I'm a senior engineer with 15 years of experience. Pretty sure I have a good grasp on "complex" vs. "unnecessarily complicated," and I see the latter a lot more than I would like to.
21 karma · joined July 11, 2020
Over the years I’ve read many things that hinted at it, but this is by far the most relatable thing I’ve ever read.
At basically any point in time I always have something that I’m massively obsessed about (and it’s usually something super weird, non-monetizable like you say). Everything else feels like an ugh field.
> The only exit seems to be financial independence.
This is what got me. It’s a daily thought.
The “hook” for me was seeing things like ifs and loops being written in Forth itself from simpler primitives. I’ve always been a fan of bootstrapping a general purpose computing environment from a small set of primitives, and Forth lets you do exactly that.
> I’m bored of the internet and browsers. I want to have fun with software AND hardware
I can 100% relate to that feeling. Discovering Forth has been therapeutic for me in a sense. I spend the day dealing with AWS and Java and logs and metrics for large distributed systems, and that brings me zero joy or motivation. I spend my work days looking forward to my time with Forth in the evening.
I think it was CollapseOS that sent me down this rabbit hole :)
It's amazing how true this is. You can see it very clearly in your day-to-day as a software engineer. The vast majority of people you will encounter in your career favor fancy, complicated solutions to problems that could be easily solved with fewer resources. And yet when you float those ideas, you're laughed at.
Not sure how representative they are (in this aspect) of hunter-gatherers these days though.
My younger co-workers who only seem to have known Slack and the likes find it really annoying.
Can you give examples of what you mean by that? I've been living in the US (Seattle area) for over 7 years and haven't felt that at all.
1. Awareness that alcoholism runs in the family, so better play it safe and not drink
2. Association between alcohol and past trauma e.g. alcoholic abusive parent
3. Past relationship that ended due to ex-partner's alcohol problem
4. Religious conviction
> Momentum for the Clean Network program is growing. More than thirty countries and territories are now Clean Countries, and many of the world’s biggest telecommunications companies are Clean Telcos. All have committed to exclusively using trusted vendors in their Clean Networks.
Seems like the idea is to form a network that's "clean" of PRC influence.
I started my career as a software engineer writing C, then C++ working on desktop software. Things made sense back then, and that was just 10 years ago.
I’ve tried contributing features to two Electron-based apps. I gave up on both. I just can’t make sense of it.
I’ve sat down countless times over the last decade telling myself I’m going to teach myself this damn frontend web stuff. I gave up every time. It’s ridiculous.
Young folks who have only been exposed to modern garbage have no idea how good it was before the web took over.
I often wonder how this came to be. How we went from well-documented, efficient, sound APIs and libraries to the monstrosity that we have now. I have nothing to offer though.
Look at what's happening in Florida, Texas, Arizona with COVID-19.
I only disclose my actual email address to a few people. For everything else, I set up specific addresses such as shopping@, health@, bank@, etc using a domain I own, and all those forward to the Mailbox address and get filtered accordingly.
Can you provide sources for that? I thought it was the opposite.