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I am retiring from tech to live offline

openpath.quest

401–410 of 617 posts

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#401
post #308
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone has different situations and different level of risk. If u lost your job already, u didn't choosingly give up a stable(don't know u, so guessing) job as the other person alludes (don't know their situation so people guessing here). So if u had a stable good paying job, giving it up to start something new while having a new kid can be very hard .. but doable. Still I'll advised. If u lost your job, based on j…

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> continue with the idea that women just want to be taken care of by a man

I don't think I took this position!

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#402
Mad respect for his work. Love his writing. But no, i'm not buying the story of going offline, especially not with a trending hackernews post and a typewritten letter to the internet. When one is done with something, they're done. Cold turkey. like "Fck this sht, i'm out". If someone notices that you are missing, they'll ask, and you can give them your spiel about being AI-Amish or whatever.

Even if you ignore all that, I think you just need a break, rest, recover, find something else in life and move on. The whole thing about "life was better in the past" is just plain non-sense, simply because the past, for all we know, extends to infinity. Why 1980 and not 1890? or 1590? the inquisition? maybe the crusades? or maybe the pharohs? If you believe in biblical tales then how about being in the great flood? or being one of the pharoh soldiers that die after the sea moses split closes on them? or one of the skulls in gengis khan's tower of skulls?

You can read Steven Pinker's "Better angels of our nature" and get a good sense of how far along have we come.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A society where the only people with stability are those who parasitize on a increasingly emaciated wealth-producing population surely doesn't seem like a stable society, nor one that would be pleasant to live in. There's no true stability in the world, but if the only option for "safety" we see is to be one of the few who snatch self-perpetuating generational wealth, aren't we just speeding up the unraveling of the…

> aren't we just speeding up the unraveling of the very system off of which we desire to subsist on Self-perpetuating generational wealth is not a zero-sum game if said wealth is put to good work. Having wealth morally obligates its holder to put it to use to benefit others. I think we all intuitively understand this; it's the impulse behind calls to "tax the rich!" People the last 500 years who put wealth to good us…

If OP said the important thing is to be appropriately generous with your blamelessly earned wealth as you safeguard it against future perils, I would not have replied.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#404
post #382
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Please do link your microkernel, I'm very curious to learn from other people working in this space 2. I'm not exactly looking to recreate the BEAM. I'm building a message-passing microkernel built on my interpretation of capabilities: they replace PIDs in a way that they basically become akin to object pointers, with all the extensibility and security. It's a pretty wild prototype, with a ring-0 kernel that's less…

Your idea sounds fun, too! Here's my thing: Crazierl https://github.com/russor/crazierl/ demo (desktop recommended) at https://crazierl.org/demo/ Here's the other one: Tyn https://github.com/tyn-os/kernel I haven't studied Tyn, I think from the high level we both have the same goals; enough kernel to run BEAM, and then BEAM does the rest. I wrote in C because learning Rust and bare metal OS stuff at the same time see…

I built an x86 kernel 25 years ago at this point, this time around I chose RISC-V because it's much simpler to get it running, and speed of iteration is paramount on a prototype. There's less documentation but much less cruft. I eventually would like to try porting it to x86, and also to run the same programs — unmodified — on Linux. My first prototype was on Linux actually, but trying to figure out how to fit userspace preemptive scheduling with async IO/io_uring and the complexities of signal handling was literally more complicated than just writing a kernel.

Thank you for the links! I'll have a look when I have a moment in the next weeks and I might send you an email to discuss this further

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would take this advice a bit further even -- I don't think savings alone is the key, because inflation and de-dollarization are exponentially eroding purchasing power. The key is ownership of income-producing assets. In late-stage capitalism, the vast majority of people who work in exchange for wages will be members of the debt class; workers who manage to escape debt will still be living on a knife's edge where yo…

Easier said than done, no asset producing income will do so indefinitely without a lot work/investments.

My S&P 500 fund has done this and will continue to do this without any work or investments of time.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#406

I just retired after 40 years writing code. The last year or so wasn’t fun - battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted. For a long time, I thought I’d do a lot of hobby or open source coding when I retired. I haven’t even tried. I’m not burned out, but find I’ve lost the passion for coding I once had. Is that AI? Or is it me? Maybe as my retirement progresses, I can rekindle that passion, but as of now, I d…

More and more I have realized it was not the coding that I enjoyed, but solving problems/puzzles. This fits into the beautiful code not really mattering to more than myself but the solution for people, but that is hard to let go of.

We have long ago learned as an industry that code tends to live for a long time and so maintainable code is important. However for individuals your stance is just fine.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#407
post #360
post #320

This whole thing is eye-searingly performative. Whether or not he follows through and goes dark after this, this farewell is just so ridiculous. Claims to have not used the internet or a phone since February, does all communication via USPS, declares that AI and social media make him hate himself... But somehow is continuing to post on Bluesky, continuing to update his blog, continuing to post YouTube videos, continu…

Chad is one of the most high-integrity persons I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. He is not fucking around for clicks in any shallow sense. I agree with the sibling comment that your cynicism is deeply misplaced imho. I mean, you can be cynical for whatever reasons, but I just think you'd be assuming (and participating in and perpetuating) a game Chad isn't playing.

> He is not fucking around for clicks in any shallow sense.

He is undeniably "fucking around for clicks." When you don't want clicks, you don't cross-post to YouTube, BlueSky, LinkedIn, your blog, etc. Clearly a lot of effort went into making this announcement social media friendly and click-worthy. He has analytics on his blog to track how many clicks he gets.

Whether it's in a "shallow sense" or not is subjective and there's no way to really argue against that. Do I think he's karma-obsessed and drooling over engagement dashboards? No. And maybe that's what you mean.

But you have to be willfully naive to deny the irony in deploying numerous completely unnecessary layers of tech, over numerous social media channels, to let everyone know that you no longer want tech and social media in your life.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#408

Mad respect for his work. Love his writing. But no, i'm not buying the story of going offline, especially not with a trending hackernews post and a typewritten letter to the internet. When one is done with something, they're done. Cold turkey. like "F ck this sh t, i'm out". If someone notices that you are missing, they'll ask, and you can give them your spiel about being AI-Amish or whatever. Even if you ignore all…

This was well written but it does sort of read as a guy bragging about his wealth and creativity. Good for him but when I leave tech I'm going to be a little less bombastic about it.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#409
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're IT people, we often work 14 hours a day. How does that not mix into your personal life?

Working 14 hours a day isn't normal. From an IT person who works 8 hours a day.

Think it might be normal for the HN crowd, founders etc.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#410

Left engineering & Google on my own accord in August 2020. WFH was the catalyst that helped push me over the edge, but it was a long time coming. The underlying feeling I always had when working on programming at work versus programming at school and graduate work: I am being paid to re-type out things that many people have typed out before. As I saw waves of layoffs both pre and post LLMs, it's funny how my gut intu…

Note to readers: I had very bad results with trusting my gut.
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