> But I use most of my free time writing software. I also tend to do that in "bursts."
I feel like this is, at least for me, a time problem. If I write software, then I have to neglect reading books; if I read books, I have to neglect writing software. Doing both seems not possible for me, so I have to do this in bursts.
This is true, however, I think that software engineering is an exception there. There are very few professions other than software development (maybe the arts?) where a growth mindset and tinkering on stuff in your free time seems to be mandatory. You don't see accountants or roofers skilling up in their free time. Furthermore, upskilling is less about pursuing one's interests than pursuing the interests of the market and I think this may be the issue for OP.
To gently push back, there are absolutely accountants and roofers who dedicate their free time upskilling or in adjacent hobbies. Many (perhaps most?) other fields have are conferences and journals, certifications, prestige jobs and grindhouse jobs, side hustles, and all the other trappings that feel unique to us. I'm not saying the distribution curve is the same, but it's easy to think this field is more unique than it really is.
And to the counterexample, the country is full of developers who just want to do their 40 hours and go home to their entirely unrelated life and hobbies. Incidentally, I have a friend who just got a job like this. He's the only developer in a regional materials company, and he loves being done with work at 5 (usually closer to 4) so he can go hang out with his kid.
This sounds interesting! Do you have some good introduction to N64 decompiliation? Would you recommend using Claude right from the start or rather try to get to know the ins and outs of N64 decomp?
> The real solution is for people to upskill and learn new abilities so they can thrive in the new economic reality. But it's hard to convince people that they need to change instead of expecting the world around them to stay the same.
But why do I have to? Why should your life be dictated by the market and corporations that are pushing these changes? Why do I have to be afraid that my livelihood is at risk because I don't want to adapt to the ever faster changing market? The goal of automation and AI should be to reduce or even eliminate the need for us to work, and not the further reduction of people to their economic value.
Because the world, sadly, doesn't revolve around just 1 individual. We are a society where other individuals have different goals and needs and when those are met by the development of a new product offering it shifts how people act and where they spend their money. If enough people shift then it affects jobs.
Yes, but again, the goal of automatization should be to reduce the need for people having jobs to secure their livelihood and enable a dignified life. However, what we are seeing in the Western Hemisphere is that per capita productivity is rising while the middle class is eroding and capital is accumulated by a select few in obscene amounts. 'Upskilling' does not happen out of personal motivation, but rather to meet the demands of the market so that one does not live in poverty. The idea of ‘upskilling’ to serve the market is also absurd because, in times of ever-accelerating technological development, there is no guarantee that the skills you learn today will still be relevant tomorrow. Yesterday it was “learn to code” but now many people who followed this mantra find themselves in precarious situations because they cannot find a job or are forced into the gig economy. So what do you do with people who couldn't foresee the future, or who are simply too old for the market?
Because you enjoy eating? Whatever you think society should be, the fact is we live in one where you have to exchange labour for money. What ought to be and what is, are unrelated to each other.
Its interesting how we feel this way about white collar jobs, but when a coal mine closes nobody cares.
This may be true, however, then upskilling should not be a way to solve economic issues as this line of thinking will not bring us further to solve the Is-Ought-Problem. I think most people can accept that a future where we don't have to exchange labour for money is a desirable future, right?
> All my chat services under one parent application. WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, Messenger.
There was a time where one application for multiple chat services was a thing, e.g. Pidgin, Trillian or Miranda. With thw death of ICQ, AIM or MSN this is pretty much history.
> Train a decoder on rich neural recordings, then test it on entirely new thoughts chosen under blinded conditions.
There have been enough studies about this and the result is mostly the same: it's difficult to nearly impossible to reliable decode neural recordings that differ from the distribution of neural recordings that the decoder was trained on. There are a lot of reasons why this happens, electrical activity being insufficient is not one of them.
I feel like this is, at least for me, a time problem. If I write software, then I have to neglect reading books; if I read books, I have to neglect writing software. Doing both seems not possible for me, so I have to do this in bursts.
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