- $500k? I make $5 million and that doesn't even seem enough
- 2 children? I have 5 children and that barely feels like a family
- 3 vim plugins? I have 1E80 and even that is barely enough to write Hello World in Java
There's a person working on vi who has tracked three decades of patches from OpenBSD starting from Keith Bostic.
There's someone working on an obscure roleplaying game that's pre-Diablo.
There's the ones who sail on a boat and craft bespoke C-reations on their own virtual machine.
The X11 maintainers, always and ever.
So many more. And not for some reward at the end of a mortal journey, but in some sense for its own sake.
Even with LLMs and the flex of planet-scale computation, in the midst of wild, speculative financial schemes, there is a comfort in a familiar domain, patches therein, and being a kind of owner of this, essentially intangible, work of code.
I just got back from visiting my grandmother who is a few weeks away from turning 100. She still lives alone, cooks her own food, walks without assistance, has a tremendous memory and still has the mental acuity of any intelligent healthy young person. Her son, my father is 75 and is a physician and still works 60 hour weeks (which he considers to be retirement hours). I started laughing when I read the doctor considering 73 to be a long life. That age feels like barely out of middle age to me.