beepnoise

Those house prices sounds absolutely insane to me.

I’m also in the UK, but I’m in the South East, so house prices are very high. Still managed to find a “cheap” house recently due to the location being a bit rough.

For comparison, my house that I’m buying is £345k (it’s 2 bedrooms with a separate garage and 2 bathrooms). I saved up a £125k deposit by living with my parents for the longest time (I think it took me about a decade). The exception being for 3 years when I house shared - the rent was £325 per month with bills included, but my room was effectively a glorified cupboard.

I will also say that I was saving lots and lots of money with my old job. I’m a software developer, so my salary was good (started off at £22.5k, went up to £45k with about 10 years experience and being a senior dev, then our company got bought out and my salary went up to £55k). A year later and I switched jobs as the annual salary increase was £150 (for the whole year). Ended up with a £75k salary w/ bonus, private healthcare, etc etc. I really lucked out at that moment.

As to why I didn’t buy a house earlier with my deposit, there was two reasons:

• I had saved up about £100k before for personal savings, then that money went to help a sibling (call this sibling A) with their property. My parents sold a property aborad to effectively give me back the money, but the money was split between me and another sibling’s bank account (call this sibling B) because of financial advice given by my uncle. What then happened was sibling B didn’t give me back the money and was being incredibly difficult about the money, and since they have a history of being difficult in general, I decided I was going to save that money instead.
• Sibling A wanted to start their own business, but it effectively flopped for all sorts of reasons. They had amassed a loan of £15k, and I helped pay that off. This was while sibling B was being incredibly difficult.
• Main reason: At the time, I didn’t know if I really wanted to stay at the job for so long, and if I did want to stay, I didn’t want to move into the area where my job was - despite the convenience, the area was incredibly rough - almost GTA like (and that is no exagerration). I didn’t know where I wanted to live, and the places I would be interested in, I effectively had no clue as I was living with my parents at the time.

So yeah, buying a house in the South of UK isn’t easy at all. It requires a ton of patience and luck.

No, I will not change your mind.

So I’m pretty much an Apple person now. I have my iPhone, my iPad, my MacBook, Apple Watch, AirPods Max - you get the point.

But this has been the past 5 years or so. Before then I was heavily an Android person. And at the time, I was kind of into Reddit, but then I got (what it was then called) Reddit Sync.

It was absolutely phenomenal. Blew me away. By far the best user experience for reddit I’ve ever experienced.

Eventually I moved to iOS. I tried so many iOS reddit apps, and quite frankly, they all sucked - until Apollo came along. I think you know how popular Apollo is.

With that said, the guy behind it promised an iPad mode and kept promising it until this year he went “yeah actually it ain’t coming anytime soon”. All the while this dude kept nagging people to get his stupid Apollo Ultra subscription, which was incredibly aggressive. Dude really liked the subscription model.

I picked up one of my old Android phones from my mobile dev days (OnePlus 7 Pro for those who care) and opened Sync. Absolutely beautiful, but it failed to load as I deleted my reddit account the moment they announced these API changes.

I went ahead and paid for the lifetime subscription as a way of saying thanks for all the hard work over the years (Sync has been going on for much longer than Apollo and has and supports tablets too!! What a concept!!). ljdawson seemed like a genuinely nice and friendly person who genuinely cared about his app, perhaps even more so than the profits (which is so unbelievably rare).

It was a good run, ljdawson, but you absolutely killed it 🍻

I have a MacBook Pro which is stock macOS.

Doing software development for nearly a decade, macOS combines that ease of using widely used software tools with the stability of macOS that seems quite rare with Linux (especially in the long term, when upgrading across new OS versions). Also, things like being able to consistently sleep and wake up and my m1’s battery life keeps me on macOS.

With that said, I also have a thinkpad with pop! OS on it. It’s nice, but I have this issue that I can’t alt-tab like I can on windows thanks to gnome. It only alt-tabs the window group, rather than individual windows, and it drives me up the bend.

I don’t think the title is good, but I do think it’s notable to some extent. With people having weird, shitty opinions, it’s nice to see someone who is relatively famous in the tech community for having somewhat sane opinions and being vocal about it.

In my experience, the Linux community has got its own bunch of free speech weirdos who would reject some of these political points (especially the trans position), so I do think in that context it is kind of important.