Happened to me the other day. I got a weird feeling when they responded with a long message within seconds of me messaging (maybe it’s partially automated?), then when they wanted to pay upfront with Zelle and asked for my email I knew it was a scam.

At that point they’d send you a fake Zelle/Venmo phishing email, saying you need to upgrade to a business account, or “login” and do something else to accept the payment.

It's helpful being outside the USA. Many scammers are easier to spot.

Profile pictures are obviously American, and often show more breast than face.

Instant replies.

Quickly ask for an unusual payment method which no local would use.

Write in the local language (machine translated) and don't switch to English if I write in English.

I miss my chunky Enter key! Also whenever I have to write a currency value in £ I'm always annoyed that I need to go to the Wikipedia entry for "Pound sign" and copy it from there. There's probably an easier way, but it comes up so infrequently and I'm far too lazy to learn.

Are you me? LOL

There is an ALT+ for it, but I can never remember it, despite needing it at least once a week.

On the subject of moocs and books, which were some of your favorites? I'm an SWE with an out-of-date background in AI and I'd love to deep-dive into ML, but there are _so many_ mooc options nowadays without a great way to determine quality.

The general aim is to figure out how much money you need at different points in your life, for example:

- how many years until you plan to retire?

- how much do you need in retirement? How much do you expect to receive from social security/other income sources?

- do you have/are you planning to have kids? Are you going to pay for college? If yes, how much might that cost?

- are you expecting any other big expenses in the future? e.g. wedding, down payment on a house

- are you planning to take a sabbatical at any point? If yes, for how long and how much do you expect to spend?

The original version was Taco Bell - Pizza Hut was dubbed over in international releases (the latter has a much greater international presence).

I never understood the appeal of Dwarf Fortress until a good few hours into my first game I had just finished following a detailed tutorial and was starting to get a hang of the interface. I decided to start work on my first big construction project - a deep pit to keep the regularly attacking trolls away and a gargantuan drawbridge to lead over it. It's probably child's play by any non-noob player's standards, but I was so proud of it. All of the noble dwarves came to the grand opening of the drawbridge - the mayor, the sheriff, the captain of the guard and all of the highest ranking military dwarves in their bright shining armor. They all stood at the base to witness the first lowering of the grand drawbridge. It was lowered and with a mighty crash, flattened the gathered nobles and military elite...Because I had placed it facing the wrong way.

The fortress didn't last too long after that. I tried my best to clean things up, making a nice new dining hall and brewery, but the remaining dwarves took it pretty hard - one of them ended up losing his mind while drunk and slaughtered most of the rest in the great dining hall, the rest died of disease because nobody wanted to clean up the mess. I was so proud of my towering (and first!) fortress, and I lost it all because of one stupid mistake, but it's definitely the most fun I've ever had losing a game.

I'd also echo the suggestion to think hard about whether you really want to be a Project Manager or are you just following what you think is a traditional 'career path'.

I became a Project Manager right out of college after completing my CS degree and did it for ~8 years. I believe I was pretty good at it, but I don't think I ever once really enjoyed it. I spent all my free time coding, and eventually realized I probably should have been doing it as a job all along. I then spent about a year self-teaching, moved half-way around the world to San Francisco, and found a job that, more often than not, I actually enjoy going to every day.

I'm sure some people really enjoy Project Management, but each of the three points in the parent comments ring extremely true for me, so for now at least I'd much rather be coding!

Setting the desktop background to a screenshot of the desktop, then hiding all the icons and the start bar.

As a victim of this prank (in the late 90's) I can attest to a) how puzzled you feel when nothing responded to mouse clicks and b) how funny it is when someone finally reveals what was going. The sole other programmer I was working with at the time had set me up, and managed to keep a straight face for 30 minutes while he suggested various solutions (rebooting, a different mouse etc).

I did something similar to this but made the desktop upside down. Then inverted the mouse so that if someone pulled the mouse, the cursor would go up (as if the screen is upside down).

I've lost count of the number of times I've been approach by random people asking for feedback on their killer app idea whilst at http://www.workshopcafe.com/

A cafe full of bloodthirsty market researchers. Scary!

http://www.theodinproject.com/ helped me when I was first starting out: it organizes a huge amount of free online courses and learning materials into a syllabus to take you from complete beginner to junior web developer.