Going from retail to trade work 20 years ago was a world of difference. If someone has a day off, it's a DAY OFF and you better not even call the motherfucker. Workers will even get yelled at by the boss for disturbing fellow employees personal time if they don't absolutely have to.
Retail is just all hell. If anyone is doing that, get out. Get out any way you can. There is no future, you will NOT be rewarded for going above and beyond, and you are just a corporate asset.
There's also another major difference. In the trades, comraderie grows organically as you work with others on a job. In retail, it's all forced, with dumbass morning meetings and songs and shit.
It's just something for people to tinker with and modify if they wish, and learn from. Kinda like Arduino microcontroller kits. My goal isn't to produce the next iPod. My goal is to open up the iPod and let anyone build one.
I have a completed project up on my Tindie page in my profile, it's an ESP32 based input/output control board powered by PoE that was designed for ESPHome software.
Lately I've been working on a fully featured modern MP3 player with tiny OLED screen and a PCB the size of a credit card. I've been frustrated with every project on the web that has anything to do with playing MP3s, they all kinda suck and most don't go beyond the "hello world" equivalent of playing an MP3 file. So I'm making sort of a "core" base firmware that will include all the basics, like browsing for a file to play, creating/editing playlists, non-blocking interrupt driven playback, internet streaming, and an alarm clock. Others would then be able to extend the functionally of this core system by just directly using its documented libraries and classes. It's all based around an ESP8266 and the VS1053 decoder chip.
I spend dozens and dozens of unpaid hours a month in my free time developing open source hardware and software and give the schematics away for free. That dedicated enough for you? You have no idea what goes on in the personal lives of each and every member of a forum, and you're painting us all with a broad brush right now.
I encourage others to reply to this comment on what it is they contribute to their cause. Because I'd be interested to hear that. On the Internet, we're just words on a screen that are easily categorized onto groups of people. But people are individuals, everybody has a story.
Uh no, if I'm looking up how to troubleshoot an issue with my computer's motherboard, I don't want to be told to slather it in banana pudding just because I like bananas. There ARE things where you can't "bias" your way out of it, things that are objectively correct and incorrect.
There are adult people alive right now who save things in software with a button that looks like a floppy disk without even knowing what it is. It will become part of normal language as just another word who's origin was forgotten. Just like we still "tape" and "film" things with digital cameras.
Same thing I did with it this year. Send emails, write documents, watch movies, watch YouTube, play KSP and Astroneer, program some c++, design hobby PCBs, look at porn...
Much as I'd have enjoyed seeing it, it would have greatly hindered adoption when the general public started finding out about furries in the early 2000s and would have made Linux look like a toy not for serious use.