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Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

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Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#131

Post by bongodongobob »

neocritter wrote: post #19
bongodongobob wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's what artists do to lie to themselves so their entire life doesn't seem like a waste of time. I went from music to tech. Art is full of completely delusional hacks.

Tech is also full of delusional hacks. You find them everywhere. Delusional hack artists are more fun.

I'd rather hang with people that have a rudimentary idea of logic than talk about karma, auras, moon phases, vibrations, and energy. It seems to come from a good place but it's fucking exhausting.

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#132

Post by datadrivenangel »

mauvehaus wrote: post #120
datadrivenangel wrote: post #20

Reminds me of the classic: "Sorry I missed your comment of many months ago. I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood. The hours are long, the pay sucks, and there's always the opportunity to remove my finger with a table saw, but nobody asks me if I can add an RSS feed to a DBMS, so there's that :-)" https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149...

Oh hey, that's me; I'm still building furniture! True to form my website still needs an update, but the contact form works. Please feel free to reach out if you have a project to discuss :-) Shipping is always an option, but it's a lot less if you're a half-day's drive from Vermont. Or somewhere I'd like to go on vacation anyway. Edited to add: I've got to go stretch my legs after spending the day in front of the com…

Keep on keeping on!

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#133

Post by neocritter »

bongodongobob wrote: post #131
neocritter wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech is also full of delusional hacks. You find them everywhere. Delusional hack artists are more fun.

I'd rather hang with people that have a rudimentary idea of logic than talk about karma, auras, moon phases, vibrations, and energy. It seems to come from a good place but it's fucking exhausting.

You and I know very different artists. "Logical" people have their woo, too.

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#134

Post by _heimdall »

renewiltord wrote: post #130
Dalewyn wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question we need to ask isn't whether Pax Americana is dying, but who is going to succeed it. So far it seems like it'll be China on account of there being no other country or bloc able to compete at that level, but that would be very unpleasant for us westerners.

The view from Disunited Nations seems likely. There need be no successor peace. There could just be a broken ocean. Europe, in particular, has long failed to contribute to the peace it prospers in. The US periodically has to go and pacify the place since they are practically barbarians who will start killing each other in massive genocides given a few moments alone. When the US withdraws, weakened and bruised, no dou…

There's a very real question hidden in there though, is it even the US's role to "pacify" the "barbarians"?

There's a lot rolled up in such a small idea. What makes another population barbarians, and how is it so different from the US? Assuming there are groups of adversarial barbarians around the world, why should the US step in to "fix" it and how can they even define what the fix is?

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#135

Post by Gigachad »

anal_reactor wrote: post #86
Gigachad wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seem to make a decent living doing furry art commissions. Looks like far less grind than other kinds of art and also not corporate.

I saw a graph somewhere that vast majority of income from OnlyFans is earned by a small number of top performers. I assume that something similar happens in the furry community.

Not really. Onlyfans creators are selling the same content to lots of people, while furry artists are selling their time slots for custom art. The top artists can charge more for their time, but there is still a limit to how many pieces of work they can put out each week so the money is pretty well spread down to the less popular artists who are more readily available to take on work.

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#136

Post by passion__desire »

pixl97 wrote: post #123
passion__desire wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a quantum information theorist went to become a hard labourer in construction because he thought "physical labour is food for the soul"

Honestly I would say labor/exercise is food for the brain. Of course moderation in everything.

Decades ago, Wiesner left academia, embraced Orthodox Judaism, moved from the US to Israel, and took up work there as a construction laborer—believing (or so he told me) that manual labor was good for the soul.

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5730

Stephen J. Wiesner (1942 – August 12, 2021)[1] was an American-Israeli research physicist, inventor and construction laborer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiesner

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#137

Post by declarethroway »

jncfhnb wrote: post #2

> In business theres a term called “Total Adressable Market,” or TAM. This is basically everyone in the world who could buy a product in a given category. What’s the TAM for a product like fishing rods? Well, that would be everyone in the world who likes fishing... > The reason we mention this is because when Pablo first started selling his art online, he created all his posts strictly in Spanish - his native languag…

Dual language adds clutter. We are in the age of short attention spans. The part you quoted is just below the Remove as much friction from the buying process as possible one.

And from personal experience, ages ago, landing some jobs when people tought I was native English speaker, and even same country, sometimes is better if they don't know the relation will be across international boundaries until they have half decided to buy/contract. Maybe that has changed in recent years.

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#138

Post by twojobsoneboss »

RussianCow wrote: post #125
bityard wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are the roles I seriously considered and actively explored to some degree or another. 1. Electrician. It's not something you can just jump into, even if you're the type who can grok 100% of the theory, equipment, and electrical code overnight. Even after you're all trained up, you have to rank up through various levels, most of which require working under someone else for X number of years. It takes a decade or…

I started a side business making custom craft cocktails for events (mostly weddings). It's a stressful job, but mixology is a passion of mine and so it doesn't feel nearly as much like work as my 9-5. I'm still in the early stages and learning a ton as I go, but I'm hoping to streamline my processes and raise my prices/margins enough to make about $80 per hour, which would be enough to allow me to go part-time with s…

Happy for you that you have a decently monetizable passion!

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#139

Post by ornornor »

antirez wrote: post #32

Well, he is using code as a tool, as a mean to reach his goals. I believe this is the best way to write code, after all. Should almost be the only sensible way. It's just that in 2024, having a programming job is 90% of times doing things you don't care with tools you don't want to use. The problem is not programming itself.

You forgot to mention terrible managers, abusive “business” people, and utterly broken processes that put all of the responsibility and none of the agency on the developers themselves.

Re: Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

#140

Post by ornornor »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #73
AlecSchueler wrote: post #45

I did this some years ago myself and I want to say the only thing I miss is...agile working! Throw your tomatoes now. It's fantastic to work in this field and very fulfilling but I consistently find the quality of teamwork and coordination to be much lacking compared to my engineering past. I wish I could sit down with a group of musicians and give them a bunch of Jira tickets to work on for the sprint before the upc…

What happened to people before processes?

Who knows, can’t find any JIRA ticket about it and anyone working at the time has long since quit/been laid off.
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