Definitely recommend "The Goal", it is fascinating to see its influence on "The Phoenix Project".
I would also offer a recommendation for any jaded hacker. Go and work for a manufacturing company. Seeing real world problems solved by lean experts and process engineers is fascinating. See Kaizen (Continuos incremental improvement) in action in critical systems, systems where a mistake can't be reverted easily and the consequences are huge. See them manage complexity. It is a real education.
Nooooooo! He was my next door neighbor a few years ago, and I knew him as a person before I realized that I knew him as a hero.
His dogs were fiercely protective of his house, which is perfectly understandable. One day I saw a "sewer cleaning" van behind his house, and I have a hard time believing that's what it really was: https://honeypot.net/2025/03/12/rip-mark-klein.html
20 years of bad habits facilitated by a given lifestyle can also be very hard to break. Not many can manage duly accumulating the savings while completely isolating themselves from what they work on, who they work with, and how all of that impacts their worldview.
And that's not even considering health. 20 years of being in a bad mental place (stress is bad, but a perceived lack of purpose and agency might well be worse) will leave its marks.
Won't expound on my life story, but this is massively overlooked. You can't just prioritize money without taking into account the massive sacrifices it will require in your life. I spent a long, long time becoming successful in careers that I hated, only to burn out and do the career I knew I wanted to do since I was old enough to think and remember. Except now I have wasted decades of my life that I will never get back.
The majority of your life is spent working so you absolutely MUST find it fulfilling or you will burn out (at best) or destroy your body and mind as a sacrifice to the insatiable Mammon.
It might backfire for sure, but being financially independent gives you freedom to figure that out for the rest of the life.
IMO it's a lot better than the situation I myself am in right now, when I can clearly see myself working my ass off for the next 20-25 years in domains I totally hate, and then hopefully I can start working on interesting things when I'm ... 65?
I'd further argue that the only downside of my strategy is that you already have a clear non-monetary objective but decided to go with the money for 20 years. That's definitely a bad thing, and that's why in my original reply I rooted this out -- if you already have an objective, go for it.
Its easy to think you have too much money in your twenties. I used to save every other paycheck. But wait until you have a family and a mortgage. The money goes very quickly.
> 20 years later, you realize you burned two precious decades accumulating money that, honestly, does not help you at all make sense or use of the next two.
Ah, but it does. Speaking as someone approaching fifty, you feel every penny. Everything about your financial situation weighs into your decision-making, makes different options possible or impossible. It changes which jobs you can take, and which jobs you can turn down. It affects how much time you can take between jobs. It affects how much energy you pour into keeping your job or chasing a promotion versus investing your energy in education or other things you find satisfying.
People worry that they will accidentally pursue money with such single-minded focus that they turn off every other part of their soul, and miss out on what they "really" want to do. But I don't think that's possible. Replace money with anything else: fame, family, intellectual achievement, hedonism. If you try to dedicate yourself 100% to one thing when something else is important to you, you'll hear the voice in the back of your head. You'll feel what it is, and if you ignore it then, that's on you.
If you don't hear that voice yet, lay down the foundation that will give you the freedom to follow it when you finally do.
This advice could really backfire badly if taken literally by young people.
Optimizing for financial reward early in your career could be the surest way to end up in a dead end from a mission/purpose/domain/skills perspective.
20 years later, you realize you burned two precious decades accumulating money that, honestly, does not help you at all make sense or use of the next two.
I'm over 40 and even though I mostly manage/lead now I have time to do programming and plenty of math. I still see improvement mentally (not so much physically anymore), but also a lot of improvement in skills I neglected when I was younger like interpersonal skills and sales. I'm also learning a new language and read more than ever. Sometimes I feel like I'm less sharp, but I wonder if that's because I'm doing so much more.
My tricks that I don't always follow, is work out every day, get enough sleep, and stay off of most short form social media. I realized when I was on short form social it would zap a lot of time and kill any focus I had.
I'm in my late 40s and I've found that my desire for working on side projects after work is affected by how engaged I am mentally at work. When I'm building new features/products from scratch and I'm having to figure out architecture and learn more about whatever language I'm coding in, I get more amped to do side projects at home. When I'm bored and just bug fixing and dealing with more mundane things, I have no desire to do any more coding after work. Something about being more engaged gets my brain in a state that I can keep going for the rest of the day until I need to pull myself away from the computer because it's 2am and I should have been asleep hours ago. I should note that I don't have children so the only "obligation" I have is to spend time with my partner and eat dinner, which I enjoy doing, of course. She usually starts getting ready for bed around 10pm and that's when I start coding. I do have some bad sleep patterns though, doesn't matter if I'm coding or not, which is probably not healthy. I have that revenge nighttime procrastination thing real bad.
Maybe it's time for me (40+) to go back to college. I want to pick up Mathematics and Physics up to the point of General Relativity. Since it's "use it or lose it", I better start reading now.
But I don't really have any time. There are so many things to do, to learn. Younger people who happen to stumble upon this reply, please please prioritize financial freedom if you don't have a clear objective in mind -- and from my observation many people don't have a clear objective when they are in their 20s! If you can retire around 35-40, you have ample time to pursuit any project you want for the rest of the life.
"Look at this lead pencil. There’s not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all. The wood from which it is made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington. To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel. To make steel, it took iron ore. This black center—we call it lead but it’s really graphite, compressed graphite—I’m not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from some mines in South America. This red top up here, this eraser, a bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya, where the rubber tree isn’t even native! It was imported from South America by some businessmen with the help of the British government. This brass ferrule? [Self-effacing laughter.] I haven’t the slightest idea where it came from. Or the yellow paint! Or the paint that made the black lines. Or the glue that holds it together. Literally thousands of people co-operated to make this pencil. People who don’t speak the same language, who practice different religions, who might hate one another if they ever met! When you go down to the store and buy this pencil, you are in effect trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all those thousands of people. What brought them together and induced them to cooperate to make this pencil? There was no commissar sending … out orders from some central office. It was the magic of the price system: the impersonal operation of prices that brought them together and got them to cooperate, to make this pencil, so you could have it for a trifling sum.
That is why the operation of the free market is so essential. Not only to promote productive efficiency, but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world."
I'd like to see a study on how the acute stress of living in survival mode for a lifetime affects the brain by using it too much for the wrong tasks.
The last 25 years have been particularly painful for people like me who favor academia and pure research over profit-driven innovation that tends to reinvent the wheel. When I look around at the sheer computing power available to us, I'm saddened that people with wealth, power and influence tend to point to their own success as reason to perpetuate the status quo. When we could have had basic resources like energy, water, some staple foods and shelter provided for free (or nearly free) through automation. So that we could focus on getting real work done in the sciences for example, instead of just making rent.
I've been living like someone from movies like In Time and The Pursuit of Happyness for so many decades without a win that my subconscious no longer believes that the future will be better. I have to overcome tremendous spidey sense warning signs from my gut in order to begin working each day. The starting friction is intense. To the point where I'm not sure how much longer I can continue doing this to myself, and I'm "only" in my mid-40s. After a lifetime of negative reinforcement, I'm not sure that I can adopt new innovations like AI into my workflows.
It's a hollow feeling to have so much experience in solving any problem, when problem solving itself will soon be solved/marginalized to the point that nobody wants to pay for it because AI can do it. I feel rather strongly that within 3 years, mass-layoffs will start sweeping the world with no help coming from our elected officials or private industry. Nobody will be safe from being rendered obsolete, not even you the reader.
So I have my faculties, I have potential, but I've never felt dumber or more ineffectual than I do right now.
Please add an offset functionality to your free solution immediately, as it has now become a core component of our operation, or we will be forced to take legal action.
Also, we appreciate if you could sign a retroactive NDA with our legal team ASAP.
The CCP first and foremost keeps control by keeping their people happy, and controlling the narrative in such a way that the people are happy.
Surveillance in China is a Damocle's sword at worst - hardly used in an enforcement capacity, transgressions (like using VPNs) are mostly ignored, and it's very easy to slip through the cracks. Everyone is breaking laws all the time - they're a tool only selectively used. Police will look the other way as long as you don't force their hand. Funnily enough you don't even need a surveillance state to create bullshit laws that you selectively enforce. They made a surveillance state... and don't really use it.
I'm more afraid of surveillance states in a western countries, because they have a much better track record of consequently enforcing laws as written. If they make it illegal to say bad things about the party and use encryption, you can be sure enforcement will go beyond just silently deleting your critical Facebook post and killing your SSH connection. They'll throw the book at you.
> they match, more or less, those of UNIX's philosophy
1. Good design is innovative
UNIX innovated by simplifying Multics -
throwing away ring security and PL/I's memory safety features.
Linux innovated by cloning UNIX, giving it away for free,
and avoiding the lawsuit that sidelined BSD.
2. Good design makes a product useful
Yet somehow people managed to use UNIX anyway.
3. Good design is aesthetic
UNIX threw away clear, long-form command forms and kept
short, cryptic abbreviations like "cat" (short for "felis cattus")
and "wc" (short for "toilet").
Its C library helpfully abbreviates "create" as "creat",
because vowels are expensive.
4. Good design makes a product understandable
See #3
5. Good design is unobtrusive
That's why UNIX/Linux enthusiasts spend so much time
configuring their systems rather than using them.
6. Good design is honest
The UNIX name indicates it is missing something
present in Multics. Similarly, "Linux" is the
gender-neutralized form of "Linus".
7. Good design is long-lasting
Like many stubborn diseases, UNIX has proven hard to eradicate.
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail
UNIX/Linux enthusiasts love using those details
to try to figure out how to get Wi-Fi, Bluetooth,
and GPU support partially working on their laptops.
9. Good design is environmentally-friendly
Linux recycles most of UNIX's bad ideas, and many
of its users/apologists.
10. Good design is as little design as possible
Linux beats UNIX because it wasn't designed at all.
I think you have a key component in good sleep but there are 2 more imo.
The first is that phones and light break our natural sleepiness triggers and the second is that we don't exercise our bodies enough because of our sedentary lifetstyle.
I used to struggle with terrible insomnia and I still get bouts of it time to time but I've also found it's related to my laxing my 3 rules.
If I have a good workout about 5x a week, I turn off my phone and the lights 30 minutes before bed and take a good long shower in the dark and I have a regular alarm set at 7am that goes off 7 days a week, I'm almost guaranteed a good nights sleep every night. It also had the added affect of ridding me of my night terrors and sleep walking I used to have frequently but I'm 90% certain that was correlated to me using my phone in bed and it causing my brain to enter a weird state where it never really turned off.
Here's a title you can reuse freely for the next decade or so.
(Startup/public/private equity owned) company <IOT device>'s collect data you don't want them collecting, use it for profit to your detriment, and didn't bother securing any of it because they don't care.
There are conflicting studies, but recently, it was determined you need adequate vitamin B levels to support omega-3.
As an aside, you can definitely over-dose on omega-3 which can cause afib, and increase your chance of stroke. I was taking 2 grams per day and definitely had arrhythmia issues. Decreasing the dosage to 500mg per day eliminated the arrhythmia.
I don’t remember which book
I got idea from but idea is to work in different modes. When you work as programmer then there are no deadlines and etc. So sometimes you have to put different hat, e.g. CEO hat. It took several months to work out but overall result is reasonably good.
Thank you for posting this! VanillaJSX is refreshingly different, and we desperately need new ideas in the front-end space to reduce the complexity and get closer to the browser. I also feel like the discussion in this thread is very rich and gives people on both sides of the fence a lot of stuff to think about.
There were two groups I was hoping vanillajsx would resonate with. The first is people who still buy into the React dream but are beginning to be disillusioned with its inability to deliver on its promises, and the second is people who already are fully disillusioned.
I don't know if you've seen it, but Alex Russell just did a blog series where he directly talks about this disillusion and proposes a move away from React for most web apps: https://infrequently.org/series/reckoning/
I am not as anti-React as that myself, but I do agree it is hard to scale up and have it perform well, not at all like the promise. As always, there are no silver bullets and you have to pick a stack that you can understand.
Good job releasing your project! It's a cool idea and surprisingly minimalist. That said, I've found a number of cryptographic flaws in the application source. This should not be used in instances where the encryption is mission-critical.
1) You generate a random key [0] and then feed it into PBKDF2 [1] to generate a 32-byte AES-GCM key. If you can generate 32 random bytes instead of 10 reduced-ASCII characters and a key stretch, just do that. PBKDF2 is for turning a password into a key, and it's far from the recommended algorithm nowadays; prefer scrypt if you need to do this sort of thing.
2) AES-GCM with random 12-byte nonces. Never use random IVs with GCM; this breaks the authentication [2] [3]. Given the pitfalls of AES-GCM with respect to random nonces, you might prefer switching to XSalsa20+Poly1305. The advantage of XSalsa is it has an extended nonce length, so you can use random nonces without fear.
3) Random key derivation with a restricted character set can make brute force attacks easier. You should have a 256-bit random key, and if you want that key to be within a certain character set, then encode the byte output from the CSPRNG using that character set.
4) 1fps achieves symmetric key distribution via a URL with a fragment identifier ("#") which IIRC is not sent to the server. Therefore it assumes you have a secure key distribution channel - the link contains the key, so it's important that only the intended recipient can view the part after the "#". If the server is truly malicious, it can deploy client-side Javascript to send the fragment to the server, allowing the server to access the key (and thus cleartext communication).
Doing http over webrtc is how https://camect.com works to let one access cameras own private server via their ui. They have a centralized bit for auth and then use webrtc and a physical nvr to serve your videos maximally efficiently...so there is low risk of their cloud becoming a financial burden that they cancel ala google nest cams
> There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+ years
Sometimes I try to talk to my 83 year old dad, who was a Teamster at the same company for his entire 35 year career, about the software industry. He's so surprised how often people like me change jobs, how we switch companies as a way to get a raise, and just generally how different expectations are. When I told him about how I'd left a company partly because they didn't promote me after 18 months, he didn't say anything, but I knew what he was thinking. In his world, 18 months just isn't long enough to feel entitled to a promotion. Promotion is primarily seniority-based, and the company rewarded loyalty as much as, err, value creation. It's a different world we're in, but I'm not sure exactly what makes it different: is it the 21st century, something fundamental about the industry, or the fact that software people feel they have more mobility, and thus less loyalty and patience?
One thing I'm fairly certain about is that companies don't treat us worse than they treated blue collar workers in the 70s. I think we'd all be surprised by the poor selection of candy in the catered employee cafeteria they had over at the shipping depot.
I would also offer a recommendation for any jaded hacker. Go and work for a manufacturing company. Seeing real world problems solved by lean experts and process engineers is fascinating. See Kaizen (Continuos incremental improvement) in action in critical systems, systems where a mistake can't be reverted easily and the consequences are huge. See them manage complexity. It is a real education.