The free sample of https://leanpub.com/algebra-driven-design is a much more practical and fulfilling read, compared to the vagueness of the linked promotional material.
> I think the only possible jobs would be some kind of backend-only dev or devops/sysadmin work.
I thought that as well, so I became a sysadmin instead of a developer after graduating (couldn't help drifting towards DevOps later). Turns out, while Ops have to keep things running 24/7, all the other teams really don't -- so you get lots of unplanned work dumped on you, with no one under you to pass it on. So you do work a lot as an admin.
Luckily I've had the wisdom to choose (and the luck to be chosen) a smaller company to work for, it was not a tech giant by any measure. Few years later, when I demanded a switch to working part-time (and stated my decision to leave if I don't get that), I actually got that deal - and the overtime maintenance duties got passed onto other colleagues who stayed full-time, sadly unfree.
Now, with more weekend days than work days, I've had enough time to read lots of fiction books, play games like back in the childhood times, learn Haskell and some NixOS internals, learn some history and philosophy/epistemology (compensating for a terribly one-sided education), and finally get to work on stuff that makes me feel like a hacker-type dude again.
I can only wish you luck in getting out of the whole "trading away your finite lifetime years for mostly useless money" story. It's not like you can fulfill yourself by paying money for mass-produced goods and services, anyway :)
I'm using US-intl (international) right now, supported everywhere I've seen. AltGr+q is ä, AltGr+s is ß, AltGr+y is ü, etc.
Might seem weird at first, but it has most of the special or combined symbols you might need, not just German ones. Other than that, it's your usual US layout suitable for vim/evil, shell, coding, etc.
I've read both a lot of Less Wrong (and the R:AZ book) and Soviet dialectical materialism (Marx and Lenin), and I've found a surprisingly large amount of overlap in the philosophical foundations. The way the notion of truth is handled, with the material world being the single-level territory, and the (conscious?) mind being the multi-level map of it, is surprisingly reinvigorating to read - especially when considering how different those sources are, separated by almost a century.
The insights about the epistemologically different modes of thinking of various groups of people under widely unequal material circumstances does shed quite a spotlight on both the "how we got here" question, and, more importanly the "where to go from here" one.
"Don't try to force it - it's like falling asleep" advice reminded me of vipassana practice - it does usually clear up my brooding, so that the "What's the point?" question dissolves into clarity of the source of intent in general. While still on the topic of history and politics - "Meditations On Moloch" by Scott Alexander is a great re-read.
Same for me, learned Haskell a year ago.
I have to note that your options only feel more limited if you refuse to look back and acknowledge the "wrong" ways. Your job options were always numerous, you just filter out the unattractive ones, leaving them to the people who don't have that luxury :)
Fully switched to Linux 16 years ago as a schoolkid, now I have a Linux admin job.
NixOS is my current most favorite, I'm using it for the last 4 years on my main box at home and my work laptop. Planning to use NixOps for my web project, too.
Gentoo was my first love, Arch was my second choice for low-power machines.
Nowadays I can fully replace them with NixOS, because once you grok the Nix language and ecosystem, you can pick any balance between "customize and compile everything" and "fetch prebuilt and lightweight".
Managing your entire OS with a Single Source of Truth becomes a viable and attractive option, and then functional programming can be used to DevOp like never before.
The only problem I see with the Nix approach is the high barrier of entry. You need to become proficient with a large amount of complex concepts, and the go-to sources often talk to you with large inferential distances.
The first things I would contribute, when I get a chance, are an interactive topology browser and a smart generator of skeleton expressions for code and binary sources, with a "nix init" similar to "stack init".
