nomoreservices

I'm a senior engineer with 15 years of experience. Pretty sure I have a good grasp on "complex" vs. "unnecessarily complicated," and I see the latter a lot more than I would like to.

I've read that post. It's effect on me was the opposite of what the author intended. That's where I first learned that Forth defines things like IF in Forth itself... and I totally got hooked on it.

Your post makes me think I should talk to a professional to check if I have ADHD.

Over the years I’ve read many things that hinted at it, but this is by far the most relatable thing I’ve ever read.

At basically any point in time I always have something that I’m massively obsessed about (and it’s usually something super weird, non-monetizable like you say). Everything else feels like an ugh field.

> The only exit seems to be financial independence.

This is what got me. It’s a daily thought.

Same here. I’ve been down the rabbit hole of Forth and embedded systems for about a month now. I’ve been learning more and more every night since I got started in it, and it has also consumed entire weekends. It’s fascinating.

The “hook” for me was seeing things like ifs and loops being written in Forth itself from simpler primitives. I’ve always been a fan of bootstrapping a general purpose computing environment from a small set of primitives, and Forth lets you do exactly that.

> I’m bored of the internet and browsers. I want to have fun with software AND hardware

I can 100% relate to that feeling. Discovering Forth has been therapeutic for me in a sense. I spend the day dealing with AWS and Java and logs and metrics for large distributed systems, and that brings me zero joy or motivation. I spend my work days looking forward to my time with Forth in the evening.

I think it was CollapseOS that sent me down this rabbit hole :)

> Humans don't like simple things.

It's amazing how true this is. You can see it very clearly in your day-to-day as a software engineer. The vast majority of people you will encounter in your career favor fancy, complicated solutions to problems that could be easily solved with fewer resources. And yet when you float those ideas, you're laughed at.

Look up "Hadza people" on YouTube. They don't seem to have perfect teeth.

Not sure how representative they are (in this aspect) of hunter-gatherers these days though.

I think it's a matter of what kind of IM culture you grew up with. As a kid and young adult I used IRC and messengers that limited message size, so doing that was pretty common and everyone did it.

My younger co-workers who only seem to have known Slack and the likes find it really annoying.

> your towns and cities are full of rule-followers doing herd-passive-aggressive self-enforcement, and live-and-let-live is a rare feeling

Can you give examples of what you mean by that? I've been living in the US (Seattle area) for over 7 years and haven't felt that at all.

Oh man, that was perfect :)

Also not OP, but I can think of a number of reasons:

1. Awareness that alcoholism runs in the family, so better play it safe and not drink

2. Association between alcohol and past trauma e.g. alcoholic abusive parent

3. Past relationship that ended due to ex-partner's alcohol problem

4. Religious conviction

I think that's what's implied in

> Momentum for the Clean Network program is growing. More than thirty countries and territories are now Clean Countries, and many of the world’s biggest telecommunications companies are Clean Telcos. All have committed to exclusively using trusted vendors in their Clean Networks.

Seems like the idea is to form a network that's "clean" of PRC influence.

I’m not even that old (early 30s) and I curse at 99% of the tech I use. Especially tech that we use to build other tech.

I started my career as a software engineer writing C, then C++ working on desktop software. Things made sense back then, and that was just 10 years ago.

I’ve tried contributing features to two Electron-based apps. I gave up on both. I just can’t make sense of it.

I’ve sat down countless times over the last decade telling myself I’m going to teach myself this damn frontend web stuff. I gave up every time. It’s ridiculous.

Young folks who have only been exposed to modern garbage have no idea how good it was before the web took over.

I often wonder how this came to be. How we went from well-documented, efficient, sound APIs and libraries to the monstrosity that we have now. I have nothing to offer though.

We don't see health care systems collapsing due to herpes infections.

Look at what's happening in Florida, Texas, Arizona with COVID-19.

I've been using https://mailbox.org and really like it.

I only disclose my actual email address to a few people. For everything else, I set up specific addresses such as shopping@, health@, bank@, etc using a domain I own, and all those forward to the Mailbox address and get filtered accordingly.

Thanks, I had my definitions wrong :)

> SARS-CoV-2 is much less virulent than SARS or MERS.

Can you provide sources for that? I thought it was the opposite.

Have you ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz? It's fiction, but I can see this project being important for future civilization.

Thanks for the laugh! I needed that today :)

Strong A Fire Upon the Deep vibes thinking of future archeologists studying that.

I'm a Brazilian and I gesture a lot. People here in the US find it funny.