Street-sweeper ticked a lot of your boxes??? How close did your profession end up being to that?
Pretty close tbh. A street-sweeper is left alone to do their job and - as long as its done well - is left alone to just get on with it :)
Readit NewsPick-A-Hill2019 commented on Ask HN: Folks who left tech later in their career, where did you go? · Posted by u/johnnycarcin
Pick-A-Hill2019 commented on Ask HN: Folks who left tech later in their career, where did you go? · Posted by u/johnnycarcin
Wow, so much to pack in and respond to so I will start with a TLDR of a +1 annectoda of ‘it can be done’.
Did I make the right choice? Yes and No. Did it work out ok/well? Yes... And No.
Would I do the same again? Yes.
Note: I considered posting under a Temp/Throwaway nick but figured meh, to hell with it.
The following is just a +1 anecdotal "can be done" rambling of some internet stranger so take it with as many pinches of salt as you wish :)
I am 'semi-retired' from the IT game, rode the Y2K and Dot-com boom and bust and semi-retired/ 'left' the industry back in late 2012. At that time I had reached a level where I could pick and choose and/or name a price without worry, secure in the knowledge that within a day or two my phone would ring with someone else on the end desperate to have a problem fixed. {Will list my reasons for getting out of the IT game at the end of this comment}.
I branched out in to a non-IT related field (but was still a very technical and hands-on field). We are who/what we are and I just have this itch to 'fix' stuff.
My pay at first was a LOT less than I was earning previously (roughly 1/10th) but within two years it was on par and within 5 years it was about 3x what I was earning in IT so yes, it can be done.
The thing to ask yourself is this (I'm assuming here that you have considered all possible different roles within the industry and found that none of them would suit you. If you haven't done that yet then do so with haste. Often it's better the devil you know).
Also consider this - Wherever you go, You always take the Weather with you. In other words - If you haven't identified the underlying cause of your dissatisfaction then even if you do decide to trade fields you will find yourself asking the exact same question on a different technical forum within a few years ;)
If still convinced that a change of career is the right thing to do (hint – the fact that you haven’t reached the point where you go Fuck it – anything is better than doing this even if it means going back to Ramen Noodle Days suggests that you aren’t at that point) then consider doing a good old fashioned “likes and dislikes” and a SWOT analysis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis ) to identify where/what to do next.
Those same strengths that brought me to that point in my IT career of where I could chose who to pick up the phone to also served me well in my ‘new’ choice of career. How did I identify the new field I chose to get in to? By trawling through a lot of Job sites (with pay filtering turned off) and just clicked/viewed the vacancies that sounded of interest. This gave me a really good idea of what interested me and if something was of interest then a quick Google/Glass-door search for roles within that industry showed the max potential earnings). As an example – “Street Sweeper” ticked a lot of my ‘boxes’ except that even the best of street sweepers could never hope to come close to what I would like to earn. But doing that gave me the criteria to narrow down on what aspects ARE essential for me in any role.
{Reasons for leaving IT} During the 2000’s the amount of pure greed, the countless ‘chancers’ (aka “cowboys”) in the field left me sickened and disgusted.
What ever you decide - Good luck and I hope you find happiness/contentment.
I think the lede is this ... * " began testing a system to use artificial intelligence to recognize secret words and messages for drug trafficking efficiently in order to ask Twitter to delete them. *
As is almost always the case - the road to hell is paved with good intentions & mutters something, something slippery slope towards automated censorship.
And as always it's "think of the children" or another one of the boogie-man "reasons".
I have an almost Pavlovian response to be against any initiative that uses those dog-whistles.
Pick-A-Hill2019 commented on How to Run Windows 11 and macOS Virtual Machines in Linux tomshardware.com/how-to/r... · Posted by u/rbanffy
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29457530
"Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux desktop VMs" submitted four hours ago which points to the GitHub repo (TFA links to it at top of article)
Quote from the article Screw It, Time for Nukes
Perfect Friday night reading before a quick bit of on-line gaming!
Pick-A-Hill2019 commented on Sweden asks EU to ban Bitcoin mining... theregister.com/2021/11/2... · Posted by u/oblib
" ... and to legally prevent anyone doing it from calling it eco-friendly."
Ok, that bit I can agree with.
Buuuttt, what I have a problem with is this - if Sweden / EU wants to ban crypto mining then simply create a specific industry code [1] that covers crypto mining and legislate/tax accordingly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Industrial_Classifica...
One of the criticisms of this device as per the article is that the critics feel that it might entrap marine life. That sounds like a reasonable criticism and is one that is refuted by the inventor saying that the ‘net’ is towed at low enough speeds and it also has various lights, escape paths etc. as mitigations but nobody seems to say either “it was zero caught so pffft to that criticism” or “yes a small amount were caught up but was it a small enough number that the benefits to species x,y,z outweigh the small amount of accidental damage” or (from the critics) “it was a fish massacre”.
I appreciate there might be technical reasons why the inventor is unable to determine the exact quantity (if any) however the absence of any quantities being mentioned at all is puzzling and either a missed opportunity to ‘slay the nay-sayers’ or is something they would rather not mention.
In fairness there may be an exact figure available somewhere out there but wasn’t something a quick dig through the first few pages of search results revealed.
Pick-A-Hill2019 commented on The Betty Crocker Effect sketchplanations.com/the-... · Posted by u/2a0c40
It's wasn't Betty Crocker.
The powdered egg effect for cake mixes is from the Duff and Sons, 1930s - https://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/pop-culture/ar... .
You can read their 1933 patent application (Patent #: US002016320) at https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?docid=02016320&SectionNum=3&ID... .
Column 1, starting at line 22.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171027-the-magic-cakes-... gives more context to the story, giving it a different slant:
> But the eggs may only have been part of cake mix's success. “I think it was frosting,” she says. When premade frosting and elaborate decorations came in, turning focus away from the substance of the cake, and onto its exterior, that may have really given the idea legs. We all want to have a way to demonstrate our love, and frosting – as a way turn a simple cake into a castle, a football field, a church – brought that. “And that, I think, is what changed the fate of cake mixes,” she says.
Thanks for posting this - I almost posted a slightly better / different link to a Betty Crocker Effect page [1] but checked the comments first and TIL, Snopes (FWIW) agrees that your are correct (see [2]).
[1] https://medium.com/@mukri2/betty-crocker-add-an-egg-248dce3d...