The way I usually formulate these lines of thought is as follows:
I have the desire to play video games (a waste of time), but I wish that I did not have this desire. I want it, but I do not want to want it.
If we do not have strong enough character to regulate our short term desires, our long term goals suffer. This tradeoff is implicit in how we spend every second of our day. Ultimately, actions reveal preferences.
If your long-term goals are unclear, or if your working conditions/ social circle are not congruent to your long-term goals, you will remain anxious over failing to progress towards these goals.
Bio, psycho, social. You have to realize that depression is caused by everything from sleep, to the food you eat, to your daily habits, to how your relationship with your parents is, to how you treat your dating partners. A drug can't make up for all these things.
I think Levy's take on hacker ethic was a bit phony to begin with, typical of journalists who try to describe the spirit of something without practicing it. All information should be free, really? Like your root password? I much prefer the version in the Jargon File:
"A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary."
Basically a hacker is someone who enjoys hacking for its own sake, not as part of some moral crusade. The OP is proposing another moral crusade which is just as irrelevant. Whether you like it or not, most discoveries will be made by those who enjoy discovery, not by those who view it as a means to reach utopia.
1) Cheating on taxes is quite literally stealing from every other person in the country. That being said I think there is a lot of small scale cheating going, especially for small cash-driven businesses.
2) There's no hostility towards entrepreneurs as far as I've seen it, quite the opposite. However people in general do seem to realize that there is a very real tradeoff between business interests and the interests of citizens. You can't have 0% corporate tax and free healthcare and education.
As for Uber Pop, the drivers are not volunteers and are simply either taxed for the profits they make through Uber Pop or they can do actual not-for-profit car pooling.
"Individuals don’t in fact enjoy being evaluated all the time, especially when the results are not always stellar: for most people, one piece of negative feedback outweighs five pieces of positive feedback. To the extent that measurement raises income inequality, perhaps it makes relations among the workers tenser and less friendly. Life under a meritocracy can be a little tough, unfriendly, and discouraging, especially for those whose morale is easily damaged. Privacy in this world will be harder to come by, and perhaps “second chances” will be more difficult to find, given the permanence of electronic data. We may end up favoring “goody two-shoes” personality types who were on the straight and narrow from their earliest years and disfavor those who rebelled at young ages, even if those people might end up being more creative later on."
Pervasive employee monitoring and feedback isn't costless. Some people will improve, others will get fired/quit find a new job, but there will be some who cannot take it at all. If losing a job wasn't so punishing economically and status-wise, it would take a lot of, but certainly not all, of the sting away.
See a problem. Figure out how many people it is a problem for. Figure out why no one else has solved that problem. Figure out if you know how to solve the problem. Figure out how much folks would be willing to pay for a solution to the problem. If you asses you are able to be fairly compensated (over long periods of time) for solving the problem after all your costs of solving it are reconciled: Commit to spending vast amounts of your resource to exploring and productizing the solution to said problem. This isn't the advice the author gives. However, here is another post written by the same author: https://rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-shutdown/
> "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
-- Robert Heinlein
I've certainly always found being a generalist more satisfying, even if it isn't always what gets rewarded.
I wouldn't necessarily restrict this to "the digital world."
Aside for scheduled items (they go in a calendar) and program-specific things (bookmarks go in Firefox), everything's a file.
Unscheduled todo goes into ~/todo.
Documents are in ~/d/org where org is the organization (school/company name). There are often subfolders, like subject name for school. Archive in ~/d/org/_archive/year. If a project is still running, it is still in the ~/d/org root, not in the archive, regardless of how many years it spans. I might sort by year inside that project folder if there are files ready for archiving.
Personal projects I generally sort by language (~/p/py; ~/p/php; ~/p/txt; etc.), for some reason that works well. Projects that I don't touch anymore (use nor expand) go into the archive folder (~/p/_archive). Maybe I should start sorting the archive by year as well, but it's not big enough to warrant that yet.
Collections like downloads, disk images, temporarily cloned git repositories, etc. go into separate folders, which makes them easy to manage and clean up. Unless they really belong with a project (code dependency) or cannot easily be re-downloaded, then they go in the project's folder.
From my experience (working 100% remotely for some years), I'd say that the sweet point lies in relatively "exotic" stacks, like Scala, Erlang, maybe even Rust.
It's not that there are more remote jobs in Scala than in Javascript. However, people who hire Scala developers seem to accept that when you need a top Scala team, you have to bring people from all over the world, i.e. they are fully committed to building a great fully remote team, not bringing remote developers as an afterthought (in general, you wouldn't want to take a role of remote engineer in a mostly non-remote team, especially if you are one of the first ones).
And Python/Javascript developers are dime a dozen (maybe not, they are still expensive, but much more numerous, and usually there isn't a problem to hire locally).
> there are those who believe that sex work can never truly be consensual...idealized circumstances free of such pressures, few people would choose sex work
In idealized circumstances free of economic pressures many of us would spent all day at the beach. It's great many found their dream career and are getting paid to do what they love. But for most what work is just work, a means to an end. Not sure why sex workers should be especially singled out and stigmatized. Would the janitor who cleaned the toilets in your office be doing that if they weren't getting paid to? Would you even be in said office if you weren't getting paid to be there?
Hm. The author works for a web/mobile development agency and uses React Native and GWT as examples of the new and the old, respectively. I hope it isn't news to anybody here that this sort of work is a race to the bottom and has such turnover precisely because it's mostly being done by junior developers. Linux systems programming arcana, for instance, doesn't disintegrate so quickly as the ten years the author cites. That's why, after getting into the industry as a frontend web dev, I will only do that sort of work now as a last resort to pay the bills (the other reason is because it's easy/boring as hell, apart from the greater opportunity for mentoring). Doing that sort of work now feels like I am sabotaging my career.
I'm not saying it applies to all those commenting negatively, but one commonly held philosophy amongst some of my geek friends is this logic:
"the world is terrible and people are terrible" -> "there's no point trying to improve things" -> "I don't need to improve things"
It's essentially an argument that allows people to live a defeatist (selfish?) life without feeling guilty.
Anyone who stands up and says "we can make things better and I'm going to do it!" is an immediate threat to this philosophical position. If Elon Musk can make the world(s) a better place, then it's much harder for me to maintain that all humans are selfish and evil, and it's harder to justify living a selfish and cynical existence. Hey, maybe I'm wrong about things, maybe I need to mature and learn about the world, which means the stance I've held all my life is incorrect and that is a scary thing to contemplate. It takes great self-awareness to move beyond that position.
I don't know why these thoughts correlate with being a programmer. Perhaps it's somewhat related to seeing things in a very black and white manner: things are good or bad. Elon Musk is a hero or a charlatan or he can't achieve what he says he will and he will fail and therefore it's pointless.
Here's an example I came across recently: "people are individually smart and collectively stupid, therefore we are doomed wrt politics and climate change." But the mature, adult, response is to ask "how can we help people better make collective decisions?"
Overall, this thinking comes across as childlike, failing to appreciate the subtleties in how progress is made, and the reality that nothing is all good or all bad, all failure or all success.
I generally agree with the sentiment here, but somewhat similar to using Linux over macOS, my experience has been that it's just a worse user experience in exchange for "doing the right thing." In the end, it's about how much you're willing to sacrifice convenience and user experience for an ethical ideal.
For me, the last time I attempted to switch from Chrome to Firefox, it drove me nuts after a few days because of one behavior: When you click a web link in another application, it opens it in your non-incognito (or whatever that's called in Firefox) window, even if the incognito window is the one on top. Instead, you have to copy the link from the other app, tab over to Firefox, and manually paste it into the incognito window. This is a flow I use many times a day, and having to do this workaround was really annoying. I found a thread about it on Firefox's issue tracker, but it was closed with a response that basically amounted to the developer telling the user that reported it, "this isn't a valid use case."
I may be able to switch back to Firefox when they implement that feature where each browser tab is essentially an isolated "incognito" context, which is really what I want. The distinction between "incognito" and "not incognito" windows has really just been a proving ground for the idea of concurrent browser sessions isolated from each other, which is a much overall solution to controlling your privacy on the web.
The public at large will never be swayed to use less convenient alternatives for ethical reasons. But even so, if a small, dedicated group of people are convinced, they can keep the ethical alternative just alive enough that it remains a somewhat viable alternative.
I don't think vegetarianism will ever be the norm, but there are enough vegetarians to create a market for vegetarian food. This creates options for people who don't want to eat meat for ethical reasons, increasing their freedom to live life the way they want without it being prohibitively inconvenient. A similar argument can be made for desktop Linux or using Firefox.
Mervyn King, formerly of the Bank of England, in "The End of Alchemy" has a great parable of an island populated by fishermen. It starts with a pretty basic need of financing the nets and boats to do the fishing, where the lender then gets slowly repaid with the fish caught.
At some point a finance person steps in and introduces a credit lending facility, which overall is a good thing for the health of the economy. Then, in decision to not take on too much risk, the said finance person offloads the loans in a securitized fashion to other wealthy islanders who then benefit from fishing booms and receive below average returns in years that are dry.
Then another finance person figures out the futures contracts, which act as insurance to fishermen and guarantee a reasonable price even at times of market over-supply.
At some point trading the loan securities and fishing future contracts starts paying more than humble fishing, which means that the best and brightest switch into finance, creating a stigma for fishing as less desirable occupation for under-achievers. Majority of island's GDP is now comprised of fishing-related loans and futures, with fishing itself occupying a relatively small niche.
This, of course, collapses at some point, but the problem is that it's hard to point out that one step that's completely irrational and bonkers - everything created by finance industry has found some demand among fishermen and simplified their lives.
I have the desire to play video games (a waste of time), but I wish that I did not have this desire. I want it, but I do not want to want it.
If we do not have strong enough character to regulate our short term desires, our long term goals suffer. This tradeoff is implicit in how we spend every second of our day. Ultimately, actions reveal preferences.
If your long-term goals are unclear, or if your working conditions/ social circle are not congruent to your long-term goals, you will remain anxious over failing to progress towards these goals.