You can sign up for Proton mail without providing email or phone number, as far as I recall.

Disclaimer: I’m not a social worker or other mental health professional or anything in any way related to those.

I’m a bit over twice your age though, so I’m speaking based on my experience in life.

There’s a lot of things I wanted to do. I wanted to be a nurse, I wanted to go to university/college, I wanted be a programmer ect ect but I just couldn’t.

All those occupations you listed require very specific types of intelligence. I fully agree with the poster above who said that there are many different types of intelligence. To expand on that a little, someone may be the best car mechanic or cook in town but be a terrible programmer or nurse. And vice-versa, a great programmer may be a terrible nurse, mechanic, cook, etc. The idea that IQ is anywhere near a full measure of someone’s abilities is truly, completely wrong.

Don’t let the fact that you “couldn’t” do those things stop you from trying a myriad of other occupations where you may be successful and find fulfillment. If you believe that you can only be successful or fulfilled by being good at one of the latest occupations trending in media, please don’t. Someone can be successful and fulfilled doing pretty much just about anything. Some examples: building trades, mechanic, driver, janitor, cashier, cook, bartender, hairdresser, anything. FYI, I’ve heard that in France, people in any occupation demand and get the respect they deserve for being experts in whatever occupation they chose for themselves. Just as an example, my hairdresser told me an amusing story of arriving in Paris and stopping at a fruit stall where she promptly started to squeeze the fruit like we do in the US. The fruit stall minder literally smacked the fruit out of her hand and selected the fruit for her. He was the expert in fruit and she had no business picking the fruit herself.

It sounds like your main issues probably stem from your father’s neglect and abuse and perhaps your ADHD and other learning disabilities, not from your IQ. You would do well to address your drug addiction first with whatever treatment options are available to you (this would also impact your IQ test scores, but do yourself a favor and forget about IQ). After that, or maybe at the same time, if you didn’t graduate high school, work towards getting your GED. After that, enroll in community college and take whatever variation of “succeeding in college” (study skills) and “career exploration” classes they offer as your very first classes. After that, many options should present themselves to you in community college. Focus on the careers that you can do with either only a high school / GED diploma, or that plus trade school or community college. Many community colleges also provide mental health counseling and assistance finding jobs. Take advantage of any opportunity you encounter.

I, like apparently many others here, believe in you! The answer to your question is yes, there is hope for you!

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

Too late: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/28/24276043/apple-new-usb-c-magic-mouse-charging-port-bottom

Thank you as well. I agree with pretty much everything you say.

Thanks for the clarification as well. That totally makes sense.

I hope we can eventually make cycling and public transportation more popular.

Take care.

I’ve personally seen each of the things I listed multiple times. Sometimes several of those items at the same time (ex: cyclist riding at night, without lights and without a helmet, on the busiest street possible).

I understand why people would do some of those things, but not others. Like you, I have sometimes ridden without a helmet or without lights, and I understand that sometimes one is just caught unprepared. The main thing for me is that when I see extremely risky behavior, especially a combination of them like my example above, I worry tremendously for those people. I also seriously wonder if they are actively trying to get themselves killed.

Yes, I imagine that our cycling infrastructure and conditions are probably very different. I also feel that this study may have focused on some places that have better conditions and infrastructure (and cyclist education) than my area. This may explain the discrepancy in what the study found and my experiences.

What you’ve described all sounds very reasonable. I guess all I was trying to say is that the study had surprising results for me, and I worry that potentially misleading results could encourage cyclists to take more risky behavior. My concern is for cyclists’ safety and for the perception of cycling in general.

This is interesting. I hadn’t heard of the recommendation for pedestrians to walk against traffic before. I’ll have to look it up. Thanks.

Regarding riding on the sidewalk/crosswalk, I was only speaking of safety for the cyclists themselves. Especially the sidewalk may seem safer, until a car coming out of or turning into a driveway runs into you because they don’t expect someone moving at bicycle speed on the sidewalk.

Regarding riding the wrong way, I was only speaking in the context of when there is car traffic on the same street. Of course, if there are no cars then there’s no added risk to riding in any direction.

SUVs

I agree with all you said, 100%!

I agree with a lot of what you say and have experienced and done some of that myself. There are just a couple of minor terms of degree that I don’t quite agree with:

Cyclists break laws to reduce exposure to cars and their drivers.

I think that’s true some of the time, but not anywhere near all the time. A few of the things I listed that I’ve seen don’t reduce their exposure.

So yeah, all the things that make using a light vehicle safer tend to make heavy vehicle users pissed off.

Again, I generally agree, except that I think “all” is excessive. Plenty of things that cyclists do that piss off car drivers don’t make them safer.

Yeah, that was poorly worded on my part. What I meant was that the combination of direction AND speed was what was wrong. I was turning from a stop sign and didn’t expect someone coming at speed against the direction of traffic that they were closest to and that I was looking out for.

If they had been going that speed on the sidewalk going the same direction as the car lane closest to them I would have noticed them. If they had come from the opposite direction at pedestrian speed I would have noticed them. It was the combination of both speed and direction that almost resulted in a collision. I hope that clarifies.

Sure, I recognize that what I’m saying is anecdotal, obviously, and I recognize the need for real studies, but it was still surprising that what they seem to be saying in the article (again, I didn’t read the paper in detail) doesn’t match what I’ve seen in my city. I can assure you that I see more of the other things I listed than cyclists running stop signs. But maybe you’re right and I notice stop sign running less because I do it myself (edit: when I’m cycling, not when I’m driving).

Sure, I realize that. Maybe I wasn’t clear or perhaps overly verbose in my previous post, but my point is that running stop signs and red lights is the mildest form of “illegal” (in most places but not all) and like you said, arguably could be said to improve cycling safety. I just thought it was a weird thing to focus on. There seemed to be no mention of either why running stop lights or stop signs can improve cycling safety, or the myriad other ways that cyclists frequently break the law and make things more dangerous for themselves. Maybe there was mention in the paper itself, I didn’t read it in detail, but the article didn’t mention it.

PS: I upvoted you, by the way. Not sure who downvoted you or why.

I’m sticking to Mastodon because I don’t want to give into yet another corporate platform to eventually end up with the same results as Twitter and Reddit. Most people are on Twitter/Reddit/Bluesky? Who cares? Enough people are on Mastodon and Lemmy.

Let me start by saying that I fully believe in fuck cars and instead having bike lanes and public transportation everywhere.

I alternate between commuting to work by car and bicycle, and I tend to observe other cyclists when I’m driving. What I notice is that a lot of cyclists place themselves in extremely dangerous situations, considering that there are careless drivers on our roads. Running red lights and stop signs is the least of it (I haven’t had a need to run red lights, but run stop signs regularly). Most of what I have observed where I live (an urban area) is not cyclists breaking the law to protect themselves, but the opposite: sometimes breaking the law and sometimes obeying the law, both in a way that makes things more dangerous for themselves and for drivers.

Some examples I’ve seen (more frequently than running stop signs - I very rarely if ever have seen a bicyclist running a red light and would completely understand if they had to do it because of stoplight sensors not detecting them):

Breaking the law (sometimes a combination of several of these):

• Riding on the sidewalk (arguably improves their safety in some ways, and worsens it in others)
• Riding the wrong way, against traffic (worsens their safety)
• Riding the wrong way, against traffic, on the sidewalk (greatly worsens their safety - I almost ran into someone doing this once because I just did not expect someone coming from the wrong direction at high speed in a completely unexpected place when I was turning into a driveway/side street)
• Riding on crosswalks when pedestrian walking lights are on (worsens their safety)
• Riding wearing headphones (not sure if illegal - it is for drivers - but worsens their safety)
• Riding on busy streets not wearing a helmet (not sure if illegal, but worsens their safety)
• Riding on the street at night with no bike lights (worsens their safety)

Obeying the law:

• Riding in just about the busiest, fastest street possible, when there’s a much safer, parallel, designated “bicycle” street to ride a block away. While this is legal, it makes things more dangerous for themselves and for drivers when they have a perfectly reasonable alternative. I personally go out of my way (literally) to find the least busy streets for my commuting route.

So I guess I’m saying that I’m surprised by the results of this study. I only scanned the actual paper, but one thing that comes to mind is that perhaps some/many cyclists have a greater disconnect between what they think improves their safety vs. what would actually improve their safety?

Ah, yes, I forgot about game jams! They sound like they would really help you spend some concentrated time on game dev and design and progress quickly. Thanks.

You’re welcome. Maybe you don’t have to make all 20, but I think the idea is just to get your feet wet with game development with simple stuff first (baby steps), rather than diving into the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim. Maybe you’ll feel you have the hang of it after making a handful of them.

Apparently, the navy is still using Windows XP on (some?) ships: https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2024/2/5/navy-looks-to-industry-to-digitize-ships

Then there’s this old classic when a navy “smart” ship was adrift for 2 hours after a Windows NT crash: https://www.wired.com/1998/07/sunk-by-windows-nt/

It’s essentially the “how do you eat an elephant?” question, isn’t it? Hint, if you’re not familiar with the reference, the answer is “one bite at a time.”

I’m not a game developer (yet), but would like to try it, so I’ve done a little reading about the topic. There are a couple things I’ve seen advocated that have made a lot of sense to me:

1. Don’t start with your dream game. Start with either tiny games to test specific aspects of your bigger game, or first practice developing clones of many relatively simple classic games, like pac-man, etc. This is a good resource I’ve found to help guide the latter approach: https://20_games_challenge.gitlab.io/challenge/

2. Don’t spend a lot of time on either programming or creating art before you playtest the heck out of your game, preferably with many people. This is what I’ve seen advocated in a popular game design textbook: https://www.gamedesignworkshop.com/ - this makes sense since the same kind of advice applies to any kind of software development and design - verify that your potential audience is actually interested in what you are trying to make before spending a ton of effort making it. I’ve seen very similar advice given in the context of solo app development and even business startups.

Good luck and have fun!