I think in my 20s I just didn't know how to recognize burnout. Combined with the usual invincibility complex and with an image as a caffeine-fueled wunderkind to uphold, I ended up burnout incarnate.
Now, when I feel unproductive for a several days running, I know I need to take a week or two and just do something else. I'm a better coder for it, and a better person too.
Years ago I actually burnt out. I felt like I couldn't learn anymore. I kept sitting down in front of my editor and going through the motions, wondering where the inspiration was, never able to click into the zone, chasing focus, being unproductive.
I took three years away from code. I got married and started a family. I worked at a relative's construction company. At first I had to force myself not to think about tech. Then I found myself actually forgetting about it because I was doing other interesting stuff. Eventually I realized I needed some software to do something, so I sat down to build it and the old joy was back. Everything felt fresh again.
Recommend you take a break and do something completely different - for years if necessary. You only live once. You might come back to software, you might not. Do what's right for you. The programming world will still be here rediscovering old design patterns and handwaving about the latest development process fads if you choose to get back into it.
They vote while holding their nose. They vote for the crook to keep the racist out, etc.
Voting while holding your nose? Please. It's all about picking the right political brand so that you feel validated in your peer group. Americans want to be on the winning team and beat the "other guys".
If your choices are "crook" and "racist", your system needs breaking.
Looking across more of their APIs, I see that the code makes liberal use of strlen and strcat, when it needs to be using counted-length data blobs everywhere. In short, the code is fundamentally broken; most of its external and internal APIs are incapable of passing binary data without mangling it. The code is completely unsafe for handling binary data, and yet the nature of TLS processing is almost entirely dependent on secure handling of binary data.
Incredible that GnuTLS is used anywhere at all. It's just mind boggling.
That and Lastpass encrypts/decrypts the password store on the client side. Only the encrypted database is ever sent over the wire. It's not perfect, but Lastpass has been great for me. Worth the $12/year. I don't know any of my passwords now except one, and my yubikey protects the Lastpass master password.
I walked into Tim Hortons for a double-double. They use big LCD screens for menus and video advertising in stores. Their screens were black and showing pxelinux trying to load. I guess they boot their menu server off the network, probably from corporate HQ.
Also, Mr. Lube (a drive-through oil change place) was using Ubuntu on their workstations - an early version with the nasty brown window titlebars. Their inventory/sales app was running in Gnome Terminal. Who knows what the backend was, linux was probably only being used to get them to a terminal as cheaply as possible.
None of these area actually weird. I always find it weirder to see Windows desktops on LED signs in stadiums or by the freeway. Once I was in Vancouver for a football game, the scores on the scoreboard suddenly 'moved aside', and lo and behold, there was a My Computer icon that was like 20 feet across. It was pretty funny to watch the operator trying to drag the "scores" window back into place to perfectly line up with the scoreboard screen.
Used to be, we wanted to know everything about everything. Now it seems there are powers out there that want a select few to keep their knowledge, and everyone else should know nothing.
This. The whole "knowledge is power" thing isn't just a platitude. The rich and powerful have realized that the lower classes are beginning to figure out a little too much for their liking. I think the Internet upset the balance a bit and gave 'em a scare until they realized that Facebook was the great pacifier.
Mobile tech, internet addiction, social media, health care costs, mortgages, unpaid internships and student loan debt... control the population by enforcing a giant wealth/knowlege/skills/health/opportunity gap. Let the plebs smash themselves to bits trying to get ahead.
Did you pull these numbers from your rectal database? Given these rules, it should be theoretically possible to put the Linux kernel in a chip without a general-purpose CPU...And since it completely bypasses the fetch-decode-execute pipeline of a general-purpose CPU, it should run blazingly fast! So, for fewer transistors, we can get probably 10x the performance of running the Linux core on dedicated silicon.
WHOA THANKS FOR THE PITCH! VENTURE CAPITAL HERE I COME BABY
It all depends where you are in the economic food chain. Regulation makes sense for people who don't have the individual power, or the time, or the expertise, to defend themselves. That's the majority of people, including me, and probably including yourself.
The problem with regulation of consumer-facing internet services is that inept politicians like to formulate laws that end up driving little guys out of business, or locking new ideas out. We've had this amazing explosion of useful services from small startups and individuals. If the political class wasn't full of grey-headed seniors who barely understand email, opportunities for little guys would be highly limited by now. You'd probably need three licenses and a certificate of approval to operate a personal home page. We'd have the National Internet, provided in partnership with Microsoft and IBM. Don't forget to renew your Level Two access permit!
The largely unregulated internet has allowed an entire generation to do a partial end-run around the backward sensibilities of their elders, and it's fucking fantastic. The greyheads will be dead or retired before they can put a lid on it, and the damage they do manage to do will be merrily routed around once they're under the ground.
There's always a handful of people who have the money and the connections to control or intimidate everyone who tries to fuck with them. Those people thrive in an anarchic free for all.
The internet at its core is based on cooperation. If the right entities stop cooperating, everybody loses. So it's not really an anarchic free-for-all. The big guys (fibre operators, ISPs, exchanges) all have incentives to keep the network functioning. The insane network growth we're seeing is because of the little guys signing on en masse. If the network becomes useless or threatening, the little guys will leave or adapt, and the big guys will have nothing. Symbiosis.
Regulation of network services like the right-to-be-forgotten crock will only lull people into treating the network with less respect than they should. Why take responsibility for your online persona? The company has to follow the regulations! Why take responsibility for your own security on the Internet? The government regulates you safe! No thanks.
Bwahaha, thanks for the inspiring link, you horrible person, you!
All these "right to be forgotten" movements just make me laugh. We'll all get there. In the meantime "the internet" might have some dirt on us. Ruh roh!
I'm just surprised that my eggnog-infused existential mini-crisis scored so highly! What is it with Christmas anyway...
We're all dead anyway. None of my old files are particularly accessible, from code written as a teenager and saved to worn-out floppy disks to CDs formatted for dead operating systems. Most of my photos are rotting on hard drives and I never really bother to look at them.
I don't want to be remembered by "the Internet". I want to be remembered by my kids and grandkids, and maybe some future programmer who might run across some old code I wrote and go "whoa, nice."
The internet can suck a bag of dicks and charge 5.99 a month to watch.
Ahh, Vancouver. I grew up there. It took leaving for a while to realize how screwed up that place is. Transit passes for a family of four cost more than running a car. Empty condo towers in Yaletown owned by speculators. Crack shacks for a cool million. Overwrought greenwashing as a political platform. Lamborghinis with Novice plates driven by Hong Konger Kids away from mommy and daddy and living on cash accounts. Sitting in the cafeteria at lunchtime waaaaay back in high school realizing that I couldn't understand most of the conversations around me because they were in foreign languages. Rain with a chance of rain. Short summers.
Since leaving I've been able to purchase three properties in my new town. Two are rented out, one is home. If I wanted a run-down house on Vancouver's east side, I'd have to sell all of them and probably take on a giant mortgage.
I love the setting, but the realities of living there are just out of whack.
My moral prohibits me from taking advantage of the buyer, no matter whether I "misrepresent" the goods or not.
If I have the knowledge that something is not as valuable as the price is, due to reasons the buyer does not understand, I just skip it. I will not sell a lemon car even if the buyer does not have the mechanical knowledge to find out it is lemon.
Hey, those values I share! The only difference between us is that I don't believe accepting market value for anything, from wool socks to XBoxes, is "taking advantage of the buyer." When I sell a coin, I get $30, my buyer gets 1 LTC, and both parties are happy. If that's taking advantage of someone, I hope you don't work anywhere that sells a product - that might comprimise your morals! So much cognitive dissonance.
I don't have any knowledge that LTC or BTC are somehow flawed. I know how they work, but people set their value, and people are unpredictable.
I will not sell lemon eletronic coins because I know they are lemon.
I do not expect you to hold these values.
You don't actually know that online coins are lemons despite all your posturing. It's a belief you hold, fine, but you haven't made a case for it. I invite you to back up your assertions by taking a short position on cryptocurrency. At least then you could make some money if you prove to be right.
I'm no more immoral for participating in the cryptocoin economy than someone else is for participating in the Craigslist economy.
Slashdot Mirror
My personal favourite: Terrorist: Volkswagen Commercial
I think in my 20s I just didn't know how to recognize burnout. Combined with the usual invincibility complex and with an image as a caffeine-fueled wunderkind to uphold, I ended up burnout incarnate.
Now, when I feel unproductive for a several days running, I know I need to take a week or two and just do something else. I'm a better coder for it, and a better person too.
Years ago I actually burnt out. I felt like I couldn't learn anymore. I kept sitting down in front of my editor and going through the motions, wondering where the inspiration was, never able to click into the zone, chasing focus, being unproductive.
I took three years away from code. I got married and started a family. I worked at a relative's construction company. At first I had to force myself not to think about tech. Then I found myself actually forgetting about it because I was doing other interesting stuff. Eventually I realized I needed some software to do something, so I sat down to build it and the old joy was back. Everything felt fresh again.
Recommend you take a break and do something completely different - for years if necessary. You only live once. You might come back to software, you might not. Do what's right for you. The programming world will still be here rediscovering old design patterns and handwaving about the latest development process fads if you choose to get back into it.
Google Chrome also uses Blink-182.
Woo hoo! So they lie and they're easy?
No. If more people disregarded rules, regulations and laws that do damage to free society as Snowden did, we would all be better off.
I'd say Snowden has reached one of the post-conventional levels on the Kohlberg scale.
Typical sysadmin, thinking they know everything about how you should do your job, even if your job has nothing to do with administering systems.
If Snowden really were a "typical sysadmin", we'd all be better off.
They vote while holding their nose. They vote for the crook to keep the racist out, etc.
Voting while holding your nose? Please. It's all about picking the right political brand so that you feel validated in your peer group. Americans want to be on the winning team and beat the "other guys".
If your choices are "crook" and "racist", your system needs breaking.
Stop disabling SELinux
From February 16 2008: Howard Chu of OpenLDAP: GnuTLS Considered Harmful
Looking across more of their APIs, I see that the code makes liberal use of strlen and strcat, when it needs to be using counted-length data blobs everywhere. In short, the code is fundamentally broken; most of its external and internal APIs are incapable of passing binary data without mangling it. The code is completely unsafe for handling binary data, and yet the nature of TLS processing is almost entirely dependent on secure handling of binary data.
Incredible that GnuTLS is used anywhere at all. It's just mind boggling.
That and Lastpass encrypts/decrypts the password store on the client side. Only the encrypted database is ever sent over the wire. It's not perfect, but Lastpass has been great for me. Worth the $12/year. I don't know any of my passwords now except one, and my yubikey protects the Lastpass master password.
I walked into Tim Hortons for a double-double. They use big LCD screens for menus and video advertising in stores. Their screens were black and showing pxelinux trying to load. I guess they boot their menu server off the network, probably from corporate HQ.
Also, Mr. Lube (a drive-through oil change place) was using Ubuntu on their workstations - an early version with the nasty brown window titlebars. Their inventory/sales app was running in Gnome Terminal. Who knows what the backend was, linux was probably only being used to get them to a terminal as cheaply as possible.
None of these area actually weird. I always find it weirder to see Windows desktops on LED signs in stadiums or by the freeway. Once I was in Vancouver for a football game, the scores on the scoreboard suddenly 'moved aside', and lo and behold, there was a My Computer icon that was like 20 feet across. It was pretty funny to watch the operator trying to drag the "scores" window back into place to perfectly line up with the scoreboard screen.
What is this superbowl thing? I've seen a lot of references to it lately, but not a lot of explanation.
I for one welcome our superb owl overlords.
Whooo! Whoo-whooo!
I am kind of surprised by how small the Tor network is. Only 1000 exit relays? Guess I'll spin up a few.
Used to be, we wanted to know everything about everything. Now it seems there are powers out there that want a select few to keep their knowledge, and everyone else should know nothing.
This. The whole "knowledge is power" thing isn't just a platitude. The rich and powerful have realized that the lower classes are beginning to figure out a little too much for their liking. I think the Internet upset the balance a bit and gave 'em a scare until they realized that Facebook was the great pacifier.
Mobile tech, internet addiction, social media, health care costs, mortgages, unpaid internships and student loan debt... control the population by enforcing a giant wealth/knowlege/skills/health/opportunity gap. Let the plebs smash themselves to bits trying to get ahead.
Can't fix the system by playing a part in it.
Did you pull these numbers from your rectal database? Given these rules, it should be theoretically possible to put the Linux kernel in a chip without a general-purpose CPU...And since it completely bypasses the fetch-decode-execute pipeline of a general-purpose CPU, it should run blazingly fast! So, for fewer transistors, we can get probably 10x the performance of running the Linux core on dedicated silicon.
WHOA THANKS FOR THE PITCH! VENTURE CAPITAL HERE I COME BABY
Yep, first thing I thought too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E87raPj9m0A
http://ioccc.org/2013/mills/
It all depends where you are in the economic food chain. Regulation makes sense for people who don't have the individual power, or the time, or the expertise, to defend themselves. That's the majority of people, including me, and probably including yourself.
The problem with regulation of consumer-facing internet services is that inept politicians like to formulate laws that end up driving little guys out of business, or locking new ideas out. We've had this amazing explosion of useful services from small startups and individuals. If the political class wasn't full of grey-headed seniors who barely understand email, opportunities for little guys would be highly limited by now. You'd probably need three licenses and a certificate of approval to operate a personal home page. We'd have the National Internet, provided in partnership with Microsoft and IBM. Don't forget to renew your Level Two access permit!
The largely unregulated internet has allowed an entire generation to do a partial end-run around the backward sensibilities of their elders, and it's fucking fantastic. The greyheads will be dead or retired before they can put a lid on it, and the damage they do manage to do will be merrily routed around once they're under the ground.
There's always a handful of people who have the money and the connections to control or intimidate everyone who tries to fuck with them. Those people thrive in an anarchic free for all.
The internet at its core is based on cooperation. If the right entities stop cooperating, everybody loses. So it's not really an anarchic free-for-all. The big guys (fibre operators, ISPs, exchanges) all have incentives to keep the network functioning. The insane network growth we're seeing is because of the little guys signing on en masse. If the network becomes useless or threatening, the little guys will leave or adapt, and the big guys will have nothing. Symbiosis.
Regulation of network services like the right-to-be-forgotten crock will only lull people into treating the network with less respect than they should. Why take responsibility for your online persona? The company has to follow the regulations! Why take responsibility for your own security on the Internet? The government regulates you safe! No thanks.
Bwahaha, thanks for the inspiring link, you horrible person, you!
All these "right to be forgotten" movements just make me laugh. We'll all get there. In the meantime "the internet" might have some dirt on us. Ruh roh!
I'm just surprised that my eggnog-infused existential mini-crisis scored so highly! What is it with Christmas anyway...
It's not your call if "the internet" remembers you. And that's the problem.
How could it ever be my call? What does that world look like?
Through regulation? I'd rather have a wild and crazy unregulated internet than a managed, legally constrained network.
We're all dead anyway. None of my old files are particularly accessible, from code written as a teenager and saved to worn-out floppy disks to CDs formatted for dead operating systems. Most of my photos are rotting on hard drives and I never really bother to look at them.
I don't want to be remembered by "the Internet". I want to be remembered by my kids and grandkids, and maybe some future programmer who might run across some old code I wrote and go "whoa, nice."
The internet can suck a bag of dicks and charge 5.99 a month to watch.
Ahh, Vancouver. I grew up there. It took leaving for a while to realize how screwed up that place is. Transit passes for a family of four cost more than running a car. Empty condo towers in Yaletown owned by speculators. Crack shacks for a cool million. Overwrought greenwashing as a political platform. Lamborghinis with Novice plates driven by Hong Konger Kids away from mommy and daddy and living on cash accounts. Sitting in the cafeteria at lunchtime waaaaay back in high school realizing that I couldn't understand most of the conversations around me because they were in foreign languages. Rain with a chance of rain. Short summers.
Since leaving I've been able to purchase three properties in my new town. Two are rented out, one is home. If I wanted a run-down house on Vancouver's east side, I'd have to sell all of them and probably take on a giant mortgage.
I love the setting, but the realities of living there are just out of whack.
I've been using Linux since early Slackware. I laughed. Lighten up.
My moral prohibits me from taking advantage of the buyer, no matter whether I "misrepresent" the goods or not.
If I have the knowledge that something is not as valuable as the price is, due to reasons the buyer does not understand, I just skip it. I will not sell a lemon car even if the buyer does not have the mechanical knowledge to find out it is lemon.
Hey, those values I share! The only difference between us is that I don't believe accepting market value for anything, from wool socks to XBoxes, is "taking advantage of the buyer." When I sell a coin, I get $30, my buyer gets 1 LTC, and both parties are happy. If that's taking advantage of someone, I hope you don't work anywhere that sells a product - that might comprimise your morals! So much cognitive dissonance.
I don't have any knowledge that LTC or BTC are somehow flawed. I know how they work, but people set their value, and people are unpredictable.
I will not sell lemon eletronic coins because I know they are lemon.
I do not expect you to hold these values.
You don't actually know that online coins are lemons despite all your posturing. It's a belief you hold, fine, but you haven't made a case for it. I invite you to back up your assertions by taking a short position on cryptocurrency. At least then you could make some money if you prove to be right.
I'm no more immoral for participating in the cryptocoin economy than someone else is for participating in the Craigslist economy.