I feel like there's honestly a space for "Greybeards Inc".
Maybe a consultancy of people who have seen and done it all before - Very selective of their clients.
I am retiring from tech to live offline
321–330 of 617 posts
Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes it is. You don't need to announce whether you are using AI or not. Just keep doing your job, use AI when it pleases you and keep building manual code when you think that's better. That's what I do, I have never been asked if I use AI to write my code. If it's dumb code I use AI. If it's something that I want to craft I don't
Where I work % of code written by AI and AI spend is tracked all the way down to the individual person. It is obvious to me that this will be used in performance reviews in the future.
They started doing that tracking where I worked until last summer, stress so high, GERD kicked in worse than it'd ever been and that's going back to the 1980's. I retired, and I do thank God I was able to. I now just dabble every week or so in my personal side projects.
Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline
#323I have been at it for 20 years now and have started to feel my time is up as well As a lot of comments here highlights, the issue is not so much the tech but the politics, constant perf reviews, re-orgs, nonsense BS that is pushed top-down. This industry is taking a toll on you. My advice for anyone reading this that is starting your career: Live simply and save a lot. When I started my career I thought I would love…
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.
Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. Chad is great. Although, if anyone were to lead a cult, I figure it would be Chad, hopefully he doesn’t accidentally charisma himself into a cult leader situation.
Well he does say in the letter he wants to be part of an offline-only community, and is starting a magazine centered around it combined with Orthodox Christianity... this after talking about a community in India that kills outsiders and wanting to be like the Amish. Seems cult-adjacent
Eastern Orthodoxy is the oldest branch of Christianity. Which means it's the furthest thing from "cult-adjacent." You want to know what is actually "cult-adjacent"? People who are associated with Mormonism, the Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientology, Transcendental Meditation, or your local Church of Cosmic Vibrations.
Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline
#325I plan to do the same eventually. I want to buy a shop and become a mechanic, primarily flipping cars, and doing actual repairs for a fair price. I need to get to the point where the business venture only needs to do a bit better than break even, and I'll quit this industry. After more than 20 years in tech, I've done a lot of cool things with smart people, but almost none of what I built still exists (every tech sta…
my wife wants to open a used book store and I want to open a coffee shop inside of it in some nice college town somewhere. That's one of our options once we're empty nesters and the retirements are funded (~9 years hopefully). We would only need to operate at cost so it wouldn't really be a business, more like a hobby.
Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline
#326To the OP...
Best wishes. You are an inspiration.
Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could and did live frugally before I had kids. How can one continue living in a small apartment with lead and asbestos hazards is beyond me.
There is surely a spectrum between small apartment with asbestos and 5m$ house. I read on HN all the time that once you have kid it is unavoidable to spend 300k$ a year. But yet 99.9% of the world and the US manages to raise kids with a fraction of that income and they turn out mostly fine. (Before you ask, yes I have kids and yes we still live simply)
The mental gymnastics I've seen kids enable is Olympic level. Need to upgrade to a bigger house, need to upgrade the car to a SUV, need keep traveling 2-3 times a year, need to sign up for some crazy sports league and coach which means domestic flights and hotels every other week.
Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline
#328For 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…
Thanks for sharing. It helps after seeing so many edgy "don't let the door hit you on the way out" type replies.
Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline
#329Best of luck to him, I hope he finds what he's looking for!
What's not completely clear from the post is what he dislikes with AI / technology. Does someone know?
Re: I am retiring from tech to live offline
#330Funny, 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…
> a Erlang-like microkernel/runtime I have been designing for the past 4 years, I don't want to step on your design process, but if you want to explore some microkernels to run beam, I can link you to mine and another one that I ran into recently. Asking before linking, because sometimes you'd rather not look.
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 than 2k lines which only deals with paging and interrupts, and the userspace is one-scheduler-per-core and a stackless design on a linear address space. A design goal is MAXIMUM performance and simplicity: in most cases a sending a message to another capability is no heavier than a function call, unless the destination is currently busy.
Processes just export a
void handle(void *cap_private_state, msg_t message)