2,994 karma · joined September 13, 2012
No, my reasoning is to enjoy life by pursuing what I love and I don't want saving money to get in the way, even if it meant possibly cutting my funemployment short.
> Nice to be able to go on a little trip or eat out sometimes
100% agree! I'd caution against over indulging on consumption though, it can lead to a trap where you spend all your money and not gain much value. Instead of spending money on consumption, I try to optimize spending on money on things that increase my creative output value. I haven't eaten out in a while, in its place I've bought a nice pizza oven and I make pizzas for family and friends. They usually bring the finer things, so I don't spend much money when I'm hosting but I end up having an incredible amount of fun.
Also when I host we usually have alot of leftover food, which then goes into my compost pile and I get to build up more high quality dirt. Win win. I'm thinking of buying a duck next week for companionship and also to help around the garden.
> Most good stuff doesn't need to cost a lot though.
From my personal experience, most good stuff comes from investing in tools that increase your creative output. Those things are always worth the money
Right before I quit, I was taking PTOs regularly to spend time at Wheaton Labs (the founder himself retired from tech) and really learned alot from there about gardening and being energy efficient with utilities around me.
I then quit my job three months ago and started doing everything I've always wanted to do / learn! Here are some of them:
1. I had no idea how food is grown. I started maintaining my own backyard to learn about how to grow different foods. Most of them are still growing, waiting patiently for harvest.
2. I had no idea why people eat gluten free foods and what types of food allergens there out there and did some digging (Wow really learned alot there)
3. I've always ate out and my cooking skills sucks. I started cooking my favorite foods and trying to get good at it (PIZZA!)
4. Music! I always felt left out when my coworkers were having music jam sessions. I've been practicing the 3 main cords every day in the past 3 months and I can sometimes improvise and sing to my wife throughout the day.
And the most important is time! I finally have the time to dive deeper and deeper into whatever topics I find interesting.
We can't possibly build a machine for every function a tree does.
I didn't fail either. Our school focused on the theoretical and we never had practical applications of the knowledge.
> A chemical is the same whether it is natural or synthetic
For me the difference is naturally occurring and moderated via biological process of organisms vs extracted and manufactured chemicals. For example, you wouldn't find large amounts of Chlorpyrifos (used in herbicides) naturally anywhere in the world. It was mass produced for use in agriculture.
> GMO can be made more nutritious
If you are measuring specifically for say, vitamin A, you can engineer a crop to have higher concentrations of vitamin A than any other crop out there. So yes you are correct.
Seems like minor improvement in a meal, it doesn't measure the cumulative effects of these minor differences every meal, over several years.
Organic ensures that the soil where your food came from had no prohibited substances (most synthetic fertilizers and pesticides) applied for three years. Chances are, if you are buying food from supermarkets without the organic label, your food probably came from a farm that uses unhealthy synthetic fertilizers that may attribute to health issues later down the road.
Unless you know your restaurant is cooking with organic food, they are probably not so it is best to eat out sparingly and learn to cook with your own delicious food with your organic ingredients.
If you want to step up your game, you could also buy organic clothes (aka clothes that came from plants / animal) that came from soil without prohibited substances. Your body is covered most of the day so it's better to be on the healthier side.
Obviously, the label "organic" doesn't mean you are getting the best because there is still alot of room for improvement. Organic still allows some form of pesticides and fertilizers and has next to nothing about the organic matter in your soil (which determine how nutritious your food would be).
The article mentions regenerative organic certification, which addresses the shortcomings for organic labels. If we, as consumers, demand for the highest quality food, it turns out to be good for the soil and the long term health of the earth too!
Hands down, if you have a space for your own garden or even pots at home, you could easily grow food that are more nutritious than any food you can find in a grocery store. Optimize for organic matter in your soil. The higher the organic matter, the more nutritious your food is. Most of the agricultural soil that grows food has about 3-6% organic matter, you can easily get it above 10% at home. So if you have time on your hands, you should try growing the food you eat most regularly at home.
first and foremost, I'm covering the bare dirt from direct sunlight by covering it with a layer of cardboard (empty amazon shipment boxes).
Next is some aerated compost tea to speed up the microbial activity and loosen the dirt and start the process of turning it into soil. Add some compost along the way
I'm documenting the journey on this forum if you want to follow along: https://permies.com/t/164053/Gardening-Journey#1286751
He has a bootcamp and I took 2 weeks off from work to try it out in January and I learned alot just by being there. https://wheaton-labs.com/bootcamp/
After that experience I couldn't focus on work anymore so I quit my job (I have 2 years worth of savings) and now my days are spent trying to restore the soil in my backyard.
How do you make sense of the intensifying forest fires, hurricanes, heat waves, and someone burning fossil fuels to go to space?
This way I have a server to ignore all the confirmation emails.
If I understand the use case correctly, I give out your system generated emails instead of giving my emails correct? And then your service forwards all emails you receive to my email?
So what I started was a local library program (pre-covid) that I would attend before / after work to be around people who are doing career switch to coding.
Then when students learn enough and have strong foundations that I look for, I recruit them to work on open source side projects that benefit new students who are learning.
For the students who have shown the maturity to build and maintain production features, I refer them to the company I work at and they interview and (hopefully get in).
In the past 2 years, I've referred 5 students successfully and they're all doing pretty really well (I secretly stalk their internal code contributions).
I hope that one day, I could have enough reputation at my company to hire engineers based on their open source contributions. I also hope that the stock market doesn't crash next year because I plan to use my RSUs to start a fund to hire junior engineers students so they don't worry about medical benefits while they contribute to open source projects and have a hard time finding a job.
If you mentor a student as they are learning, you can instill good engineering practices: like taking the time to communicate and write good documentation, write code and comments to make life easy for the next engineer to take over, how to handle tradeoffs between time and quality, etc. These are critical engineering skills that are very hard to test in 1 hours but are very effective if mentored early on.
What was your reasoning? Personally, I write tests for all my projects, it forces me to really think hard about how to break down the different components and functionalities and it helps others feel more confident to contribute.
It used to be closed source, but it was only because I wasn't confident about the quality of the codebase. Now it is much better.
> My personal experience when I was a gsoc admin was that it was hard to get the students stick around after the end of the summer, do you manage and have some tips to share?
First you should realize that some people just don't really see the point in coding. These people are just going to wander off.
The ones who are dedicated though, its important to spend time to talk to them and make sure your project aligns with their goals. Then they will contribute above and beyond. Our project mission is simple because most students want an engineering job: Working on c0d3.com repository will not only help you gain the skills as a software engineer, it also counts as work experience and makes your resume look amazing.
Does your gsoc project lead to a full time job conversion? 100% of the people I know who did gsoc did it with only one goal in mind: get a full time job.
Rather than talk about your story and how you were able to "make it", I think it'll be really cool if you found a way to help open up this social mobility so that is is accessible for more people.
That's what I'm trying to do anyways. I've moved quite a few people from 40k / year (whole family) to making 150k / year. You not only learn alot by doing that, you can also create miracles in people's lives.