nbaksalyar

> The Luddite's central objections about automation was about declining working conditions

I can also recommend the book "Blood in the Machine" by Brian Merchant [0][1] which is precisely about this.

[0] https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian-merchant/bloo...

[1] https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/about

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was mandatory school reading in the USSR - and still is in Russia and many of the ex-USSR countries.

I’m not sure people are “wishing for the death” in the literal sense.

We just need to apply the antitrust law and break these trillion-dollar corps into smaller competing corps.

There’s no reason for a single company to provide your email, browser, search, operating system, entertainment, AI, etc.

> often these techniques are invented first and the applications come later

There's a great paper from Abraham Flexner on this topic:

https://worrydream.com/refs/Flexner_1939_-_The_Usefulness_of...

It argues exactly that we should be allowed to pursue the seemingly "useless" knowledge.

Previously discussed on HN:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=usefulness+of+useless+knowledge

Also his "Division by Zero":

https://web.archive.org/web/20111121100139/http://www.fantas...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_by_Zero_(short_story)

What's really cool is that it has an ARM64 CPU. If it can run any Steam game, it's very possible we'll see Steam on Android phones/tablets.

> the options to use socks proxies

I pair it with wireproxy [0]. This way you can assign any Wireguard-capable VPN for specific containers. It's extremely useful.

[0] https://github.com/windtf/wireproxy

> Similar to how students who spend most of their time practicing what they are studying with actual exercises achieve higher grades

This is spot on.

> build a mental model of the code with every new line of code

This idea has been explored in depth in the Peter Naur's excellent paper, "Programming as theory building" [1] (also extensively discussed on HN [2]). If you haven't read it yet, I bet you will enjoy it a lot. :)

[1] https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Programming+as+theory+building

"Eliza" is a bit unusual for Zachtronics as it's not a programming/puzzle game but a visual novel. But it's excellent and I think it's one of their most under-appreciated games. It's well-written, well-acted, and very prescient. Highly recommended!

What a great and timely question! :) I quit a week ago to take a year-long sabbatical.

> 1. What pushed you to do it?

The pursuit of curiosity, for the most part. That's what makes quitting a lot harder when you have a good job and nothing to complain about: you feel like you're making a huge mistake on a whim. Doubly so when you consider the state of the job market at this time.

That said, we don't live to work; we work to live. It's a lot of risk and uncertainty, but you should remember that while some unknown bad things can happen in the future, unknown good things can happen too! [1] When you own your time, you increase your luck surface considerably: you have more opportunities to travel, to wander, to play, to meet new people, to tinker, to discover.

So I've been thinking and reading about this a lot. The final push came from two books I read: "The Pathless Path" by Paul Millerd [2] and "The Inner Compass" by Lawrence Yeo [3]. I can't recommend them enough.

> 2. What will you be doing? (Even if nothing!)

I have a huge Steam backlog to beat... :) Besides that, I'll be studying computer science and maths. Programming language theory, compilers, and functional programming are particularly close to my heart.

But, most importantly, enjoying life!

[1] https://moretothat.com/take-the-leap/

[2] https://pathlesspath.com/

[3] https://compass.moretothat.com/

People keep saying things like

> it's probably an issue with your usage of if

> I've rarely seen a repo and a problem that claude can't chew through with the right prompt

> a skill/PEBKAC issue

But then I remember how Anthropic couldn't fix the flickering issue for many months. It just does not compute.

Is it that people working at Anthropic can't prompt and it's a "skill issue" too? I mean, the terminal does not flicker in a lot of other complex TUI apps that I use every day - Midnight Commander, Emacs, tmux, etc. These are open source, Claude could be prompted to "just do what Midnight Commander does". So what is it?

It's not just Google AI Studio, it's also Google proper. Just one search result page consumes gigabytes of RAM. How did this happen? I've switched to DDG and never looked back.

Bret Victor's list of papers and references would be one:

https://worrydream.com/refs/

It's a deep, deep rabbit hole.

> Is this what getting old feels like? Hating everything the rest of society is racing to embrace?

I don’t think so. Some societies are racing to embrace mass surveillance and abuse of civil rights. Pointing this out and complaining about it is not “hate” and not reserved for old people only. :)

I think spreadsheets have been severely undervalued by software engineers and they're generally under-researched. It's definitely possible to use them in more non-obvious and interesting ways. E.g., see AmbSheets [1]

[1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/ambsheets/notebook/

I have a feeling that the same idea absolutely does apply to code. Writing code is much closer to writing prose than it may seem. And the act of writing code also makes you think as you write. Even if you're writing boilerplate. Because how else would you uncover subtle opportunities to reduce the boilerplate and introduce new, better abstractions?

Why is it wrong? Please elaborate. For more substance, here’s a discussion from 2015:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10381015

    > only to have it completely obsoleted a few years later

Not really. There aren’t as many fundamentally new ideas in modern tech as it may seem.

Web servers have existed for more than 30 years and haven’t changed that much since then. Or e.g., React + Redux is pretty much the same thing as WinProc from WinAPI - invented some time in ~1990. Before Docker, there were Solaris Zones and FreeBSD jails. TCP/IP is 50 years old. And many, many other things we perceive as new.

Moreover, I think it’s worth looking back and learning some of the “old tech” for inspiration; there’s a wealth of deep and prescient ideas there. We still don’t have a full modern equivalent of Macromedia Flash, for example.

I strongly recommend to check all other papers and articles on https://okmij.org/ftp/, every single one of them is brilliant and insightful. I love the pedagogy, the writing style and clarity. Oleg Kiselyov is one of the best technical writers I've discovered recently.

In the Stalin times, yes.

But the policy in the early Soviet Union was in fact opposite:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia

> you want your vault accessible across linux/windows/android/macos/ipad

For that, I use Syncthing [1] in addition to iCloud. It works exceptionally well – I see my edits in real time across different devices.

[1] https://syncthing.net/

> introductory textbooks/blogs/resources on the topic

Books on TypeScript, OCaml, Rust or Haskell are usually great resources for that.

There's also "Thinking with Types" which addresses this topic in a lot of depth:

https://thinkingwithtypes.com/

SEEKING WORK

Location: United Kingdom, UTC+0

Remote: Yes

Technologies: Rust, compiler engineering (query languages, code generators, dev tools, programming languages, LLVM), Linux kernel (eBPF, io_uring, low-level networking, performance optimisation)

Email: [email protected]

I'm a systems engineer with 8+ years of experience in Rust. Solving problems in low-level programming, design and implementation of compilers and programming languages.

> Has google completely stopped working for anyone else?

Yes. However, I found that https://scholar.google.com still works perfectly well. It feels just as the old Google without all the crap they've been adding in the last years.