yhcj

RE:

1. I did consulting for a bit, $500/hr haha I was so reluctant to do it. I do admit that SV was just pouring way too much money back then. The good old days. I don't live in the US, and remote opportunities have been vanishing quite quickly. In the US I would have no doubt I'd get crazy good offers, I have lots of people who respect me there. My friend and I even got offered high positions at Youtube way back when.

2. I quit 3 years ago and have done a lot of artisanal code. Lots of fun. But next year I'll need to figure out stuff, hence why I accepted this small contract (ends next month) and thinking if it's time to move on.

BTW I have a family to feed and my son eats like a husky even though he's only 45 pounds, so there's that. My daughter is a big fan of Argentinean shrimp and caviar. You get the point.

Hitting you an email

also people have no clue how to know what is good or bad.

It's like if I asked an LLM to produce a contract for a a new hire

(my friend the one I mentioned, did that BTW LOL)

Yeah, okay, it might be good, probably very good, in fact might be GREAT.

But I just have no clue

my uncle is 70+ years old and he's one of those haha

I saw him starting at a monitor at midnight, back all hunched up and thought "nope, not what I envision"

yeah, I've seen plenty of people like us.

What I'm sad about is when others call us out for being a ludite or so.

But now I understand that these people don't understand that some of us just love programming.

I mean if I say I love gardening, nobody is going to tell me "Oh you're a stupid ludite, just buy a tractor and glyphosate"

Or when I mention my love for long walks in nature, imagine somebody telling you "that's so inefficient why don't you buy a segway, you'll be able to explore 10x the number of places without wasting any effort and time"

Thanks for the recommendation, I in fact couldn't sleep past 5am today and woke up to check an SQLite presentation on that channel. Pure gold!

I think that's how it is, we just gotta fine-tune the algorithms on our favor. I'm doing it slowly with Youtube (I'm into rock climbing recently, and it's been a fun ride on YT). My Twitter feed can actually be pretty amazing, even my IG one. I don't check them much often any more but they're still pretty good. No BS.

The trick is not to fall for the stupid videos with millions of views. I just recently learned about Mukbang or something like that (a weird trend where people binge eat on YT). Crazy

Hey beej71, I'm 41 and I love advice from people with more life experience than me.

I also love teaching (not particularly great at it, but not the worst) and taught SALSA dancing for a few years. The money was okayish (enough for myself but not to feed my children) but I LOVED being around ppl.

I wasn't talented in dancing but my talent in programming really made me happy (and well paid), so that kind of sucks. Definitely same as you, I'd even say programming can be my 90% of joy and effort (in a bad way sometimes, but I manage to talk myself into dialing it down)

I can't imagine the hell teachers are going through, especially coding, with AI.

Luckily I have a lot of weird interests and some can pay well (for example, I've had a decent success teaching people how to lose weight doing intermittent fasting, imagine the randomness of my interests)

What is your next plan?

I wasn't joking on becoming a yoga teacher, as cliché as it sounds, because I did it and quite successfully so (I was young, handsome, and single back then, and my classes were PACKED. I'm still handsome but the other two are gone. People paid cash so I had a lot of bills in my home lol)

good you realized that, but you do mention an interesting approach:

Most of my friends would use cheat codes to beat games.

Me and my brother (who's a crazy amazing artist btw) would instead figure out how to get good enough in a game to not lose a single life.

Contra, Ninja Gaiden, Mario.

I could see that the amount of fulfillment we got was 100 times more than my friends who played the game like that and didn't struggle.

One thorn?

I already lived under a cave but did you see the amount of money and hype pushed into AI? Just look at YC, 90% AI, just like it was crypto back then.

Jensen Huang saying we have AGI.

One thorn I can handle. A field full of slugs and nettles with billions of dollars to burn I'm not so sure

Hey great for you!

I've been on a 3 year sabbatical, and I spend most summers in the countryside with my kids, grilling meat, planting berries, going in nature for hours-long walks.

It's really a great life ain't it?

So you're planning to go back for work? I'm unfortunately on my last 12-months or so of runway so time to figure out stuff.

EXACTLY! The dopamine we get from doing stuff with mostly our own hands is unbelievable. But social media, junk food, and adult content should have taught us that cheap dopamine is addictive and dangerous.

Most of us will learn the hard way (or never learn)

because some of us have some dignity (and savings) left. That's really just what it is. If I lie to my wife I can't sleep at night.

I almost sold my soul to the devil doing AI assisted coding review for top dollar. That night I almost cried in my sleep

Damn, would love to work somewhere where no LLMs are needed. I have a friend working for Nintendo stuff (I think he does something for their secondary software, IE sales) and he is not allowed to use LLMs. Happiest man on earth.

If I were in the States, where I have connections, people would hire me easily. But for my wife and kids, it's not really possible to emmigrate.

Remote is crazy. I heard from a friend who got 100s of applications on a remote job on a single day.

I used to think there'd be space for unfuckers. Now I'm doubftul.

Yeah I could do management and all that crap but I was Eng Manager for 5 months and hated it.

Some of us are like huskies, we need to run on the Siberian Permafrost in order to thrive, else we get depressed.

That's me.

if I got $1 for every time me or anyone I know prompted AI, got the wrong answer, and people claimed "you need good practices / get better at prompting" I'd be a millionaire

The problem is these companies literally say "NO NEED TO LEARN ANYTHING JUST VIBE". Ton of ads on social media and YT claiming that.

Like my mom doesn't even know what a PC, a Macbook or a Linux computer is and we're telling her she can make apps?

It's like the casino, crypto gambling, or eating junk food. We're wired for that short-term gains and few of us can escape it. I understand that, just sad that the casino slot machine had to hit our craft.