antiherovelo

+1 for music production. Endlessly diverting, and not nearly as expensive as it used to be. With a good laptop and a keyboard and a guitar or two you can accomplish stuff that was impossible 20 years ago in the most advanced studio on Earth.

Road cycling. Reasonably safe when you do it properly, but still offers enough thrills to get your juices flowing, and keeps you in great shape.

Absolutely. Some of the best engineers I have hired have been of modest talent but had tons of grit. They run circles around their more talented but aimless peers.

And if you have both talent and resilience, you’ve got a proper superpower.

You’re talking about consumer grade graphics, not AI processing, and you’re talking about cheap, not performant.

There is no significant competition to the NVIDIA A100 and H100 for machine learning.

Handwriting still has value in certain contexts, but these are so subtle compared to the massive speed/retention/recall advantages of computing that they seem worthless unless you’ve already mastered and use them.

I handwrite all of my personal things (journals, drafts of a few novels, todos, etc) and find it both pleasant and more effective than doing so in org-mode or similar digital tools. This is primarily because handwriting triggers a mnemonic effect that allows me to retain information with very little effort, whereas typing does not.

I also just enjoy spending time on written art away from the computer, which I otherwise live on all day for work. Sitting down at my laptop for recreation starts to feel like work really fast. Sitting down with a notebook and my favorite fountain pen feels like play.

^^^ this is great advice.

For some of us (not all) taking a long break makes stuff worse because we are so identified with the whole work/money axis. If you’re like this, find ways to stay busy and make some income, even just a little, like driving Uber or cooking in a restaurant or whatever you might have up your sleeve. Remember that simple jobs can still be super satisfying when done well.

The advice about serving others is especially good. Acts of service have pulled me out of all kinds of dark places over the years, and surrounded me with people that remind me of how much real goodness there is in our otherwise cynical world.

^^^ this is the way. Spend your time on deep relationships with worthwhile people and remarkable things can happen.

I’ve been where you are. It’s a worrisome spot.

Cutting back is absolutely the right thing to do. You won’t regret it. Your mind will bounce back - the longer you’re sober, the better you’ll feel.

I’ve been mostly sober for 6 years, and 100% for 3. Things got rapidly better after 6 months of being mostly clean, and then improved again after going 100%.

I started to love my work again. Home life was happy again. Depression and guilt didn’t stalk me anymore. And my brain was working better than ever.

Don’t give up. The beginning is the hardest part. It’s worth it!

Moving to an entirely plant based diet has made all the difference in the world for me. It isn’t a cure, but excellent nutrition makes a HUGE difference.

Eating entirely plant-based can also be done very very cheaply if you’re careful.

Walking or other gentle exercise is essential - it’s hard. It hurts. But it WILL slow down the progression of the disease. Keep moving!

Do some reading about your legal rights - if you have a diagnosed case of MS in the United States, you have all kinds of ways of protecting yourself from job termination. If your HR department isn’t evil, they should help you here. If they are evil, keep careful records of everything so you can sue the crap out of them if they fail to protect you as the law requires.

Don’t give up! It’s a disease, not an identity. Don’t let it define you or control your thinking.

You’ve got this.

It matters. If you are tall and good looking, it helps.

BUT…

Amongst the vast majority of the most capable, successful, and broadly well-respected people I have worked with, their status has had little to do with their beauty. I am thinking of folks that are not “attractive” in any conventional sense, yet their wits and competence and heart makes them so.

In certain professions, the effect of beauty is outsized. I hardly need name these; look for shallow aesthetes and cameras. In technical professions that value actual competence, I have found that it doesn’t matter (much.)

For a DC operator, GPUs have high runtime costs: think about all amps drawn and heat spewed by a box full of GPUs.

The fraud thing has been a factor, for sure. You need some guarantees that your client is legit before you spend money on them.

Running big clusters of GPUs is a more challenging technical exercise than ordinary Hypervisors/VMs/K8s/whatever. Doubly so if you are doing multi-tenancy and containerization. It takes a lot of effort to rig that stuff up properly and integrate it with the rest of you management stack, and folks tend to be protective of it once it’s fired up.

Pretty much the same as right now, or 200 years ago:

The ability to learn new skills on short notice.

Grit.

Emotional and intellectual maturity.

Most everything else is just details.

That said, there will likely be plenty of Enterprise Java, C, hardware, and whatnot lying around that needs old folks like us to maintain it. Those big AI models are gonna have to run on top of some hardware somewhere, after all.

You need observability in order to make good decisions. Get that mess into source control, and the. Start instrumenting it. Spend what meager budget you can get from upper mgmt on instrumentation.

Writing tests is great, but how do you even write good tests for spaghetti code like this and have faith in them? Answer: you can’t. But you can instrument your spaghetti code so that you have a fighting chance of seeing what’s wrong when stuff breaks.

After a year or so of instrumentation, small bug fixes, and fixing the absurdly stupid stuff, you’ll grok that spaghetti mess well enough and have enough political capital to be able to start refactoring great whacks of it. The strangler fig pattern mentioned earlier smells like the right approach, but you won’t really know until you’ve really grilled the codebase.