silcoon

  Location: Hobart, Australia
  Remote: yes
  Willing to relocate: yes, Australia only
  Technologies: TypeScript, React/Next, Vue/Nuxt, Java Quarkus, Clojure, Node, Python, Common Lisp, data-science, AWS, Postgres
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliascotto/
  Email: [email protected]
  Website: https://scotto.me

Senior full-stack software engineer with over 10 years of experience building B2B SaaS products, backend services, APIs, and complex web applications. Experienced in translating business requirements into technical designs and delivering solutions end-to-end. Now works with AI coding agents using spec-driven development and automated testing to accelerate delivery. Brings previous experience in data science and a growing focus on building AI-enabled software products.

Agree with the author. Most rationalist material I've tried to read it's incredibly lengthy and frequently boring. It's also true that they are using verbosity and a certain academic style to hide the lack of precision and correctness. They are prolific writers, but not great.

> Paywalls pay for journalism. If there’s a paper or news site you read every day, please subscribe to it. WallHop is for the one-off article someone texts you from a site you’ll never visit again.

What protection is implemented to make sure of this? Or you leave the choice to the good moral of the users?

> Why would a reduction in human writers cause a complete reduction in motivation to read?

Because there would not be human written books about the present. All books would be about the past. But literature is not stuck in time. Today writers talk about topics and feelings that writers of the last century might never know or experienced. Many people read books to better understand the today world (non-fiction) and to better understand their today feelings (fiction).

> People write for hundreds of reasons other than to make money.

Agree, but most of the writing that we have from the past still came with some form of financial incentives. Shakespeare didn't write all of the compositions just because he wanted to express himself. He was making money with theater performances. Many religious writing got patronage by the church. Dante Alighieri had a career as politician, Plato came from an aristocratic family. Writing was reserved to elites because education was expensive and people had to work for food.

Today we are lucky because education is accessible and printing is cheap.

> they created literature before copyright was a thing.

Copyright wasn't a thing because replicating content was hard. Try to manually copy a book...

As much as I hate piracy in a sector in financial crisis like book publishing (because Anna’s project is piracy), I hate even more what these large AI companies are doing: privatizing human knowledge.

On one side, there’s copyright law, which exists to support the work of creative people. “Information wants to be free” is bullshit spread by people who have never spent a minute in their lives trying to create something themselves. Artists need some form of reward.

On the other side, buying and destroying copies of rare books is quite scary. We would lose access to those books if they weren’t digitized. They are creating walls around knowledge that they acquired because there are no laws in place to protect authors.

This is scary, and it reminds me of Fahrenheit 451.

Do not believe Anna’s claims, since physical book sales are plummeting — the main source of income for writers — and shadow libraries are killing the incentive to write. But even more importantly, do not believe AI companies will help you discover and access knowledge.

We might end up with all of humanity’s books digitized and accessible for free, and LLMs capable of writing entire books for us. But there would be no human writers left.

In a world like that, what motivation would we still have to read?

Author here. Yes, I agree that reading for two minutes here and there is not that effective, but in my opinion, as little as 10 minutes of reading helps me make progress. The story is already loaded in my recent memory, so it's quick to switch context and immerse myself back in the book, even if I only have a short amount of time.

Reading multiple books at the same time helps with this. The level of concentration required varies by book and personal experience. I can set aside a larger span of time for more complex books and read more lightweight stories for the rest of the day.

Next week I will try to answer your question with a new post. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reporting. I fixed the error as soon as I read your comment.

Curious, is there an Andreesen Horowitz Agent MCP?

Let’s automate this end to end, from idea to raising capitals. Vibe Angels should just be multi agents managing how much capitals to allocate to each projects.

"Don't take no for an answer, never submit to failure." - Winston Churchill 1930

Some advice from my experience.

- Working remotely by yourself every day sucks. Get a coworking space, shared office, work from a cafe, at least a few days a week.

- Go out. Riding a bike, hiking or even bringing your dog out three times a day keeps you stimulated and makes your body moving. Go to the mountain, go to the beach, go to rivers and parks.

- Join clubs that interest you. You like cinema? Join cinema a cinema talk, a book club, if you like a sport join a club that organise communal things. Doesn't really matter what, since nowadays there are clubs for everything.

- Take a brake from internet. After work, keep yourself busy doing things that don't involve using a screen and even try some hard blocking method to avoid using tech in public spaces.

All this things might help you finding people to connect. Your initial answer should rewritten: "How to be alone?" -> "How to meet people?". The individualistic culture created in the last few decades, exacerbated by social media create a loneliness epidemic; kids have less friend, same for adults, so many people I met told me that online dating sucks, more and more people are using brain medication for anxiety and depression. The situation is not good and individualistic thinking clearly is not working.

The real trick is not learning to be alone, but re-learning how to make friends and share parts of life with others. Humans are social animals.

It's not clear to me why running this attack to install OpenClaw? Especially if it's installing the real latest OpenClaw. Is it compromised as well?

Kind of yes and kind of no. Not many reasons to use Common Lisp I agree, but the Lisp idea itself has still something to offer that couldn’t be found in other systems.

I’m comfortable to declare that are not macros the most powerful thing of Lisp, but the concept of an environment. Still in 2026 many languages now implement the concept of evaluating the code and make it immediately available but nothing is like Lisp.

Lower level programming languages today they all still requires compilation. Lisp is one of the few that I found having the possibility to eval code and its immediately usable and probably the only that really relies heavily on REPL driven development.

Env+REPL imo is the true power still far ahead of other languages. I can explore the memory of my program while my program is running, change the code and see the changes in real time.

The issue is that CL is old, and Clojure is so close to be perfect if it wasn’t for Java. Clojure replaces Java, not CL and this is its strength but also its weakness.

I lived in Australia in Far North Queensland until last year and power was running out every heavy rain. The point is that in that region there are only two seasons: a short dry season and a long wet one.

So everyone expects multiple power off a year and every household has generators and stock of fuel and matches for emergency.

Locals have a “it’s gonna be fine” attitude against a poor (but expensive) infrastructure. I was really disappointed, growing up in Europe, where a power off it’s extremely rare (even if we have rain and snow).

Truly great Italian literature. Also “The day of the Owl” is another famous Sciascia’s book with old mafia theme.

Maybe they have a paid account? I don’t think there’s much magic behind

Did they? I’m pretty sure that’s just political propaganda of the regime.

A bit older than you but yes, the feeling is kind of there. Let's try to be a bit more precise:

> no hope of ever living a fruitful and meaningful life

This is wrong. Fruitful and meaningful life can be lived anyway independently from your career and from your financial situation. Since it seems that job opportunity and growth might shrink without "hustling" or "grinding", it's extremely important to learn from a young age what really gives meaning to life, and this task has to be done entirely by you. No quick course, no AI or tutorial can teach you this. You need to learn it by yourself when you're young because it would probably make a real difference for the rest of your life. There are some tools for it, and the best one are probably books, and fiction can be really powerful to shape your thinking. I don't know you but I'll start from this one if you haven't read it before (don't think too much about the title and the tone, concentrate on the topic): The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck

> get awfully depressed

Yes, this is a bit the feeling that over-exposition to social media provokes in a lot of people. Everything seems going shit; politics, climate, wars, nothing is right anymore. Idk you but my life is pretty stable, go out with friends, cook nice meals, traveling, stuff like that. So yes this are real problem in the world, but media currently over-expose us to this things (because it helps them sell articles and make you click). The easiest solution might be detoxing from media, and replace that with learning how things work for real trough books.

> The means by which I could ever potentially earn a living are slowly destroyed.

Unfortunately no-one know this for sure, so it doesn't make sense to overthink it. The technology field is changing but AIs are not near replacing humans yet. Technology has the power to automate and so replace every single job out there, so it's a field that still has work to be done and so investment will come in. It's just the current time that seems not right, and mostly it's because rich entrepreneurs tied themself with politics, to save their ass and make even more money in a period of political instability.

The future doesn't look bright, but learn how not to fall in a negativity trap created by media and internet.

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Thanks for your reply. Mine wasn't a critique but a genuine curiosity. I was interested to see what where the base instructions used for a rust project.

> The .gitignore excludes AI config files because they where not needed in the project and aren't useful to others

I would disagree with this. Since it's an open-source project it would be beneficial to everyone, especially to future contributors, to agree in good code practices and conventions when using LLMs. I would say they're really useful.

I perfectly agree with antirez about the importance of AI and the benefit for coders. In the last month we saw a big jump and we all are in the middle of the biggest technological revolution since the internet. He summarised the benefits, but omitted the rest.

Why we don't have to be anti-AI? Why in his opinion is just "HYPE"? I didn't find any answer in his post. He doesn't analyse the cons of AI and explain why some people might be anti-AI. He skipped the hard part and wrote a mild article that re-publish the narrative that is already getting spread on every social media.

Edit for clarification: I don't consider anti-AI the people that think LLMs don't work, they are wrong. I consider anti-AI people that are worried how this technology will impact society in so many ways that are hard to predict, including the future of software engineering.

Why did you remove AI agent configurations and instructions from the repo? See .gitignore

I get your point but then let's not complains if creativity dies and things all look the same. Creative people don't have motivation to produce if they can't make a living out of it.

> The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated.

Anna’s archive business is stealing copyrighted content and selling access to it. It's not ideologically motivated.

What ideology is about pirating books and music where most of the people producing this stuff cannot afford to do it full-time? It's not like pirating movies, software and large videogame studios, which is still piracy, but they also make big money and they don't act all the time in the interests of the users.

Writers and musicians are mostly broken. If we sum the rising cost of living, AI generated content and piracy, there's almost no reward left for their work. Anna’s archive is contributing to the art and culture decadence. They sell you premium bandwidth for downloading and training your AIs on copyrighted content, so soon we can all generate more and more slop.