justanother

Hi there, programmer since age 4, professionally for about 27 years. You haven't heard of me. There's a fair chance you've used something I've worked on, but more likely you haven't. I'm over 40 and haven't had my zillion dollar Californian exit. In fact, despite extracting some rather generous sums from clients over the years, I still often struggle financially due to the people, animals, and causes I care for.

I know people who've had exits. Some of them have a family they neglected for it. Often there's an abused (or just cheated-on) spouse. Many of them are just pure sociopaths who would shank their own mothers, and literally gave all to pursue an exit. If you really wanted to join them, you know you could. But you haven't. This shows that despite your doubts about your career, you have some degree of integrity. And yes, I'm aware not all people with the Grand Exit achievement are this dirty, but having had a front-row seat enough times, I can verify it's substantially easier when they are. I should also mention I know some genuinely nice, and not incredibly talented, people who sort of stumbled into the Grand Exit and have been horribly alienated by the ruthless financial demands of entitled "friends and family."

You've chosen your battles, be proud of your choices. In just a few more decades, you and I and the overachievers will all be equal below the surface of the planet. Their names and works will be forgotten too.

Till then, let's have fun and maybe lift a couple other people up with us.

A few years back, I once mused to friends: What happened to the hackers and revolutionaries, the teenage determination to liberate technology at all cost, writing cool text-philes along the way? A friend's answer has stuck with me ever since: "I think that says more about you than the disappearing hackers." I knew he was right: My attitude has a lot to do with how I handle the present and future. Indeed, at the smallest conferences (small-town B-Sides, 2600 meetings, even Apple II KansasFest and so forth, definitely not Defcon), I can still catch a glimpse of that gritty excitement to which I was literally addicted, night and day. To stay up all night discovering, hacking, and plotting to use the new knowledge to build a more democratic knowledge-centered world.

I mention this because so far, the future seems to involve more DRM and paywalls, less neutrality, more megabytes of poorly-written crappy Javascript. And if you let that line of thinking get to you, you just feel like tossing your iPad in the trash and going hiking. At least then, you don't have to read all those dumb Alex Jones forwards from your crazy aunt.

But it doesn't have to be that way. The re-decentralization movement is slowly gaining mindshare. What happens in 2040 depends 100% on how we act now. The great utopian sharing mindspace that we wrote about endlessly in Mondo 2000 (or Computer Lib / Machine Dreams) can still happen if we want.

1990. Not very many people had even heard of it. Some of us who'd gotten tired of wardialing and Telenet/Tymnet might have had friends in local universities who clued us in with our first hacked accounts, usually accessed by first dialing into university DECServers or X.25 networks. Overseas links from NSFNet could be as slow as 128kbit and you were encouraged to curtail your anonymous FTP use accordingly. Yes you could chat and play MUDs, but you could also hack so many different things. And admins were often relatively cool as long as you didn't use their machines as staging points to hack more things. If you got your hands on an outdial modem or x.25 gateway, you were sitting pretty sweet (until someone examined the bill and kicked you out). It really helped to be conversant in not just Unix, but also VMS, IBM VM/CMS, and maybe even Primenet. When Phrack came out, you immediately read it and removed it from your mail spool, not just because it was enormous, but because admins would see it and label you a troublemaker.

We knew what the future was, but it was largely a secret. We learned Unix from library books and honed skills on hacked accounts, without any ethical issue because we honestly felt we were preparing ourselves and others for a future where this kind of thing should be available to everyone.

We just didn't foresee it being wirelessly available at McDonalds, for free. That part still surprises me.

Yes I still use it for simple edits (usually removing a line from ssh known_hosts or similar) these days. My fingers learned it at 1200 baud on hacked Xenix machines and it's too late to knock it off.

SEEKING WORK - experienced full-stack developer

Location: Tampa Bay, Florida, USA

Remote: Preferred, but will discuss other options

20 years of full-stack web development experience, with embedded development history before that. We can get down to basics with C/C++ or party with PHP, Rails, Node/Express, React, and more. My specialties include security, PCI-DSS compliance, crypto, and writing beautiful documentation that's easy to read.

US citizen, covering Pacific through Eastern timezones.

I welcome your short to long-term challenge, and can bill hourly or via monthly retainer.

askhn@cshepherd.fr

Wife has Scheuermann's and Levoscoliosis (spinal deformities) and spends a large (often majority) percentage of her time in agony. American doctors refuse to give her opioids because their idea of resolving the 'opioid crisis' is to not help anyone (because the DEA is up their asses for every script they write), and since most of them haven't heard of her issues, they shrug their shoulders and recommend physical therapy, for someone who can't get out of bed. Yes, her pain has driven us to the brink of divorce on a few occasions, but we are united in our revulsion at the American healthcare system and the politicians whose meddling has shaped it.

I truly envy everyone who gets help for their mysterious or chronic illness in the United States. We're leaving next year.

Was a Senior Member for years until they backed software patents and I quit. I didn't get tons from it honestly, although it was fun to read Spectrum.

To me (American by birth, Francophone by grace of dieu), it's more than just baguettes and Eiffel towers. This is the country that frightened Europe to the core by taking the still-bleeding head off of a monarch and setting an example for civil law. The world's leading military power until an unfortunate defeat in 1763 by lucky Brits, without which we'd likely speak French as a first language instead of second.

Or more simply, the most beautiful country I've ever visited, where I can visit a doctor for just 27 euros without insurance, and they'll actually have a personal conversation with me to understand my ailment, instead of the horrific, expensive, and impersonal factory farm that American medicine usually is. A place where "zero tolerance" does not (yet) reign supreme and even the infamously numerous and curmudgeonly bureaucrats can make exceptions for a heartfelt story. Where best friends can get into debates daily that turn into shouting matches, before continuing with the business of being best friends.

La lumière du monde. Never ever change, France. Not like you were going to anyway.

Chances are, he was just remarking on your pronunciation, which is all anyone cares about with French. I studied it for 5 years (IB/college many years ago) and still managed to get the brusque English-menu treatment in Quebec. For the past year I've listened to almost exclusively French music and my pronunciation has improved dramatically. Now even when I whip out a couple lines of simple A1-level stuff, natives compliment my French. The only thing that has changed is that I talk more like the songs I've learned.

So cities should subsidize your multi-million-dollar operation by reducing urban on-street parking inventory and donating that space to you? Okay, but here's some free advice about how cities work: You won't get that by writing internet blog posts that contain false equivalencies (ie scooter rental companies and car manufacturers). You'll get it by wining and dining a lot of city councilpersons. Best get started.

I had Hakarl at that lodge near the Blue Hole. I was the only American they could recall who asked for seconds. Wait. I had whale at a restaurant near Hella. It was more amazing than any beef steak I had ever had and was more or less sustainably caught. What did we say in the 80s? Diff'rent strokes.

Regardless of whether or not you regard opioid addiction as a disease, please please consider the slippery slope you're sledding down if you buy into this. Who's going to deny insulin to people whose credit card statements show more than 3 Dairy Queen visits this month? Who's going to deny chemo to people who smoked too many Pall Malls, in your opinion? This reeks from top to bottom, and yes, narcan isn't nearly as expensive as chemo, so yes, the slippery slope is pretty much guaranteed to go there. Proceed with caution.

No. I have to be an adult and deal with a lot of people, some of whose personalities will get on my very last nerve, and do a lot of reactive (as opposed to proactive) things. A lot of investigation and fixing as opposed to greenfielding. Sometimes this isn't the case, but it never lasts.

But 'fulfilling' is a pretty tall order. Sometimes people just pay your price and you shut up about it.

I haven't commuted in 14 years, not that I'd mind because the German luxury car they gave me is amazing and comfortable, but I'd miss the extra time with the wife and furry children. Eventually I'll retire on some island and crank out vintage computer software between naps. That will be plenty fulfilling.

Productions such as the faux-BBC video and "The Day After" remind me that the word 'obscenity' is utterly wasted on pictures of naked people, when it applies perfectly to high-altitude nuclear mushrooms created by global banking interests.

It isn't just police. I have a somewhat common American name. A bank once opened a signature loan for one of my 4 or so same-state doppelgangers and sent me the payment coupons. One of the doppelgangers is a felon, which sucks for background checks and also because I love to travel and therefore always end up with an 'X' from the APC kiosk. Post-Trump, this means about an hour of detention in Miami while a lady questions me in Spanish until finally they realize we have different birthdays and physical descriptions. They told me it would stop if I got Global Entry. It didn't.

This could all be prevented. These organizations are just flat-out negligent and don't care.

> The keyboard has suffered so much criticism that I have to wonder: who of those who condemn it, have actually used it for a sustained period?

I got a 2015 Macbook as soon as it shipped. Within a few months, the butterfly mechanism had collapsed on several keys. A couple Apple Store repairs later, they're still breaking often enough that the 2015 Macbook is mostly collecting dust and shame.

When I saw what they'd done with the MBPr for 2016, I decided to overhaul pre-2016 ones indefinitely, because it's pretty much that or Dell XPS13 hackintosh. That keyboard is proof that the devil is not only real, but has subverted Apple's once-rigorous design process.

The rest of the machine looks good to me.

this means that back in my teenage years I never encountered a properly configured VMS cluster

If this message is helpful, it is only by way of empathy. I have some amazingly hotrodded Commodores and Apple IIs myself, although you really should consider opening those boxes and playing with the goods. I enjoy discovering games I'd never played, and spending my should-be-work days writing 6502 or 65816 assembly. In fact, I'm pretty sure that if I ever get the chance to retire, the 8/16 bit world is going to see some awesome new warez from me...

This happens a lot more commonly than people might think. Not sure if this is still the case, but Florida DHSMV (motor vehicles department) used a Honeywell mainframe as recently as a few years ago, and the word around Disney World Ride & Show was that the parades in Magic Kingdom ran on a DEC PDP-10 as recently as the late 1990s and early 2000s. Both of these may no longer be true, but I haven't checked in awhile. Both of them might still be true...

"Hackers penetrate and ravage delicate public and privately owned computer systems, infecting them with viruses, and stealing materials for their own ends. These people, they are terrorists."

After unfortunate experiences in Real Estate, I began a new life as the Renting Scum in decent, fiber-optic-Internet-having neighborhoods. As you may imagine, this Floridian enclave of happiness has an HOA which utterly lacks enthusiasm for Renting Scum. Indeed, my webcams show them photographing my front lawn several times weekly. If one of their dogs happens to pee on my lawn and create a dead spot more than a couple inches across? My landlord hears about it from them. My expensive lawn service comes a couple days late after a heavy rain and the grass gets a bit long? Landlord. It barely rains at all during a summer month and things get a bit sparse and brown? Landlord (unless I illegally water on multiple days, which I do, just like the police who live around me do).

TL;DR many of us maintain the Reaganian-perfect front lawn out of the first scene of a David Lynch movie under duress, even if it's the dumbest, most wasteful thing we ever heard of. Hey man, fiber's fiber.

Debt isn't possible without a counterparty.

+1 for the above. This sure was a dick move, but from the past week OP has probably already discovered Toronto is an amazing, clean, and courteous city (from my limited experience) compared to many others. Don't know what their work/visa situation is, but it's worth shopping around for another job and giving the place another shot.

Can pretty well confirm this isn't true; 97 for PSX etc was a fresh rewrite in C++.

I am not familiar with the geological features of the Netherlands, but much of the Florida coastline is formed from porous oolitic limestone, meaning you can build as many dikes and dams as you want, and the water will go under them and appear to come up from the ground on the side where it is not wanted. This is why so many coastal wells here in Florida have such problems with saltwater intrusion.

This is really nice for those of us who run vintage computers (e.g. Apple II) with ethernet adapters. I hope they keep this around.

Another possibility that we are forced to consider is that the Executive is not as unitary as it looks; There is likely severe coalition-building and politics even within the Oval Office itself, such that even a Constitutional scholar with good intentions could not realistically and singlehandedly deliver on actions that would seem to be well within the scope of her powers.

The beating that we Apple IIgs owners took in the BBS scene from the Amigans in the early 1990s was downright brutal. It gives me no particular pleasure to note that the Amigans suffered approximately the same fate as we did (horrible marketing, unnecessary obsolescence). Either one of our machines would have been more fun than what we ended up with, no?

Nice read. I being somewhat younger than the author, didn't get into the scene (such as it was) until after the dust settled from Operation Sun Devil. There was a lot of what he describes, excepting less emphasis on long-distance codes (understandable in our 5ESS LATA) and greater emphasis on hacking nearby universities to get onto the somewhat nascent Internet, as well as the occasional Tymnet/X.25 NUI. Almost none of us 'carded', although there was an epidemic of nice modems being stuffed down pants at the local Comp-USA. But for a few years, if it was connected to a local phone line or was on the Internet with a security vulnerability, one (or more) of us had root access.

I did get receive modest interest from local law enforcement, but I owe a sincere debt of gratitude to university staff (who I hope recognized something of a kindred, non-malicious spirit) who begged district attorneys not to proceed with my prosecution. Between that scare and somehow raising modest capital to start a local ISP with a Sprintlink T1 line, I eventually graduated from 'the scene' and found myself a straight-laced system admin (later software developer).

I like to think 'the scene' didn't disappear; Most people can buy fast Internet access somewhat cheaply (or hack a wireless network) and install Linux for free. For a couple nickels more, you can operate your own IN-WATS PBX with help from Twilio or a cut-rate SIP provider. In short, much of what was forbidden to us became easily and/or cheaply within reach. Welcome to utopia.

Jeer if you must, but here's an iOS app that any of us could have written, yet will make several house payments' worth by week's end.