I think I had a huge lesson early on in life where I generated a huge amount of bitcoin in 2009 on some old pentium 4 CPU (you could do that back then!) and would have basically won the lottery if I hadn't basically just given it away to a friend of mine who was trying to do something (Which ended up being getting scammed by that butterfly labs scheme)... That friend ended up probably one of the most anxious people I have ever seen, ended up threatening to hit me over some petty shit, doesn't talk to me nor a bunch of our old mutual friends because he dragged them into the scam, and all this drama that I probably would have been subject to in some way had I been the one to blow that cash. Hell - I likely would have been dead if I was in my early 20s with that much money. Reflecting on who I am now vs who I would have been if I had done the "less regrettable" thing and been way too rich way too fast is fine, I think I just paid for having everything in life put into perspective and that's invaluable. I'm doing fine these days which is good enough for me.
I don't mean to pry but I often see people make statements along the lines of 'if Id been rich when I was younger I wouldve died' and I never quite get it. Just drugs stuff?
Early 20s is when people peak at risk taking behavior. Add a large amount of money into the mix and the types of risks can go way up. Think go from sitting around playing beer pong, to doing coke and speeding around in a Ferrari.
Even later in life, large amounts of money can cause people to do stupid things (see many famous people), but maturity has a chance then.
The story of lottery winners is sometimes an unhappy one. A windfall can ruin relationships, lead to a loss of normalcy, make one a target for crime, and as you say, enable vices.
Yeah actually, I did a lot of travelling&living outside of such culture (Like a decade) on other earnings and while I was gone not fucking my life up with drugs stuff I watched a ton of my friends die or end up really messed up because of exactly that so your comment wasn't far off the mark like whatsoever. Some ended up in the news for shit like attacking paramedics or murder after fucking their minds up badly enough.
Very North American/European kind of problem with the way I seen people go hard and the sort of things being used here, primarily the appetite for stimulants and opiates that I'm glad I never stuck around to develop in the culture I was from. I have a few other friends who have managed to spend most or enough time away from the continent who feel the same.
I think there's a lack of family cohesion as a huge factor of difference here. Ties into shit like higher suicide rates jn the developed world and other sad shit
Reminds me of "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" by Ted Chiang. It's part of his 2019 collection Exhalation: Stories.
In this story, people use a device called a *Prism*, which allows them to communicate with alternate versions of themselves in different quantum realities. The Prisms create a split in reality when activated, connecting two timelines that diverge from the moment the device is used. People can talk to their alternate selves in these parallel universes, and this communication brings up complex philosophical questions about free will, decision-making, and identity.
Chiang explores the emotional and ethical implications of interacting with alternate versions of one's life, focusing on how people cope with the knowledge of the different paths their lives might have taken.
Has the overbearing tone of painfully detailed world building with very little narrative power I've come to expect from Chiang. Guy has cool ideas but really likes to describe how cool his ideas are in detriment of telling a compelling story.
A very healthy life perspective, one you can't just get without walking the proverbial line and looking back. At the end, probably the best path for you, but greed can be a powerful emotion even for strongest personalities.
The BFL scam was where they were mining on equipment before sending it out, right? It's too bad they went that way. I bought two BFL Jalapenos with BTC I'd mined, and the hardware was pretty nice.
dusty circuit boards, broken hardware, delayed shipments, taking money and delivering nothing. The equipment would be pre-used and then delivered late, when it was much less useful due to the BTC difficulty increase.
how much is huge? thousands? I know it was easy back then to generate btc. You probably would have sold them at $10 or something ,congratulated yourself, and then felt massive regret anyway
This was my experience with litecoin. I bought some back in the day when it was < $1 from my minimum wage job and sold it all when it "skyrocketed" to somewhere above $1. In the end I made a few thousand dollars and thought pretty good about it. Only a couple years later when it touched (if I recall correctly) close to $300 did I have regrets. Oh well.
That's how I rationalize it. I had an early Bitcoin opportunity I missed out on but realized I'd have cashed out the second I could make a quick $1000 or something. Now my strategy with stuff like that is to keep a tiny "FOMO" amount even after selling the majority.
Was it? I ran a mining program for weeks with no results and finally deleted it because a) it was trashing my CPU the whole time and b) I was worried that Ihad been fooled and it was using my machine as a node for distributing CSAM or something.
I'm guessing the reward was 50btc per block back then, so they might have mined a single or double digit number of blocks, so somewhere between 50 and 4999 btc.
Me and a friend also mined a ton of bitcoin around the same time on his PC. We forgot about the whole thing when it turned out that you couldn't do anything useful with it. I wonder if the keys are still somewhere on a disk on landfill.
The best advice I've read about avoiding regrets was in “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy” by William B. Irvine. William B. Irvine has an entire chapter dedicated to it titled; Fatalism. The basic approach of the Stoics was that the past (and present) should be viewed fatalistically; fate would have it so, and therefore there is no rational (again a key word for the Stoics) reason to regret this or that. Have you spent years coming to one realization or another? Lived too long in one place? Worked too long in the same workplace? It was fated to take so long. The same goes for the present; enjoy it because you can't change it. The future, on the other hand, you must influence to the extent you can.
William B. Irvine starts chapter six with:
> “ONE WAY TO PRESERVE our tranquility, the Stoics thought, is to take a fatalistic attitude toward the things that happen to us. According to Seneca, we should offer ourselves to fate, inasmuch as “it is a great consolation that it is together with the universe we are swept along.”
My wife grew up in the Cultural Revolution. I grew up in an unsafe and disordered environment. When I made peak money we spent a lot on awesome experiences, then saved a good chunk. Instead of making payments on a house in the kind of enclave where pro athletes lived, we paid cash in a FAANG neighborhood. Both of us have zero expectations about the future. We have no debt and I retired comfortably but not too lavishly. Our farmhouse is not beautiful but we can afford a good health plan.
We both understood sunk costs from the beginning. We know governments love to take things. Of course we could have saved more. But the people I grew up with are dead or homeless addicts. Many of the people she grew up with were destroyed or disappeared by the government. If catastrophe strikes, and we have to move to a shoebox outside of Cleveland, that’s what we’ll do.
Fatalism has worked out well for us. We are exceptionally fortunate to think congruently on those matters.
> I disagree. The best thing to do to avoid regrets is to act, to take the step forward. Not to resign ourselves and diminish ourselves hoping to soften the nastiness the world is sending us.
> Stoicism is good when you are being tortured (hello John McCain), when you are in the final stage of incurable illness, when you are a slave (hello Epictetus edit: oops, I meant Epictus) and have no agency.
But upon re-reading the advice is about the past, not the future and it's not an endorsement of the whole of stoicism and I think I could agree with it. I just don't follow through with the whole Stoic ethos.
Especially in these days and age where it's being promoted by ex-marketing executives feeding off of people who are lost. It's Tony Robbins's exploitation of people in bad places all over again. It's mindfulness meditation training for employees instead of raising wages and getting rid of monthly quotas.
It sounds to me like you convince yourself there was no other way. It's an interesting dilemma - lie to yourself that it was fate and live a happy life, or torture yourself with the consequences of the truth.
I like the advice of the article better - approach every decision knowing not all of them will work out. It's what I ended up in the last couple years and it has worked ot out for me. Fear of failure can paralyze you and this will cause even more regrets. The advice doesn't help with old regrets though - for this it boils down to, for me: dwell and die slowly or forgive yourself for making a mistake and move on with your life. Can't change the past, but you can change the future.
Its not that they won't work out, it's that uncertainty at the time of the decision justifies it. Some then get lucky and others dont and most land in between. You did the best you could given the information at the time. There is then nothing to regret.
A related mental trick I use to move on from some mistake I'm stuck on is to think the following:
In the future, I will make another mistake, and I will be regretting that instead of this. So I should focus on the present and the future, and try to identify and avoid that mistake (pick a different future!), rather than obsessing over the past.
It's incredibly obvious, of course, but going through the exercise of thinking it out explicitly really helps.
Even better is to just focus on the here and now. The past cannot be changed and the future is just a mental construct, both can cause anexity and endless thinking.
My issue is i regret rather non-issues. Which makes it difficult to avoid because A. they're often small, stupid things that are difficult to avoid imo. And B. i'm sure i'd just find something else. The small things are objectively not reasons to be obsessing and regretting.. yet i do. So i think it's a problem in my frame of mind, not the action in focus.
Our brains are machines for trying to avoid future mistakes, and doubling down on focusing on them isn't ideal. It's good that at least you're not also tying them to the past, which is doomed, but that's not what the future has to be. It's better not to focus on fears and let the possibility of the future open up instead.
I think I could make a good argument that our brains are machines for repeating past mistakes. Interesting to think about the opposite sides of the argument.
Study was a bit silly. Losing $10 in a game of chance is one type of regret but real regret is normally several shades darker, or at least more embarrassing. Could make an anecdotal argument that losing a small stakes game of chance is one of the easiest levels of regret to move on from. Anyone whos seen a casino on tv could tell you this. (EMPHASIS: SMALL STAKES. Yes, gambling at advanced levels is as dark as anything i can conjure.)
The movie Challengers this year portrayed the most relatable depiction of regret ive ever seen. Made me feel like the intrusive memories of mistakes i live with daily, and keep to myself, are a universal experience. Knowing that living with regret is part of life helped me embrace it. Now i can think of it as, "my brain doing that thing that all brains do" then move on without a mental breakdown.
Totally agree. For the 'Portfolio' strategy to be effective you need all the bets to be of a comparable size. If I place 20 $1 bets and 1 $10,000 bet, winning the $1 ones is going to be cold comfort to losing the $10,000 one.
Similarly if I regret a 10 year relationship that ends in divorce, something like finding a great new restaurant isn't going to even that out.
> The movie Challengers this year portrayed the most relatable depiction of regret ive ever seen. Made me feel like the intrusive memories of mistakes i live with daily, and keep to myself, are a universal experience. Knowing that living with regret is part of life helped me embrace it. Now i can think of it as, "my brain doing that thing that all brains do" then move on without a mental breakdown.
Thanks, I didn't want to watch that movie because even though I was interested by the setting I was not interested in the drama (and headlines I read in my feeds made it clear it was about drama). But your comment makes me reconsider.
Yeah, regrets like not telling "I love you" or telling it or "let's wait a bit before becoming parents" or "let's go for this career" or "don't call that friend back", etc. Those regrets.
My whole life is regret and I found the article very insightful. I heard a religious quote that I wish I could remember: it's better to earn gold along the way by investing in relationships than to bet it all on a gold mine.
As a hacker trying to win the internet lottery since.. 1992-ish, I put all of my eggs in one basket most of the time, and I've been part of at least a dozen ventures that all failed. It's like flipping a coin and getting tails 30 times in a row, which feels like 1 in a billion odds of losing to this extent. My best years were invested in techs like C++ that nobody even uses anymore, and I wouldn't use because they don't provide enough leverage. I only have the smallest bandwidth now to get anything at all done, and 90% of that is a waste of time due to conceptual flaws in languages, frameworks, operating systems, hardware, etc. In a very real sense, my most impactful choices were in the beginning, but I chose poorly or lost, so now it's too expensive to get back the sunk cost that I've invested. Making it ever-harder to keep going. Sometimes it feels like regret is all I have.
Unfortunately the winners usually don't have this experience. They don't have the gumption to lose for a lifetime. So they don't go through the same healing and growth process. Vanishingly few wealthy people can step back and use their money for social wellness altruistically.
Meanwhile some of us stumble onto concepts like duality and see through the matrix. We grok that there's no way to opt out of reincarnation. Then we look around and wonder why everyone is acting so strangely, having strong attachments to materialism in the 3D. The more we have, the more we cling to our ego and accomplishments, eventually living in fear of losing it all. While the people with nothing are more likely to lose their risk aversion and live in service to others.
Which means that the wealthy and powerful often live in a fear-based reality, while the poor often live in a love-based reality. Which works out well for the rich, while the poor suffer under systems of control they have little say in.
Zen Buddhism and Taoism touch on the idea that life is suffering, and suffering comes from attachments. So something that helps me is to go into situations knowing that I'll likely fail, but trying anyway, without expectation of outcome or regret.
So that one day if/when the win comes, I don't waste it like so many others. And maybe, just maybe, we can change the world.
I am just a stranger on the Internet, so I apologize in advance if my comments/questions are irrelevant.
> In a very real sense, my most impactful choices were in the beginning, but I chose poorly or lost
Specifically in relation to picking up technologies. Unless you are working on something highly specialized, I am not sure your situation calls for such desperation. Learning new languages is not hard (as you are aware, as far as I can tell), and switching to a more agile stack like e.g. React/JavaScript could unlock new opportunities, considering how in demand it is across the industry.
> We grok that there's no way to opt out of reincarnation.
Hm. That's a personal belief, right? It seems like you are convinced in it as a fact of life, and that might not be the most change encouraging strategy. Similar to fatalism in a sense.
> Which means that the wealthy and powerful often live in a fear-based reality, while the poor often live in a love-based reality.
You are romanticizing the poor. Certain societies have more family and community oriented lifestyles. Not because they are poor but because they have a cultural predisposition and a tradition. Poverty is not full of love, financial abundance is not full of fear.
Ya I guess I should have been a little more specific. I've learned React and Javascript and most of the domain-specific and functional languages like SQL, Octave/MATLAB, Lisp, Clojure, and mainstream languages from assembly, Python, Lua, Swift, Java, C#, Kotlin, etc over the years. Sometimes I wonder if I'd be better off unlearning what I've already learned, if I could.
I'm actually most fascinated now with simple spreadsheets and getting back to #nocode with stuff like Firebase and Airtable, although I don't believe that anyone has fully solved offline and distributed conflict resolution well enough to give us MS Access and FileMaker for the web. Although CRDTs can do a lot if we're willing to let ACID go, kind of like the eventual consistency fad around 2010. Dunno if I can do that though!
So really what's going on is that I'm not an artisan, I'm not a craftsman or even an engineer anymore (if I ever was, I never got my professional engineering license). I'm more of an architect or researcher. I want to write the building blocks for engines that are used to build other things.
But that ship has sailed. Open source isn't modeled right, since nobody solved funding. So nobody pays for the pure research that I'd like to do, so society misses out on proceeds from that investment in innovation. Banks only loan to match a multiple of collateral which doesn't kick in until someone has on the order of $100,000 saved. And there never was funding for ventures. VC firms vacuumed up all available capital so those trillions of dollars are now concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires and multinational corporations who pick winners and losers in the same role that democratic governments used to perform, except now through gatekeeping. The central challenge is how to get money for runway to get real work done, and that hasn't changed in the 30 years I've been doing this. If anything it's far worse today, with competition increasing an order of magnitude each decade, along with wealth inequality as winners hoard their gains and dodge their taxes.
On top of that, AI has already surpassed my knowledge and experience. It can whip up working code for mainstream frameworks like Laravel and React in seconds, whereas it would take me days just to formulate a plan of action. So the only thing going for me is that I know what not to do, from attending the school of hard knocks. But AI will solve that too within 5-10 years, removing even the minefield so that all programming has guard rails. Every innovation there just withers me, since I started down this course in life with the goal of creating AGI back when that was a joke. It's an all but certainty now, arriving by 2040 but maybe even 2030.
That's a good insight about reincarnation being akin to fatalism, I hadn't considered that. I feel that philosophies have merits that can be ranked under somewhat formal metaphysical conventions, even though they amount to sniff tests. So I find written religious accounts somewhat less believable than personal insights from experience. The most universal truths seem to come from epiphanies that can then be verified against other accounts.
So basically that means that a child's question of "how does my soul control my body?" is every bit as valid as "why don't dogs go to heaven?", except that the child's question is ranked higher because it's universal, whereas heaven is a construct and rules about who gets to go there are dogma.
We live in a mostly western capitalist economic model, with ethics rooted in Abrahamic religions. In other words, we live under dogma. So seeking universal truths is mostly discouraged, as they threaten the status quo and entrenched power structures controlled by dynastic wealth. It also threatens the psyche. The more I learn, the more my mental health suffers with knowledge that can't be shared, either because there are soul-crushing aspects to life that can't be changed (yet), or because I don't want to co-opt someone else's journey. Then people confident in their worldview mock me for trying, the way that hard-right politics mock any attempt to make things better. Because they are optimizing gain within a zero-sum game to find the best Nash equilibrium, while I and others are thinking outside the box at a meta level to change the rules, which again threatens their power. Leftist politics can also succumb to tribalism, so I'm not saying that hard-left or hard-right is best, but that strong attachments block insight and solutions. And unfortunately the people with the strongest attachments control the world right now.
So I guess my belief that we're all one in the consciousness field, destined to live out every perspective so as not to be trapped alone within a singularity as God, is not so different from believing that this is all there is and we're worm food when we die, or that we spend eternity in heaven or hell after this life. Except that I might say the worm food philosophy doesn't pass my personal sniff test, since being here again doesn't seem that much less likely than being here now.
And you're right, fear and love have no direct correlation with wealth or the lack thereof. I might say that the feeling of having enough can be personal or societal though. Someone may feel loving and not see the burden their lifestyle places on those supporting it. And conversely, someone may feel loving and not realize that it's a trauma response from exploitation.
I feel that my soul contract, the dream of my inner child, is to liberate future generations from unnecessary suffering so that they (we in the next life) can more easily self-actualize. Which IMHO is closer to a progressive planned economy with UBI like Star Trek than a libertarian wild west economy like Star Wars. Maybe our attention shifts though, the way that children in developing nations seem happier than children raised with a silver spoon. Maybe my personal journey through suffering has felt rewarding in some way. Like maybe I'd go crazy with anhedonia if all my needs were met.
All that said, what I really seek is peace, since I'm not sure that I've ever really felt at ease in my entire adult life.
> I put all of my eggs in one basket most of the time, and I've been part of at least a dozen ventures that all failed. It's like flipping a coin and getting tails 30 times in a row, which feels like 1 in a billion odds of losing to this extent.
But it's not. It's more like playing the lottery over and over. The chance of succeeding even once is pretty low.
> My best years were invested in techs like C++ that nobody even uses anymore, and I wouldn't use because they don't provide enough leverage.
Bit of an odd choice. Not only is C++ still being used, as far as I know, but even if it weren't: If you know C++, you know C, and that is definitely very relevant. If you know C, you have vastly more low-level knowledge than the average programmer nowadays. C is not my favorite language by far (I like rust, or Haskell, depending), but just being proficient in it means I can program a lot of different things.
Anyway, to the rest of your point: I never wanted to get rich or anything like that, I always just did what interested me on a technical level. I fared very well with that.
Ya I kind of answered what you are getting at in my longer response. Basically it's a question of fulfillment.
I can feel how much more fulfilled I'd be if I got to make the personal contributions in my heart. I wanted to write languages and frameworks, even design hardware like multicore CPUs, that would have made tech work easier so I could accomplish more and maybe win the internet lottery in the process.
But instead, I just endlessly ran the treadmill to make rent, in the end only standing in place as if I had done nothing. That's what the very essence of the suffering of life is: we insert a coin from the astral plane to incarnate in this life and run the rat race, eventually losing it all to end up right back where we started. Do it enough and we might ascend to the next level, but even then, we eventually volunteer to start over as the fool.
So nothing against C++. In many ways, it's still the most capable bare-metal language. The catch is that the developer has to do everything by hand. It's like comparing a protected memory process to one that can take out the whole OS at any time. I know from personal experience, having programmed my first computer (a Mac Plus) with C++ in the early 90s and having to reboot up to 30 times per day.
Today my time is stretched so thin that in an 8 hour day, I usually get less than 1 hour of actual work done, and probably more like 20 minutes if I'm being honest. It's all logistics now. Travel, orchestrating containers, meeting with team members, researching workarounds for unfortunate snafus in whatever framework, navigating large codebases, maintaining the body and living area, etc.
If I was using C# or C++ instead of PHP and the shell, I simply wouldn't be able to get any real work done in any reasonable amount of time. And PHP is a lackluster language, a far cry from what I would design, but it's the only imperative language with copy-on-write arrays like functional languages, so runs circles around them and avoids countless conceptual pitfalls. It's like MS Excel, simultaneously the best and worst software that I've ever used.
I really want to learn Haskell and Scala to extend my functional programming knowledge, but so far have only made it to Lisp and Clojure. I think I need a course to overcome some of my misunderstandings around decomposition, currying, functors, monads, impurity, etc. The utility of MATLAB jumped out to me immediately (operations happen on arrays, not primitives, similarly to shaders), but I haven't found a use for lambdas as much.
I'm happy that you've fared well and are able to do what interests you. I'm struggling with discipline, motivation and giving myself the space to play as a people-pleaser. I've had a scarcity mindset and been in survival mode for so many decades that I don't know how to put myself first. I just procrastinate and project my frustrations onto the web..
Definitely go for it. My very fondest years were spent staying up until 4 in the morning 2 nights in a row making shareware games in C++ in the early 90s before video cards, until my programming partner at the time and I passed out from exhaustion. There is nothing quite as intoxicating as the full control that comes with C-style bare-metal programming.
If you grasp CUDA, you'll be ahead of me as far as programming GPUs goes. I was never able to quite let my love of desktop CPU programming go to transition to shader and cloud programming. I'm more into higher-order methods like map/reduce/filter. But languages like Julia are working to unite the two paradigms under a common runtime.
There are many tools available to help you get started. I would highly recommend also learning Docker and git (if you haven't yet), so that you can rapidly iterate with full undo ability to remove fear of failure. There are many operations in git that I find easier than the built-in SCM in Unity, for example. And I know they can be used together to give you a local scratch sandbox, then commit your final changes when you're ready. I still want to do this, so you'd be ahead of me again.
And if you could go ahead and build J.A.R.V.I.S. for the rest of us, that'd be great!
Hey Zack just checked out your linked-in and honestly it would be worth contacting a professional resume specialist. You have a double Bachelor in CS/EE and tons of relevant experience. A wordsmith could make you look like gold on paper. Grab the book ‘Cracking the Coding Interview’, do some leetcod practice. If you can grab a couple Google Cloud certs great and/or build a web app with the latest version of Angular, Next.js, whatever so you can update your tech stack perfect. Not sure why you believe C++ is not relevant anymore the concepts have not changed only the syntax.
Like others have said, just some random on the internet, but at a minimum seriously find a wordsmith to update that resume and some recruiter will be contacting you. Also, more is not better no need to list the Test Tech or Mac Repair since other jobs overlap with those years and makes it seem like you were only part time. Everyone fibs a little bit no one is going to ask if you were part time or full time on a job from 20 years ago. Also, if you have self-employed listed make sure you have the tax# and LLC cert from the state as they are going to want to see that as proof to count as relevant experience.
I know you did not ask for my advice, but after reading your reply got me curious about why so gloom. As programmers we need to market ourselves and fake it till, we make it.
You're right, and my best employment experience so far probably came from Adecco placing me at hp for a year in the early 2000s. I'm just not good at advocating for myself. And my AuDHD tendencies create a feeling of overwhelm, that I need to solve the world's problems, even though I'm the one affected. So I obsess over reforming the gig economy and startups and UBI instead of putting myself out there. Recruiters help a lot, although then I feel like I'm on call, never knowing when the next opportunity will hit me when I'm in the middle of work I've already invested so much time and effort into.
The gloom comes from knowing that had I just worked company jobs with 6 figure salaries, I'd be retired by now instead of still at square one. And I never bought Bitcoin when it was $10. And I never had money at the time to invest in Google when it opened at $85 and everyone knew it would go to $100, and it did, opening day if I recall correctly. Same with Apple, when it was $12 but I had no money to buy shares.
That's how capitalism works. As you get wins, they let you invest in further wins to eventually create a stream of unearned income large enough to more than cover living expenses.
But if you never have a single win - not in the beginning and not ongoing - then you watch on the sidelines as countless people with less experience and expertise, who haven't tried as hard, who don't even know what they're doing half the time, fly past you into financial security.
And why did I never have a win? Because the rules of the game that I started under changed. In high school, I didn't know anyone with a computer besides a handful of my friends. There was no internet or cell phones, just the BBS. Geeks weren't cool. We didn't know girls. We barely had cars, passed down to us from parents, if we were lucky. The only real jobs in my small hometown were flipping burgers and moving irrigation pipe.
The reasons I went into tech are largely irrelevant today. And if I knew then that our combined efforts were driving us towards a service economy, wealth inequality and tech dystopia, I might never have gone into it. I originally wanted to be a genetic engineer and cure all genetic disorders, eventually helping to cure senescence.
Which I'm not sure I even truly care about anymore, because at midlife there is a certain allure to starting over in the next life to lose one's memories. I understand Joker and Loki sentiments that I never expected or wanted. Or at least, I'm able to forgive those that scream "let me out!" like David Bowie and Freddie Mercury sang about. And have survivor guilt, that I'm still here after losing loved ones so close to me.
So the central challenge is how to get over myself, to forget the horrors I've seen, to somehow reintegrate with the 3D and reenter the matrix. I basically have startup PTSD from so many tries without a win. Basically a veteran like Rambo, I've seen too much, am highly capable, but can barely take care of myself and would be homeless if not for the help of family and friends.
I really appreciate your advice though. It's good to get honest feedback from someone able to see the situation impartially. Writing this out helps me see that the barriers before me are not so much societal, but self-imposed perhaps.
It says that it was written 3 days ago and that my post was 4, and I definitely read it after mine. But I've noticed that these similar attention/expression synchronicities are happening more and more often lately.
I try to follow a 'butterfly flaps its wings' mindset. In the alt universe where I had done the 'right' thing, other tragedies might have befallen me.
In the alt universe where I aced the interview and gotten my dream job, I might have died in a car crash.
In the alt universe where I didn't say something stupid and alienate a friend, my husband might have been stricken by cancer.
We just don't know and can't know. Every night, whatever happened, I try to feel a moment of gratitude. My family is here and secure and happy and that is not true of everyone and not to be taken for granted.
The actual study:
Reeck, C., & LaBar, K. S. (2024). Reining in regret: emotion regulation modulates regret in decision making. Cognition and Emotion, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2024.2357847
I realized in my late 30s that I have almost no sense of dread when I think back on all of the cringey or embarrassing things I've done.
I think this was a huge super power for me early in my career. I embarrassed myself over and over again and didn't care or even think about it. Right back at it the next day.
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Even later in life, large amounts of money can cause people to do stupid things (see many famous people), but maturity has a chance then.
Very North American/European kind of problem with the way I seen people go hard and the sort of things being used here, primarily the appetite for stimulants and opiates that I'm glad I never stuck around to develop in the culture I was from. I have a few other friends who have managed to spend most or enough time away from the continent who feel the same.
I think there's a lack of family cohesion as a huge factor of difference here. Ties into shit like higher suicide rates jn the developed world and other sad shit
Dead Comment
In this story, people use a device called a *Prism*, which allows them to communicate with alternate versions of themselves in different quantum realities. The Prisms create a split in reality when activated, connecting two timelines that diverge from the moment the device is used. People can talk to their alternate selves in these parallel universes, and this communication brings up complex philosophical questions about free will, decision-making, and identity.
Chiang explores the emotional and ethical implications of interacting with alternate versions of one's life, focusing on how people cope with the knowledge of the different paths their lives might have taken.
-> thanx Chat.
Was it? I ran a mining program for weeks with no results and finally deleted it because a) it was trashing my CPU the whole time and b) I was worried that Ihad been fooled and it was using my machine as a node for distributing CSAM or something.
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William B. Irvine starts chapter six with:
> “ONE WAY TO PRESERVE our tranquility, the Stoics thought, is to take a fatalistic attitude toward the things that happen to us. According to Seneca, we should offer ourselves to fate, inasmuch as “it is a great consolation that it is together with the universe we are swept along.”
We both understood sunk costs from the beginning. We know governments love to take things. Of course we could have saved more. But the people I grew up with are dead or homeless addicts. Many of the people she grew up with were destroyed or disappeared by the government. If catastrophe strikes, and we have to move to a shoebox outside of Cleveland, that’s what we’ll do.
Fatalism has worked out well for us. We are exceptionally fortunate to think congruently on those matters.
Why didn't she stay in China ? Why did you leave that unsafe and disordered environment ?
> I disagree. The best thing to do to avoid regrets is to act, to take the step forward. Not to resign ourselves and diminish ourselves hoping to soften the nastiness the world is sending us.
> Stoicism is good when you are being tortured (hello John McCain), when you are in the final stage of incurable illness, when you are a slave (hello Epictetus edit: oops, I meant Epictus) and have no agency.
But upon re-reading the advice is about the past, not the future and it's not an endorsement of the whole of stoicism and I think I could agree with it. I just don't follow through with the whole Stoic ethos.
Especially in these days and age where it's being promoted by ex-marketing executives feeding off of people who are lost. It's Tony Robbins's exploitation of people in bad places all over again. It's mindfulness meditation training for employees instead of raising wages and getting rid of monthly quotas.
It seemed to serve Marcus Aurelius (hello Emperor) quite well. Stoicism is strongly tied to duty, to ones self, to ones family, and to ones nation.
I like the advice of the article better - approach every decision knowing not all of them will work out. It's what I ended up in the last couple years and it has worked ot out for me. Fear of failure can paralyze you and this will cause even more regrets. The advice doesn't help with old regrets though - for this it boils down to, for me: dwell and die slowly or forgive yourself for making a mistake and move on with your life. Can't change the past, but you can change the future.
There is no way to change the past, so it makes sense to be fatalistic about the past but not the future.
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In the future, I will make another mistake, and I will be regretting that instead of this. So I should focus on the present and the future, and try to identify and avoid that mistake (pick a different future!), rather than obsessing over the past.
It's incredibly obvious, of course, but going through the exercise of thinking it out explicitly really helps.
Why not regret all of them? I'm yet to see my capacity for regrets get saturated
The movie Challengers this year portrayed the most relatable depiction of regret ive ever seen. Made me feel like the intrusive memories of mistakes i live with daily, and keep to myself, are a universal experience. Knowing that living with regret is part of life helped me embrace it. Now i can think of it as, "my brain doing that thing that all brains do" then move on without a mental breakdown.
Similarly if I regret a 10 year relationship that ends in divorce, something like finding a great new restaurant isn't going to even that out.
Thanks, I didn't want to watch that movie because even though I was interested by the setting I was not interested in the drama (and headlines I read in my feeds made it clear it was about drama). But your comment makes me reconsider.
Yeah, regrets like not telling "I love you" or telling it or "let's wait a bit before becoming parents" or "let's go for this career" or "don't call that friend back", etc. Those regrets.
Try not to make up too many regrets, people.
As a hacker trying to win the internet lottery since.. 1992-ish, I put all of my eggs in one basket most of the time, and I've been part of at least a dozen ventures that all failed. It's like flipping a coin and getting tails 30 times in a row, which feels like 1 in a billion odds of losing to this extent. My best years were invested in techs like C++ that nobody even uses anymore, and I wouldn't use because they don't provide enough leverage. I only have the smallest bandwidth now to get anything at all done, and 90% of that is a waste of time due to conceptual flaws in languages, frameworks, operating systems, hardware, etc. In a very real sense, my most impactful choices were in the beginning, but I chose poorly or lost, so now it's too expensive to get back the sunk cost that I've invested. Making it ever-harder to keep going. Sometimes it feels like regret is all I have.
Unfortunately the winners usually don't have this experience. They don't have the gumption to lose for a lifetime. So they don't go through the same healing and growth process. Vanishingly few wealthy people can step back and use their money for social wellness altruistically.
Meanwhile some of us stumble onto concepts like duality and see through the matrix. We grok that there's no way to opt out of reincarnation. Then we look around and wonder why everyone is acting so strangely, having strong attachments to materialism in the 3D. The more we have, the more we cling to our ego and accomplishments, eventually living in fear of losing it all. While the people with nothing are more likely to lose their risk aversion and live in service to others.
Which means that the wealthy and powerful often live in a fear-based reality, while the poor often live in a love-based reality. Which works out well for the rich, while the poor suffer under systems of control they have little say in.
Zen Buddhism and Taoism touch on the idea that life is suffering, and suffering comes from attachments. So something that helps me is to go into situations knowing that I'll likely fail, but trying anyway, without expectation of outcome or regret.
So that one day if/when the win comes, I don't waste it like so many others. And maybe, just maybe, we can change the world.
> In a very real sense, my most impactful choices were in the beginning, but I chose poorly or lost
Specifically in relation to picking up technologies. Unless you are working on something highly specialized, I am not sure your situation calls for such desperation. Learning new languages is not hard (as you are aware, as far as I can tell), and switching to a more agile stack like e.g. React/JavaScript could unlock new opportunities, considering how in demand it is across the industry.
> We grok that there's no way to opt out of reincarnation.
Hm. That's a personal belief, right? It seems like you are convinced in it as a fact of life, and that might not be the most change encouraging strategy. Similar to fatalism in a sense.
> Which means that the wealthy and powerful often live in a fear-based reality, while the poor often live in a love-based reality.
You are romanticizing the poor. Certain societies have more family and community oriented lifestyles. Not because they are poor but because they have a cultural predisposition and a tradition. Poverty is not full of love, financial abundance is not full of fear.
I'm actually most fascinated now with simple spreadsheets and getting back to #nocode with stuff like Firebase and Airtable, although I don't believe that anyone has fully solved offline and distributed conflict resolution well enough to give us MS Access and FileMaker for the web. Although CRDTs can do a lot if we're willing to let ACID go, kind of like the eventual consistency fad around 2010. Dunno if I can do that though!
So really what's going on is that I'm not an artisan, I'm not a craftsman or even an engineer anymore (if I ever was, I never got my professional engineering license). I'm more of an architect or researcher. I want to write the building blocks for engines that are used to build other things.
But that ship has sailed. Open source isn't modeled right, since nobody solved funding. So nobody pays for the pure research that I'd like to do, so society misses out on proceeds from that investment in innovation. Banks only loan to match a multiple of collateral which doesn't kick in until someone has on the order of $100,000 saved. And there never was funding for ventures. VC firms vacuumed up all available capital so those trillions of dollars are now concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires and multinational corporations who pick winners and losers in the same role that democratic governments used to perform, except now through gatekeeping. The central challenge is how to get money for runway to get real work done, and that hasn't changed in the 30 years I've been doing this. If anything it's far worse today, with competition increasing an order of magnitude each decade, along with wealth inequality as winners hoard their gains and dodge their taxes.
On top of that, AI has already surpassed my knowledge and experience. It can whip up working code for mainstream frameworks like Laravel and React in seconds, whereas it would take me days just to formulate a plan of action. So the only thing going for me is that I know what not to do, from attending the school of hard knocks. But AI will solve that too within 5-10 years, removing even the minefield so that all programming has guard rails. Every innovation there just withers me, since I started down this course in life with the goal of creating AGI back when that was a joke. It's an all but certainty now, arriving by 2040 but maybe even 2030.
That's a good insight about reincarnation being akin to fatalism, I hadn't considered that. I feel that philosophies have merits that can be ranked under somewhat formal metaphysical conventions, even though they amount to sniff tests. So I find written religious accounts somewhat less believable than personal insights from experience. The most universal truths seem to come from epiphanies that can then be verified against other accounts.
So basically that means that a child's question of "how does my soul control my body?" is every bit as valid as "why don't dogs go to heaven?", except that the child's question is ranked higher because it's universal, whereas heaven is a construct and rules about who gets to go there are dogma.
We live in a mostly western capitalist economic model, with ethics rooted in Abrahamic religions. In other words, we live under dogma. So seeking universal truths is mostly discouraged, as they threaten the status quo and entrenched power structures controlled by dynastic wealth. It also threatens the psyche. The more I learn, the more my mental health suffers with knowledge that can't be shared, either because there are soul-crushing aspects to life that can't be changed (yet), or because I don't want to co-opt someone else's journey. Then people confident in their worldview mock me for trying, the way that hard-right politics mock any attempt to make things better. Because they are optimizing gain within a zero-sum game to find the best Nash equilibrium, while I and others are thinking outside the box at a meta level to change the rules, which again threatens their power. Leftist politics can also succumb to tribalism, so I'm not saying that hard-left or hard-right is best, but that strong attachments block insight and solutions. And unfortunately the people with the strongest attachments control the world right now.
So I guess my belief that we're all one in the consciousness field, destined to live out every perspective so as not to be trapped alone within a singularity as God, is not so different from believing that this is all there is and we're worm food when we die, or that we spend eternity in heaven or hell after this life. Except that I might say the worm food philosophy doesn't pass my personal sniff test, since being here again doesn't seem that much less likely than being here now.
And you're right, fear and love have no direct correlation with wealth or the lack thereof. I might say that the feeling of having enough can be personal or societal though. Someone may feel loving and not see the burden their lifestyle places on those supporting it. And conversely, someone may feel loving and not realize that it's a trauma response from exploitation.
I feel that my soul contract, the dream of my inner child, is to liberate future generations from unnecessary suffering so that they (we in the next life) can more easily self-actualize. Which IMHO is closer to a progressive planned economy with UBI like Star Trek than a libertarian wild west economy like Star Wars. Maybe our attention shifts though, the way that children in developing nations seem happier than children raised with a silver spoon. Maybe my personal journey through suffering has felt rewarding in some way. Like maybe I'd go crazy with anhedonia if all my needs were met.
All that said, what I really seek is peace, since I'm not sure that I've ever really felt at ease in my entire adult life.
But it's not. It's more like playing the lottery over and over. The chance of succeeding even once is pretty low.
> My best years were invested in techs like C++ that nobody even uses anymore, and I wouldn't use because they don't provide enough leverage.
Bit of an odd choice. Not only is C++ still being used, as far as I know, but even if it weren't: If you know C++, you know C, and that is definitely very relevant. If you know C, you have vastly more low-level knowledge than the average programmer nowadays. C is not my favorite language by far (I like rust, or Haskell, depending), but just being proficient in it means I can program a lot of different things.
Anyway, to the rest of your point: I never wanted to get rich or anything like that, I always just did what interested me on a technical level. I fared very well with that.
I can feel how much more fulfilled I'd be if I got to make the personal contributions in my heart. I wanted to write languages and frameworks, even design hardware like multicore CPUs, that would have made tech work easier so I could accomplish more and maybe win the internet lottery in the process.
But instead, I just endlessly ran the treadmill to make rent, in the end only standing in place as if I had done nothing. That's what the very essence of the suffering of life is: we insert a coin from the astral plane to incarnate in this life and run the rat race, eventually losing it all to end up right back where we started. Do it enough and we might ascend to the next level, but even then, we eventually volunteer to start over as the fool.
So nothing against C++. In many ways, it's still the most capable bare-metal language. The catch is that the developer has to do everything by hand. It's like comparing a protected memory process to one that can take out the whole OS at any time. I know from personal experience, having programmed my first computer (a Mac Plus) with C++ in the early 90s and having to reboot up to 30 times per day.
Today my time is stretched so thin that in an 8 hour day, I usually get less than 1 hour of actual work done, and probably more like 20 minutes if I'm being honest. It's all logistics now. Travel, orchestrating containers, meeting with team members, researching workarounds for unfortunate snafus in whatever framework, navigating large codebases, maintaining the body and living area, etc.
If I was using C# or C++ instead of PHP and the shell, I simply wouldn't be able to get any real work done in any reasonable amount of time. And PHP is a lackluster language, a far cry from what I would design, but it's the only imperative language with copy-on-write arrays like functional languages, so runs circles around them and avoids countless conceptual pitfalls. It's like MS Excel, simultaneously the best and worst software that I've ever used.
I really want to learn Haskell and Scala to extend my functional programming knowledge, but so far have only made it to Lisp and Clojure. I think I need a course to overcome some of my misunderstandings around decomposition, currying, functors, monads, impurity, etc. The utility of MATLAB jumped out to me immediately (operations happen on arrays, not primitives, similarly to shaders), but I haven't found a use for lambdas as much.
I'm happy that you've fared well and are able to do what interests you. I'm struggling with discipline, motivation and giving myself the space to play as a people-pleaser. I've had a scarcity mindset and been in survival mode for so many decades that I don't know how to put myself first. I just procrastinate and project my frustrations onto the web..
Strange -- I'm actively considering learning C++ to help with CUDA programming for ML.
If you grasp CUDA, you'll be ahead of me as far as programming GPUs goes. I was never able to quite let my love of desktop CPU programming go to transition to shader and cloud programming. I'm more into higher-order methods like map/reduce/filter. But languages like Julia are working to unite the two paradigms under a common runtime.
There are many tools available to help you get started. I would highly recommend also learning Docker and git (if you haven't yet), so that you can rapidly iterate with full undo ability to remove fear of failure. There are many operations in git that I find easier than the built-in SCM in Unity, for example. And I know they can be used together to give you a local scratch sandbox, then commit your final changes when you're ready. I still want to do this, so you'd be ahead of me again.
And if you could go ahead and build J.A.R.V.I.S. for the rest of us, that'd be great!
Like others have said, just some random on the internet, but at a minimum seriously find a wordsmith to update that resume and some recruiter will be contacting you. Also, more is not better no need to list the Test Tech or Mac Repair since other jobs overlap with those years and makes it seem like you were only part time. Everyone fibs a little bit no one is going to ask if you were part time or full time on a job from 20 years ago. Also, if you have self-employed listed make sure you have the tax# and LLC cert from the state as they are going to want to see that as proof to count as relevant experience.
I know you did not ask for my advice, but after reading your reply got me curious about why so gloom. As programmers we need to market ourselves and fake it till, we make it.
The gloom comes from knowing that had I just worked company jobs with 6 figure salaries, I'd be retired by now instead of still at square one. And I never bought Bitcoin when it was $10. And I never had money at the time to invest in Google when it opened at $85 and everyone knew it would go to $100, and it did, opening day if I recall correctly. Same with Apple, when it was $12 but I had no money to buy shares.
That's how capitalism works. As you get wins, they let you invest in further wins to eventually create a stream of unearned income large enough to more than cover living expenses.
But if you never have a single win - not in the beginning and not ongoing - then you watch on the sidelines as countless people with less experience and expertise, who haven't tried as hard, who don't even know what they're doing half the time, fly past you into financial security.
And why did I never have a win? Because the rules of the game that I started under changed. In high school, I didn't know anyone with a computer besides a handful of my friends. There was no internet or cell phones, just the BBS. Geeks weren't cool. We didn't know girls. We barely had cars, passed down to us from parents, if we were lucky. The only real jobs in my small hometown were flipping burgers and moving irrigation pipe.
The reasons I went into tech are largely irrelevant today. And if I knew then that our combined efforts were driving us towards a service economy, wealth inequality and tech dystopia, I might never have gone into it. I originally wanted to be a genetic engineer and cure all genetic disorders, eventually helping to cure senescence.
Which I'm not sure I even truly care about anymore, because at midlife there is a certain allure to starting over in the next life to lose one's memories. I understand Joker and Loki sentiments that I never expected or wanted. Or at least, I'm able to forgive those that scream "let me out!" like David Bowie and Freddie Mercury sang about. And have survivor guilt, that I'm still here after losing loved ones so close to me.
So the central challenge is how to get over myself, to forget the horrors I've seen, to somehow reintegrate with the 3D and reenter the matrix. I basically have startup PTSD from so many tries without a win. Basically a veteran like Rambo, I've seen too much, am highly capable, but can barely take care of myself and would be homeless if not for the help of family and friends.
I really appreciate your advice though. It's good to get honest feedback from someone able to see the situation impartially. Writing this out helps me see that the barriers before me are not so much societal, but self-imposed perhaps.
https://medium.com/@dualisticunity/ai-religion-and-the-uncom...
It says that it was written 3 days ago and that my post was 4, and I definitely read it after mine. But I've noticed that these similar attention/expression synchronicities are happening more and more often lately.
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In the alt universe where I aced the interview and gotten my dream job, I might have died in a car crash.
In the alt universe where I didn't say something stupid and alienate a friend, my husband might have been stricken by cancer.
We just don't know and can't know. Every night, whatever happened, I try to feel a moment of gratitude. My family is here and secure and happy and that is not true of everyone and not to be taken for granted.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02699931.2024.2...
I think this was a huge super power for me early in my career. I embarrassed myself over and over again and didn't care or even think about it. Right back at it the next day.