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Ask HN: Burnt out from big tech. What's next?

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Re: Ask HN: Burnt out from big tech. What's next?

#51

Post by badpun »

sieabahlpark wrote: post #42
shortcake27 wrote: post #18

When it comes to burnout, the general advice I received is take minimum 1 year off work. I left my job a few months ago as the burnout got so bad I wasn’t able to conjure up the motivation to tackle the simplest of tasks. First couple months I didn’t feel any better and I was getting worried. But I’m _just_ starting to feel better now. I’m finding myself more positive and less stressed. So what am I doing? I’m living…

Yeah I'm sure everyone can be unemployed for a year straight and live out of their car. That sounds completely reasonable and not absolutely, in any way, privileged or insane.

The fact that the right solution is not accessible to everyone does not make it less right. If a specific cure for cancer costs say $20k per month, not everyone can buy it - but it doesn't not make it inefficient cure for cancer.

Re: Ask HN: Burnt out from big tech. What's next?

#52

Post by laszlojamf »

majikaja wrote: post #21

If I had $1m lying around now I would drop everything and focus on longevity/medical research. Who cares about making improvements to gadgets if we're all going to die in a few decades. The faster this tech bubble bursts and people stop flocking to engineering the better.

So once we all live forever we can spend our days improving gadgets just because it's fun?

Re: Ask HN: Burnt out from big tech. What's next?

#53

Post by wiihack »

sircastor wrote: post #46

As a random suggestion for a project to pursue, over the past few years I've thought that there needs to be some way to cryptographically sign media that was recorded by a camera - basically a way to say "Yes, this is a real thing that happened, and you can prove it with this signature." Especially given the leaps in audio, video, deepfakes, etc, we're all going to need a means for verifying that something is real. I…

Something like thats exists already! The organisation behind it is called C2PA :) https://c2pa.org/

Re: Ask HN: Burnt out from big tech. What's next?

#54

Post by bjornsing »

badpun wrote: post #50
sircastor wrote: post #46

As a random suggestion for a project to pursue, over the past few years I've thought that there needs to be some way to cryptographically sign media that was recorded by a camera - basically a way to say "Yes, this is a real thing that happened, and you can prove it with this signature." Especially given the leaps in audio, video, deepfakes, etc, we're all going to need a means for verifying that something is real. I…

Sounds interesting! It would probably require a hardware solution though - a private key and encryption chip tightly coupled with the rest of the camera hardware, so that it cannot be reached from the outside (to extract the private key).

Security by obscurity... But maybe good enough for this use-case.

Re: Ask HN: Burnt out from big tech. What's next?

#55

Post by aardvark179 »

sircastor wrote: post #46

As a random suggestion for a project to pursue, over the past few years I've thought that there needs to be some way to cryptographically sign media that was recorded by a camera - basically a way to say "Yes, this is a real thing that happened, and you can prove it with this signature." Especially given the leaps in audio, video, deepfakes, etc, we're all going to need a means for verifying that something is real. I…

Such cameras already exist.

Re: Ask HN: Burnt out from big tech. What's next?

#56

Post by obnauticus »

sircastor wrote: post #46

As a random suggestion for a project to pursue, over the past few years I've thought that there needs to be some way to cryptographically sign media that was recorded by a camera - basically a way to say "Yes, this is a real thing that happened, and you can prove it with this signature." Especially given the leaps in audio, video, deepfakes, etc, we're all going to need a means for verifying that something is real. I…

I’ve worked on this specific problem you are describing but for other reasons.

The issue will be once someone breaks the secure enclave in the CCD, all of the video they produce will now be trustworthy. CCDs are pretty lightweight in general as most of the heavy lifting is meant to be offloaded to the ISP—so the on-die processing for the CCD is generally very lightweight and wouldn’t have buffers large enough to sign each frame. Also there is no standardized way of creating a secured MIPI connection. You can do some clever things to mitigate for this, but it is far from what I’ll call “best practice” and more along the lines of a bespoke solution.

Re: Ask HN: Burnt out from big tech. What's next?

#57

Post by doix »

> Part of me is tired of spending so much of my life in front of a computer.

Sports/activities are great. I don't know how old you are, or if you have kids or not, but if you have little responsibility, I would pick an activity and then move somewhere that the activity is easily accessible.

If it's surfing, then move to somewhere and live on the beach. If it's skiing/snowboarding, live on a mountain during the season. Hiking, move to near mountains with fairly good weather (or bad weather if that's your thing), etc.

It's the advice I give everyone that feels like they are burning out since it helped me, but obviously everyone is different.

Re: Ask HN: Burnt out from big tech. What's next?

#58

Post by Joel_Mckay »

"working in ML", nothing like research on an arbitrary deadline to burn out staff. "Distributed systems" is hard, but working on Julia seems like a natural consolidation of your interests.

A 1 year break is a good idea, if you are at the burn-out stage with persistent neck pain, and constant illnesses due to immune system stress.

The ikigai chart is pretty good guidance: https://management30.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IKIGAI--...

Generally, most take a graduate course, or pick up a new certified skill.

Synthetic biology study is interesting, as it approaches some problems in unique ways. Also, a course on Human Behavioral Biology may be interesting if you are interested in Neuromorphic engineering.

Different people have different ideas of fun. =)

Re: Ask HN: Burnt out from big tech. What's next?

#59

Post by wnkrshm »

marshallbananas wrote: post #26

I burnt out hard after almost 20 years programming, mostly web things, last decade in the full-stack JavaScript ecosystem. Last year I started building simple electronic stuff with the Raspberry Pi Pico board. It's not far off from programming and I had to learn C (Python feels too JS somehow), but being able to literally move things with electrons and code and talk directly to the metal awakened something in me. I g…

You should also have a look at

https://www.youtube.com/@rctestflight

with lots of autonomous vehicles, solar driven power etc.

Re: Ask HN: Burnt out from big tech. What's next?

#60

Post by majikaja »

laszlojamf wrote: post #52
majikaja wrote: post #21

If I had $1m lying around now I would drop everything and focus on longevity/medical research. Who cares about making improvements to gadgets if we're all going to die in a few decades. The faster this tech bubble bursts and people stop flocking to engineering the better.

So once we all live forever we can spend our days improving gadgets just because it's fun?

If tech were that fun all SW engineers would be paid games industry salaries.
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