This article spoke to me, a lot. I had a similar experience, though I started with a "leftover" C64 that my uncle didn't need anymore when I was a child.
All the magic was in those magazines, where people shared code, optimizations, explanations, and new programs and games. In each of those magazines people were writing letters to the publisher team with their modifications. It was pretty awesome how the community spirit worked and shared the creative enthusiasm through "paper channels" before the online age.
Then came github. Github was amazing, the /explore page was my new tab page for at least the first 5 years. I loved the exploration part of what other humans built, what kind of ideas they had, and where they wanted to go with their projects. I just loved reading code and learning from it.
Now, post github and post LLM, I don't know what this means anymore. Doxxing communities rule the internet, people are abusing hate and misinformation to enforce their political views. The remaining ones try to shield themselves from information overload syndrome.
But what does it mean to contribute now? Are humans now something like Christoph Waltz in Zero Theorem? Algorithm monkeys training the AI at an input console? Is that what humanity envisions as its future these days?
I still build software, but my approach has changed. I am scared for future generations that will have forgotten how to read books, and where the knowledge and hacking spirit has been lost completely. So I am spending the time I have left optimizing for that future, because the trend of short lived media excessively emotionalizing every topic is clearly going there.
Maybe, some day in the future, a kid will read my wiki and be amazed on what you can do with a computer. That's enough motivation for me to keep going.
My goals are pretty clear for now:
- make knowledge decentralizable
- write down all the basics I need to know to exercise my craft
- write tools to combat surveillance, censorship, and cyber warfare
- write tools to share knowledge