232 karma · joined September 8, 2021
What was the first "x" you used in that message early on? How did you get that many of initial subscribers?
It seems to me that the only way to bootstrap something like this is with ad spend or viral social media content that inspires people to subscribe, but that's sort of a chicken and egg problem if you don't already have wide reach.
So tell your company that you're leaving them for a while to spend time with your family. Go do stuff and see if you can find what's important to you.
Leave on good terms, wrap up any projects, in the hopes they'd have you back in the future. People will 100% understand if you say you want to spend time with young kids, but it can actually be about "retiring early to do other projects".
That's probably the most pragmatic way to satisfy your "why".
> It is probably human to always want more.
I think people are most happy when they are wanting more, ideally striving to be the best at something they care about. Most great artists and athletes are like that.
I have a theory that our employment system hijacks this by providing a small salary for distraction and artificial challenges and rewards for retention.
Many of us learn that we need to "slow down and become happy" once we've achieved enough career challenges. Somehow we should be content in our positions and pay, but paradoxically fearful of unemployment.
If that's the space you occupy, you're simply underfunded and may actually need to "speed up".
Also, if you have children, and you don't want their lives to be difficult, you may want to consider expanding your safety net to include future generations. You may need to really start hustling if you think about your family's long term goals.
> If I knew I could have a job like this ten years ago, I would have thought that's it, the dream.
At the risk of challenging your dreams, it may not be an accident that we are taught to dream of labor.
Easy to see that you're an old perl hacker that's now into rust and you're active in community stuff that matters (LWN, CPAN).
I feel like you might over-share on your blog in a way that could turn off potential employers, but those are companies you wouldn't want to work for anyway.
I get the vibe you might be opinionated and risky, but are clearly technically competent.
I'd probably put you in a team with other rust-enthusiasts for maximum success. You're likely to inspire newer developers.
You might want to take HTML/CSS/JS off your resume because JS pretty much means React/Vue/Angular these days and you don't seem too interested in that stuff.
That's the sort of stuff I'd check about you before the interview.
Good luck!
I don't know what happens in computer science departments, but you can watch Ethereum be developed in the open. They cite the research they're implementing.
For example: https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/proto_danksharding_faq#...
I'm not quite smart enough to follow all the cryptography, but there are a lot of unsolved problems being worked on. It seems that doing trust and accounting at global decentralized scale is trickier than chaining blocks together.
No, I don't think that's happened yet. I still know tons of people excited to build for "web3".
I don't think we need "rich" websites with javascript, "smart" phones in everyone's pocket, or "social media" at all.
But those all happened, and it seems to be a lot of the same vibe for "web3" builders right now.
You can't make this stuff up.
There may be some very specific data privacy laws (like two-party consent states), but yeah, you should assume no data privacy protection in the US.
I have plenty of options besides cell phones. I could have a landline, or get my ham license, or pen a letter!
I'm just a subscriber to a private service, after all.
Your argument is akin to being anti-Twitter because the local government could build a notification system just as well. Maybe San Francisco could, but most of America cannot.
Twitter's core function is that it lets you send and receive short messages. That's absolutely great for a local government office, but it didn't make enough sense for any local government to invent Twitter. That's not the job of local government.
The value here is in the network effect of agreed upon protocols between interested parties.
If parties agree on data sharing protocols, which is something we've all been talking about forever, then the network gains value.
> we can transact using an on-chain NFT that grants the equivalent of ownership rights to the house
He's literally talking about ownership rights tokenized for convenient settlement with a governance layer that can be overridden by officials. I think that's a fine idea to try out. It will probably reduce friction most of the time.
> you can just gloss over because blockchain
The idea is that a universally trusted, always-on database allows you to build new types of applications. This seems obvious to me.
I was listening to NPR a while ago and they had story on about governments that paid for ransomware attacks so they could access critical records. That's where we're at today.
All networks are hard to get off the ground. If you can't tell, I was a fan of the "semantic web" idea. I feel like this time it's going to work because there's a money-layer built into it.
If anything (at the risk of sounding extra American), these threads remind me that the US is still the place to be if you want to build something different.
There's a positive side to how the US works too. The few things we really commit to, like building our military, we really are the best at. Also, the lax regulation does let new technologies like driverless cars get tested on open roads. Hurray? I think so.
Somewhere has to be the test-bed for new ideas. When they fail, they'll be expensive and stupid and maybe even stick around for a lot longer than they should (can we please, please, fix the shoes thing with the TSA?). But all together, we do a lot of cool stuff first that changes the world.
I think you've overlooked this in the grandparent, because you've probably never had the experience of going to a low-tech county property registrar's office to pull a record.
> it's the absolute ton of bureaucracy and paper-shuffling that takes several weeks
Of course, but so much of that bureaucracy is about being risk-adverse. I really do have to take my shoes off at the airport because somebody tried to wear explosive shoes once, about 20 years ago.
So, yes it's the "ton of bureaucracy and paper-shuffling that takes several weeks", but that doesn't really address what's going on. Our governments will easily adopt new technologies when they're simple.
If minting officially signed records is as cheap and easy on-chain as it looks like it's going to be, it would be silly not to use the technology, even if you think government should have been the entity to build and maintain it.
> Choosing blockchain + API vs DB + API here doesn't address that.
This whole class of technology precisely addresses that.
It removes the "who has to build and maintain this DB and keep access to it forever" step, which is pretty significant for important records.
Literal teenagers can buy and sell pictures of apes easier than I can prove to a mortgage company that I own my residence. Something isn't right there, and I don't think it's the children and their fancy record keeping that's wrong.
When the intern at a county clerk's office somewhere in the middle of the country says "hey boss, let's mint NFTs for these records, it costs about a penny each and I can set up the computer to do it as a summer project", that's about the threshold we need for widespread local government adoption.
I come from a place that still has toll booths so that toll booth workers can keep their jobs.
I have to take off my shoes before I can get on an airplane so that my government feels safer.
I personally compute my government taxes, which only occasionally (if ever) get verified. That's how we fund the country.
If I routinely saw the government creating new technology that improved the lives of citizens, I suspect I would share your opinion.
It would be interesting to map "places interested in crypto" against "places that have low trust in their government" and what kind of overlap there is.
The way I see technology in the US: First, the nerds get excited and start forming groups about it. Then, the business people figure out how to monetize it. Eventually, the government gets sold an overpriced enterprise solution. Then we do it all over again.
It sounds like a lot of work to build that though.
Maybe we can find some nerds to make it for "equity" on the chance that such a database has value? They could use it for other stuff too if they want.
I really value being able to sleep until I am rested and wake up without an alarm.
I also want to be able to act on things when spontaneity strikes. Whether that's doing a marathon coding session to solve a problem, staying out late with a new group of friends, or deciding I'd like to go travel somewhere today.
Also freeing up the area of my brain that is filled with perpetual worry about my employer's expectations has got to be a good thing, even if I'm not sure what would fill the void.
The anxiety and depression that come from knowing I have to sleep because I have to wake up to an alarm tomorrow so that I can solve some arbitrary problem for my employer is pretty much killing me.
The other problem is that once I tap out, I'm going to have a resume gap that may make it hard to find high paying work again in 5-10 years should the need arise. Because that's how our system works, I need to secure all the funding I need now, because I know I may not have access to it again.
We have access to all of the world's knowledge now, but I don't have time to sponge up as much of it as I want. It's like we live in this amazing future but I use it to maintain obscure software systems all day.
I sort of feel like this episode of The Twilight Zone ("Time Enough At Last"): https://youtu.be/oLoNGRVeC7Y?t=65
I have a miserable high paying tech job that I would absolutely not do if I wasn't being paid so well.
Maybe I'm delusional, but I believe this is my best strategy for buying my freedom.
The way I see it, it takes about $3M to bond yourself away from a lifetime of servitude. That much capital would allow me to pay myself a middle class income without any time commitment.
The best answer would have been to have rich parents with a large trust fund so I could go pursue my interests without worry. I don't have rich parents, but that doesn't change my requirements.
So instead, I'm going about acquiring the funds I need by whatever legal means I can, which in practice means job hopping at tech companies, looking for equity payouts, and buy/borrow/die with companies and funds that I anticipate to be around for 50+ years.
Of course, I don't get to have kids with this strategy, but ethically I wouldn't want to birth a child into a life of bondage under capitalism anyway. It happened to me and I'm not particularly keen on how it's going. At $10M+ I may reconsider, but I don't expect to get there in my lifetime.
I'm a little less sure every time I read one of these threads.
For a group that's largely bet their fortunes on internet companies, it's kind of funny that anything crypto is so toxic here, but that's probably the reason.
The actual browser is under good technical stewardship from what I know. It's essentially not-evil Chrome with an optional crypto-for-ads monetization model, a crypto wallet, and some primitive default privacy and adblocking tools.
It suffers from the same technical deficiencies as Chrome (installing addons is harder than it should be, addon API is weak compared to firefox, Google controls the "store" for extensions), but I'd recommend it over any other Chromium-based browser.
With a career like that, I doubt he's worried people will stop paying attention to him.
But you're right that nobody will care about new variants even if they are worse. Of course, that means a lot of people will get sick, but that's what's going to happen.
I suspect pharmacists are the only people that some class of Americans can speak to about medical issues because they have an open storefront.
I don't know what pharmacists know about drugs, but they're useful people to speak to about insurance issues. They know the rules around age cutoffs for optional vaccines, which generics are in stock, when something will be denied by insurance, etc.
I understand why most people wouldn't want to be earlier adopters of smart contracts. A lot of people are going to lose a lot of money to a lot of contract bugs for a lot of years.
But eventually that will stop, and the contracts will be stable, and the lessons will be learned.
At some point along the bounty x time curve, there's a threshold where you'll have a greater confidence trusting contracts than centrally managed institutions.
There was a time when banking over the internet was laughably insecure, but it saved so much time that people did it anyway. It took about 15 years before 2FA became standard practice and we're still weening people off of SMS.
Securing contracts may take 10 years to happen, but posts like this show me that it's going to happen.
How about a college dorm hosting a movie night? Maybe theft?
What if a million people watch it for one purchase? I know you think that's theft, but I'm not sure where you'd draw the line.
I think the reality is that 90% of the population won't pirate because it's too much effort and legally ambiguous. If your content becomes popular through piracy, you will absolutely reap the rewards of good content creation.
If a billion people pirated your content because it was that good, you'd have absolutely no problem monetizing. You'd be a household name. When Disney loses their copyright on the Mouse, they're still going to be a huge company capable of monetizing all things Mickey.
If we get back to a state where everyone is pirating because the content services suck, then you need to petition your content distributors to lower friction and provide an experience worth paying for, but we're nowhere near that.
Gabe does it with Steam. I used to almost exclusively pirate games, and now I almost exclusively buy them, because Steam has value adds (achievements, friends, online play, tournaments, workshop content, etc).
Also, you have to understand that many people who have large collections of pirate content see themselves more as archivists than viewers. I'd guess most pirated content never even gets consumed, just downloaded for a "later" that never comes.
Do they lose more income if I watch the content with friends?
In the early days of photography, people believed that if your photo was taken, it was stealing your soul [1].
I can understand the idea of piracy being wage theft in the same way I can understand the idea of photography being soul theft, but I think both are rather silly ideas.
"Intellectual property" doesn't really work like that.
Modern currency like USD is not intended as a store of value, it's intended to facilitate transactions. You should only have it when you need to do transactions. Otherwise you should be invested in assets that you believe will grow over time.
There is no reason to believe the value of USD will grow over time. It's not backed by any commodities and the government prints more of it as it sees fit, with a target inflation rate that's intended to devalue the dollar over time, by design.
In other words, dollars are good for convenient transactions, but you generally wouldn't buy them as an investment.
> it's not impossible to purchase something beyond its fair value.
By definition the price at which an asset trades is the fair value.
> Ray Dalio mentioned his confusion about markets not crashing when he was young because the dollar became untethered from gold a second time in U.S. history, and he later realized buying assets when central banks print was a "rhyme" in economics history--these events don't repeat perfectly, but similar situations occur over time. In his case, it was a repeat event.
The entire world economy is a fiction, but that doesn't change how it works. A lot of "gold bugs" had to learn this the hard way. The entire world is invested in this fiction.
> It's so pervasive that you get studies put out by financial institutions saying you're better to always be fully invested, and to never set aside cash.
Because it is. Dollars are for transacting.
> If you refused to buy when general equities were historically high at any point in time and held on to cash while eating inflation, when market prices came down and you bought ... That's NOT MARKET TIMING.
It is market timing, but trying to time the market can be fine. People say "time in the market beats timing the market", and that's true on aggregate, but there are personal reasons why individuals may want to take on additional risk by trying to time the market for greater gains.
> The whole attitude industry-wide is gross and conflicting to me.
Yes.
> Buy low, sell high! Buy and hold forever! Yeah, but what is "high"? And why would you hold something that is dying?
Don't do this. Buy assets that you believe will appreciate over time relative to other assets. In other words, try to make good bets.
If your bets are working and will continue to work, or you believe your bets will work over time, then keep holding and borrowing as you need dollars.
If you believe you've made a bad bet, take your losses and reinvest into hopefully better bets.
Taxes are a big factor in the decision to sell, but generally, you want to borrow instead of sell when you can.
> I feel like the pop literature available to the public that is digestible covers some reasonable concepts but I think there are studies that either haven't been independently recreated to back simple common questions for the above average person, or they haven't been performed at all.
This has nothing to do with studies. The US Dollar is designed to lose value relative to other assets over time. You have to allocate your dollars into other assets to mitigate this effect.
I finished my degree due to parental pressure. I didn't learn anything in school. It was a pretty big waste of time for me, because I thought it was supposed to be about learning. It turns out that school has nothing to do with education. It's for gatekeeping elites, so if you go, try to make friends with elites that will help you in the future. If you're not going to do that, don't bother attending.
Then I wasted about 3-5 years trying to do my own thing (web apps, iphone apps, IT freelancing, etc). Turns out it's very hard to make a living doing your own thing, or maybe I just never cracked it. You might be able to pull it off, but in terms of time invested, your hourly wage is going to be low. Still, this was better than the $50k/yr jobs that were being offered in my area at the time.
I floated around SF for a while and eventually landed as a "senior engineer" at big tech company where I work pretty minimally, and after a couple more years of this, I'll be permanently retired with millions before 40. Networking was key to me getting my final job.
What I would do instead, knowing what I know now, is fast track myself to be a mid-level engineer working remotely. If you can write React, that's probably the easiest way in. Change jobs every 1-2 years to get promotions. Climb as high as you can, and in about 5-7 years, you'll have enough money to "fat FIRE". Essentially, retire early and live well. Compounding returns make this strategy better the younger you do it. Invest aggressively as you're earning. Always invest all available money.
If you already have the technical skills, but can't stomach working for someone else, you can get pills to either turn off your anger or provide you the motivation to do it.
If you don't have the technical skills to be employed full time as a remote engineer already, you do need to get those. You won't learn them through school, so you'll have to do a lot of building to get those skills. If you can't get a job making $120k+/yr as a junior dev right now, you're not ready to make a living on your own.
If you start working the corporate system now, you'll almost certainly be comfortably retired before 30. It sounds like a long time at your age, but it's likely to be the most efficient path.
I know at your age, you want to take your shot and you don't want to sacrifice your youth, but you'll actually have more opportunities to achieve greatness if you're 30-something with several million dollars in assets.
In other words, if you had wealthy parents, you could skip right to the step you want to do. But you don't, so you're going to have to suck it up and work for 5-10 years to essentially buy yourself a trust fund.