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I am retiring from tech to live offline

openpath.quest

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Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#191

Post by dataviz1000 »

sph wrote: post #70

Funny, if all goes well today is my last day as professional software engineer, after 20 years. I have enough savings to buy a modest cottage and to last me a year or two being frugal. After that it’s anyone’s guess, but I am beyond excited not having to program for a living any more, just on what feels meaningful, in complete autonomy. Projects lined up: a Erlang-like microkernel/runtime I have been designing for th…

> last me a year or two being frugal

Word of advice.

Get a part time job where you can keep your skills up-to-date because from personal experience personal projects on GitHub will not be enough to land a job in two years. Make sure for every penny you spend you are earning equal.

The two years are going to fly by.

EDIT: I'm not joking about taking this serious. You want to be working when people start losing their jobs to AI. Most likely this is going to end with society rethinking distribution but you are going to need to be able to survive the changes and 2 - 3 years is not enough wealth.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#192

Post by edgarvaldes »

narrator wrote: post #10

This reminds me of the movie Edge of Tomorrow where the main character decides he doesn't want to fight the aliens today and instead goes into town to get a drink at the pub. The aliens still get him. Robots and stuff are going to start appearing everywhere soon. He's not going to like that. Hoodlums are probably going to start burglarizing his house with their robot accomplices. Then he won't be able to go outside b…

So exactly as we "modern" people are to the Amish, yet the Amish persist in its way of life.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#193

Post by sph »

embedding-shape wrote: post #129
tasuki wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] nothing to do with a FIRE strategy. I just saved, lived humbly [...] Textbook FIRE strategy.

"Lived humbly" is vastly different from "reduce expenses and maximize savings" which FIRE is all about. I've basically always earned more than I could spend, although I thought nothing about saving money, does that mean I'm doing FIRE too, or just happened to be "living humbly"?

"reduce expenses and maximize savings" simply means spend less than you earn. Live below your means. We call that 'living humbly' in the modern world, when you're not buying the latest phone and watching the latest movie at $50 a pop.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#194

Post by swiftcoder »

pipes wrote: post #41
kamaitachi wrote: post #7

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…

The battling ai bit you mentioned. This is my life right. Ai is both amazing and shit. I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code and having amazing lives. Meanwhile I am going insane with stress because I've burnt so much time trying to wrangle it on a team I've just joined. My productivity has not been good. I half feel like I am being gas lit by YouTubers and half f…

> I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code

If they are, they aren't producing anything useful with it. Just look around - do you see a sudden increase in actually useful software alongside the AI boom?

What they are mostly doing is a snake-eating-it-own-tail million lines of code LLM harness to burn tokens faster to write more code... to write a 10 million lines of code LLM harness. Or endlessly bikeshedding the perfect LLM-powered bespoke personal knowledge base.

In normal software engineering jobs, we're debugging problems a bit quicker, we're writing boilerplate faster, we have a lot of questionable new test suites... but the game is more or less the same as it was before

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#195

Post by solomonb »

I love learning about computers, programming, and math so much. I actually got into tech as a career pretty late. For many years I worked as a art fabricator/carpenter in the art world.

I only got good enough at programming to get a job in tech because I became obsessed with the Curry-Howard Correspondence as a backdoor into learning math.

I've always had a wide array of interests. I live on a half acre property with a giant garden and a shop that is bigger then my actual house. I've always split my free time between exploring and learning about computers, gardening, radios, and carpentry, fixing old machines, etc.

The shift in my lived work experience with AI has substantially demotivated me from programming and computers in my free time. A million times over I would rather pull weeds or clean my Bridgeport mill.

I've always wished I could go back to a 1990s experience where the computer lived in the den, the internet was only somewhat monetized, the future was utopian.

OP's plan to fallback to 1980s era technology is appealing but also somewhat depressing. Not only do I really like and enjoy learning about computers, but also making this kind of individualistic decision doesn't really get us to a better place as a society.

I wish we had heeded the warnings of researchers like Sherry Turkle who identified the impacts of technology on the individual as far back as the 1980s.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#196

Post by georgeburdell »

reactordev wrote: post #53
narrator wrote: post #10

This reminds me of the movie Edge of Tomorrow where the main character decides he doesn't want to fight the aliens today and instead goes into town to get a drink at the pub. The aliens still get him. Robots and stuff are going to start appearing everywhere soon. He's not going to like that. Hoodlums are probably going to start burglarizing his house with their robot accomplices. Then he won't be able to go outside b…

We have a choice right now on whether that world exists or not

Exactly. People make this technology with impunity. If they felt repercussions for working with the “bad guys”, it would give them pause before accepting a job with Flock, Andruil, Anthropic, etc.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#197

Post by tenacious_tuna »

jdorfman wrote: post #89

For those scratching their heads asking who is this guy and why should I care? He has been tackling the open source sustainability issue since launching gittip circa 2012. Since then millions of dollars have been raised for open source because of him. Sure it’s a drop in the bucket but he did it. Chad is a friend of mine. You can’t find a nicer person in tech than him. I hope this is temporary because he can still ma…

Chad taught me programming when I was a child, and introduced me to a professor I then went on to work for. Sadly I haven't kept up with him, but I second his impact: both big and small, he's a brilliant and caring guy.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#198

Post by cantalopes »

kamaitachi wrote: post #7

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…

I feel you. I've been coding for about 20 years and the last 2 years were an absolute downer, draining all the joy of programming by offloading the actuall puzzles to an ai third party thst i just navigate and correct. I am 20 times more productive but 20 times less happy

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#199

Post by OG_BME »

Chad has been one of the strongest voices in the open source community for the past few years. When we were building tools for OSS developers we valued his opinion highly.

This is the final nail for me, that something is rotten in the state of open source.

There's the "old guard" of open source, who seem to spend most of their time arguing about semantics, governance, and the nth kubernetes telemetry solution.

So where is the "new guard"? There's been a lot of interesting work in open source AI, but it seems to me like a championed effort cannot exist without a new paradigm around collaboration and monetization. More and more, we see the new guard question or outright deny new contributors due to AI slop PRs and issues continue to pile up.

There desperately needs to be a sexy revitalization of open source, starting with young developers. I thought it would be from the YC-esque startups of the world, who use open source as a way to garner legitimacy, good will, and a top-of-funnel upselling motion.

"Trad" open source is greying - and the new wave is more of a ripple. It has no shared identity, and no champion.

Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline

#200

Post by sph »

azangru wrote: post #32
kamaitachi wrote: post #7

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…

> battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted What I am selfishly curious about is: is it possible to remain a software developer, and ignore AI? To write code the same way we did before 2022? I understand that there are many companies in which managers demand more of workforce — but are there still places where people are satisfied to not rush ahead and do business same way they did three or four years ago?…

Yes: work for 90% of the world that isn't a purely tech company, but just need a working product delivered on time and at cost.

No one has asked me to use adopt LLMs in my consulting work, at least as of yet.

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