Twice As Efficient

The instant someone discovers you work with computers, their brain immediately jumps to "tech support wizard who can fix anything with a power button." The selective hearing kicks in - they start the question, you're already mentally disconnecting. Ten years of building complex systems and mastering three programming languages, but Aunt Karen still thinks your primary skill is resurrecting her 2007 inkjet printer that's been possessed by demons since Windows Vista. The modern programmer's defense mechanism: develop the ability to tune out any sentence that begins with "Hey, so you study computers right? Can you fix my-"

The eternal struggle between performance and comedy. While everyone's dropping their life savings on RTX cards to see every pore on their character's face, some of us are over here deliberately cranking those settings down to potato quality. There's something deeply satisfying about watching a AAA game turn into a blocky, glitchy mess where characters' faces fold in on themselves during emotional cutscenes. It's the digital equivalent of watching a Shakespeare play performed by kindergartners - technically worse but infinitely more entertaining.

The duality of a programmer's financial decision-making. Agonizing over a $50 purchase for basic necessities, but dropping $2500+ on a new PC with the emotional investment of someone commenting on the weather. "Yes, very sad. Anyway." The RAM wasn't going to upgrade itself, and those compile times weren't getting any shorter on the old machine. It's not an addiction if you can justify it with "productivity gains."

OH. MY. GOD. The AUDACITY of using a WHOLE INTEGER for a measly 1-10 counter when you could stuff those bits into the dark corners of other variables! 💅 Embedded engineers are LITERALLY having heart palpitations right now. In their world, every byte is sacred, every bit a precious child that must be optimized to within an inch of its life. Meanwhile, you're over here WASTING 24+ PERFECTLY GOOD BITS like some kind of memory billionaire throwing cash from a helicopter! The sheer memory gluttony. The optimization blasphemy. I can't even.

Ah, the beautiful marriage of corporate gaslighting and consumer desperation. Jensen Huang's infamous quote about buying more GPUs to "save money" sits right above a retailer thanking customers for making GPU launches "memorable" (read: chaotic scalper-fests with mile-long queues). The cherry on top? Lisa Su from AMD genuinely thanking people for standing in those dystopian lines like it's some kind of heartwarming community event rather than the hunger games of hardware acquisition. Nothing says "we value you" quite like celebrating your customers' suffering while they fight to give you money for artificially scarce products. The tech industry's version of "The beatings will continue until morale improves."

The tech community's version of natural selection: watching newbies confidently throw around terms like "bricked" without realizing they're essentially announcing "I permanently destroyed my device" rather than "it's temporarily not working." Nothing quite like the silent judgment of seasoned engineers watching someone declare they've "bricked" their laptop because the battery died.