power up or shutdown machines or trigger a task or open up work orders. There is very little actual math, if any, in the entirety of my work.

At it’s core, programming is just the storing, moving around, manipulating, and keeping track of bits of information. Especially in a language like Python (which is my primary language).

EDIT: I should probably add my background isn’t STEM either. I’m a two time college dropout who got a break 14 years ago and left the restaurant industry to go into the tech sector instead.

I ended up just flipping to T1 to get past it so I could finish the story (and then flipped back immediately after and never had an issue again). Since then, I’ve gotten some legendary gear that would have probably carried me (specifically, a piece that gives me a pretty big barrier as soon as I hit an elite or higher that lasts 10s and can pop every 30s - its gotten me out of a few scrapes already; got another piece that bumps my skeletal mages by 2 and they freeze shit near instantly if they actually focus on one target)

I’m actually starting to look at other classes for when I wrap the main story (so I can just skip it with subsequent characters) - sorc looks really interesting, but I’m not sure how well it’ll play with the controller. Or, rather, how happy I’ll be personally with it on controller.

So it seems. Guess I’m going to be forced out of solo play one way or another. I suppose I should be glad I have at least a couple of friends who are also enjoying the game. haha

Hah - noted. I rekt him on WT1 so I could just get past it and continue plowing through the story (I want my goddamn horse lol). Would definitely like to revisit that fight in the future with various different builds and see if I can get some traction, though. In any case, thanks for the responsess. :)

Will do! Definitely gave me something to think about and try, so thanks!

I should add I think sometimes, there’s just an insane disparity between WT1 and WT2. I melted him with almost ZERO effort after switching to WT1. It wasn’t even a challenge. Easiest boss fight I’ve ever done and that’s disappointing. He wasn’t spamming mob waves in WT1 so aggressively and I had more breathing room than I would ever need.

I think I’m mostly set on corpse generation, the issue lies more in being able to keep my summons up (and subsequently, reliable “targeting” of the spawned waves of mobs). The amount of raw damage that the Executioner mobs do, and their ability to close a gap so quickly with their leap attack, also forces me to keep moving so I spend a lot of the fight running in circles, trying to pull summons up out of nearby corpses, then trying to regen mana (by either exploding corpses or spamming Bone Shards - the latter generates corpses because I’ve maxed Hewed Flesh) so I can let off some bone spears.

My summons get melted incredibly fast.

So the way I have it configured is I have auto-targeting enabled in the options as this lets me avoid having to click R3 to initially target a mob. I rarely use the targeting feature explicitly, but it’s helped on a number of occasions as a sort of crutch. I may just shut that off and try to go without targeting at all since that’s primarily how I’ve actually been playing (I’ll move away from the fight and let my minions pick up the slack while I reposition and then point myself where i want to attack; auto-targeting mostly picks up what I’m after).

The controls on the Deck are being recognized as a standard gamepad to my knowledge, so that shouldn’t be the issue, but I suppose you never know.

Interesting… I’ll google that build up and take a peek at it. Like I mentioned in my OP, bone spear build has been great for me - bosses or otherwise - since the beginning of the game on WT2. It’s just this one fight specifically where he spawns endless waves of enemies while I’m just trying to get my minions back up and lay a few points of damage on him that I’m having issues. Thanks!

Yeah, I used to configure vim with syntax highlighting and auto-suggestions and whatever else. I just like… don’t anymore. I’ve been feeling less burned out over the last few months and it seems, at least, like its still lifting slowly. Maybe when I get the energy back, I’ll take another crack at vscode.

Yeah, for sure - I don’t deny that at all. For me, it’s a confluence of general burnout, laziness, and comfort with what I already know… and likely not a really urgent need to move to a proper IDE. The majority of my coding is small, one-off Python scripts where I can :wq and run it and then open it back up to refine, fix bugs, add debugging prints, etc.

I stick with vim because every time I try to use vscode, I get so bogged down trying to set things up and figure out how to use it that I end up just being like, “eh, fuck it - I’ll do this later.”

Younger admins and engineers look upon me with awe, but really I’m just secretly a really lazy bastard. I don’t even pack plugins into vim anymore to make my life easier. Just plain old vanilla vim.

Not sure about the entirety of available options but one thing I think instances are able to do is block other instances… so I guess if an instance became flooded with illegal material, another instance could block it - though I’m not yet sure what that means exactly in this context.

it needs time and more users, but I think it’s alright so far.

I had looked into a couple other decentralized or federated services in the past and they seemed like kind of a pain or they were poorly explained. until now, all of it also seemed too obscure to have any kind of notable traffic. if this isn’t temporary and the reddit api controversy actually did something meaningful, then I look forward to seeing how the federated service ecosystem grows and changes.

reddit’s dethroning was a long time coming in my eyes. it’s just not going to be as smooth as the digg -> reddit pipeline years ago.

I think there may be room for another couple million users spread across a ton of communities. wishful thinking, but maybe that would keeps thing toned down with the bots and other shady shit.

lots of polish and QoL needed both on the main site(s) and the mobile offerings out so far. all in all, pretty good start.