> Maybe it's disabled if your workplace uses Copilot?
It unfortunately doesn’t appear that it is. I downgraded my Jetbrains IDEs because AI Assistant kept trying to clobber over my other tools, even when disabled.
Me personally: I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mexico-California border to the Washington-Canada border in 2022. While I missed work on trail, it definitely made me realize that once I'm financially independent, I'm mostly going to be living a life outdoors, with occasional indoor time to play music.
Your situation is a bit different from my goals, but honestly if I had that opportunity, I'd be doing my best to explore the woods/mountains nearby in whatever way I can.
I also kind of agree with the "Learn German" comment - learning a non engineering skill that's also either practical or brings you joy is a great way to eat up time. I'm speak a few languages, but as I only regularly use English in my day-to-day life, just maintaining the other ones at a high skill level is a time consumer, though one I enjoy doing.
I've always wanted to do this trail! How was it - honestly? I delved deep into one bagging a few years ago which brought me to ultralight groups/blogs, and this is the one trail that always just seems so... hard, but freaking cool.
I'm not going to say everything was perfect - sometimes it was miserable (mosquitoes, wildfires, close encounters with irresponsible hunters, etc). With that said, it's been more than 3 months since I've finished and not a day goes by when I don't think about it.
The people you meet out there are fantastic too. I'm fortunate enough to live in Colorado, where a bunch of us came from, and we hang out fairly frequently. We actually went for a hike yesterday that I wouldn't feel comfortable inviting just anybody on.
I feel like you are describing me. I speak four languages. I love engineering and building stuff, but I have a limitless love to nature and the outdoors, hiking, biking, swimming in the wilds, hunting, and I love Deserts and mountains.
Yeah, I'm extremely lucky to work at a company where I could take an unpaid leave of absence and also I work with a great team that was happy to make sure my oncall shifts were covered until I got back.
I'm somewhat comforted to hear that others have similar reactions to music applications. I rarely ever feel myself getting angry over things, but the one thing that gets me feeling uncomfortably heated is thinking about how much worse music apps and streaming services have gotten over the years.
I think I, like many people, have a very emotional connection to music and things that get in the way of that feel like a very personal attack, even though that's not reasonable in any way.
At one point, I think I was signed up to every music stream service and had some issue or another with all of them:
* Google Play Music - nearly ideal, but incredibly buggy once I switched away from Android to iOS, and the fact that it's in perpetual "dying but not dead" frustrates me. I've also moved almost completely away from Google at this point.
* YouTube Music - Takes the worst parts of Spotify and YouTube and puts them together, with no benefit over the app it's replacing.
* Spotify - I find the UI infuriating after a year of trying to switch to Spotify. Every time I try to let go of control and listen to my music the Spotify way, I can feel myself getting more and more frustrated. Additionally, I don't think they understand what a queue is, their implementation of a queue never ceases to surprise and frustrate me. Playing everything by a single artist is difficult to do well, without dragging in a lot of crap, and the "This is $ARTIST" playlists are mostly awful, IMO.
* Tidal - Lacking many basic features, has the same queuing issues as Spotify.
* Deezer - Almost gets queuing correct, but the fact that they always try to add music to your queue when it's empty and the fact that clearing a queue still isn't possible is a non-starter. I know there's a feature to disable auto-play, auto-add music, but on three separate occasions I've tried to turn it off, with support attempting to manually turn it off for me, without it working.
* Rdio - Was almost perfect, but is now dead
* Amazon Music - In terms of conceptual design, works better than most, but I've mostly gotten off of Amazon's services and their app's performance was abysmal last I tried.
* Apple Music - I have many of the same complaints as the author, I just can mostly overlook them as they have a weird queue that I can almost adapt to. It frustrates me once in a while, but it lets me listen to music.
Apple Music is currently my daily driver, but I still have several premium streaming accounts as I _want_ to listen to music and will happily pay for them, just unhappy with the offerings atm.
I'm not contributing a ton to the conversation this late into discussion, just sympathizing with the author that, at least with streaming services, I can very much empathize with someone who can't find a good solution to just play music.
Maybe not relevant to you, but my Pixel 2 XL was already $900-ish, so switching this year to the iPhone XS wasn't a big deal.
I will say a brand new iPhone 8 is also currently $599 (and the 7s is even cheaper) and will likely get updates for the next 4 years or so.
I've used Android since the original Android phone (T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream). It felt hypocritical, however, to have switched away from most of Google in my personal life and still give them access to me through my phone. I dislike Apple for many reasons, but I'd much rather deal with those issues than continue to use Google.
If that's the case, that's incredibly misleading. Especially because that's not undiscovered by human players, just by the OpenAI team, if that's what it is: https://blog.openai.com/more-on-dota-2/
"Sumail pointed out that the bot had learned to cast razes out of the enemy’s vision. This was due to a mechanic we hadn’t known about: abilities cast outside of the enemy’s vision prevent the enemy from gaining a wand charge."
It unfortunately doesn’t appear that it is. I downgraded my Jetbrains IDEs because AI Assistant kept trying to clobber over my other tools, even when disabled.