piercebot

I actually think Linus has had some of his rough edges smoothed out over the years. This was not nearly as combative as it could have been or may have been in the past!

Finite Automata and the Theory of Computation.

Lots of Turing Machines and constructing proofs. I'm not sure I would have passed if it wasn't for my friend who worked with me on the homework.

Sure!

For the first job, I bill hourly for the time I spend working. Here, I develop web applications to validate machine learning models for a company; I help organize results in a way that allows ML engineers to easily "spot check" the results of ML runs on data through a web interface.

The second job I have is in the "web3" space developing applications that run on a specific blockchain in which I've specialized. Compensation here is based on milestones and paid out in cryptocurrency.

In both cases, I am transparent about the progress I'm making and compensated accordingly. The hourly rate I charge as a contractor brings in an equivalent salary to what I had as a full-time employee in about 900 hours per year, which works out to be about 18/hours per week if you assume 2 weeks off.

I transitioned from full-time employment to contracting in April 2022. I am currently over-employed and working two gigs simultaneously.

All leads have come from my personal network or my reputation as a known entity in a relatively niche field.

Only trouble I've had is invoice approval and waiting for money to be moved, but it has always eventually come through.

Cashflow remains equivalent to when I was an FTE, but I'm working fewer hours per day and working on more interesting things. A lot of that has to do with transitioning out of management, I think. I don't miss it :)

It took learning another language (Japanese) for me to finally make sense of my native language (English)'s grammar.

I still remember the day I learned the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs in Japanese and had that "ooooHHHHHH" moment in my head where all verbs everywhere finally made sense.

What a luxury to work at a place where tickets are defined and work is scoped out for you :)

If you're chafing there due to the lack of autonomy, I promise there are places hiring people whose strong suit is tackling ambiguity in addition to software development.

Are there any copyright concerns around doing this kind of thing? Surely SEGA will come after him for providing this as a free download?

This is like saying "you can't really leverage Java well without knowing JVM bytecode." Which is to say: I also disagree with you :)

I think the real advantage is scripting with a REPL in your IDE. Whipping up a script becomes trivial because you can test every data transformation (heck, every expression!) with a keystroke. There's no great way to do this in a language without s-expressions.

What is it about America (or other countries) that makes you think this couldn't happen anywhere else?

Maybe not once you consider the R&D costs of figuring out how not to melt a solid gold Merlin engine ;)