Moving country at this point might not have been the optimal thing to do, but I wouldn't suggest you give up just yet: it does give you a new environment where all those old habits and circles and things are no longer around you. You get to reset. You get to define a new you. But you're going to have to do it slowly, and you're unlikely going to get a whole lot of answers from LLMs or shrooms, and a lot more from asking yourself - and answering honestly and openly - some questions you might not have thought about deeply (as in, repeatedly over many weeks or months, without distraction), in a long time, if ever.
What interests you?
Each word matters.
"What" points to a thing, and is a more interesting question than "Why am I tired?", or "How do I fix this?". You can probably write a list of things, but "Why" is about blame or justification and "How" is about method, technique or skill. "What", just is.
"Interests" is not about "passion" or "love" or "desire" or "think will make the most money". It is about what makes your brain feel tickled. It's the thing you can start to create (not what you consume), where you start diving in for 5 minutes and you're still there 2 hours later. I don't mean doom scrolling or media you like - rule out anything where you are not learning deeply about something that will help you create, or creating something directly.
"You" is obviously important. Don't try and build your direction based on what other people do if you're feeling like this. Don't try and copy - try and be your authentic self. You can ask others what interests them and think "Huh, me too, I hadn't thought of that", but don't be diving deep into internals of crypto or LLMs or buying a farm or becoming a buddhist unless those things interest you.
Again: What. Interests. You?
The answer might be "nothing". That's a sign of definite burn-out. It would not surprise me based on what you have written.
Take some time for yourself, explore your new home, go and see some sights and read some books (fiction as well as non-fiction - there's more truth in them, in my experience), and for a while (a month or two, maybe longer), just allow yourself to follow your nose. Focus on your physical and mental health for a while. Eat good quality food. Rest. Consider avoiding stimulants like alcohol and recreational drugs. See the next few months as a sort of extended vacation where you get a chance to reset.
You ask about how not to "waste your time" and how do you "focus" - maybe the best thing you can do for you in the long-term right now is waste your time and focus on nothing. Had you considered that as an option?
After a while - because you're capable, intelligent, conscientious, this is almost inevitable - an idea will start to emerge that you want to focus on. It might not be what you were expecting. It might be building something for yourself (I love writing software for an audience of one: me), or learning a new skill or applying for a job. It could be writing a book or producing art, or learning a musical instrument. It might be in your comfort zone, it might not be.
Whatever it is, you'll look at it and think "This interests me".
"I will write X. Once I have sold $Y worth of licenses, I'll open source it".
Every purchaser is contributing towards the future state of it being open sourced. It balances the needs of developers to need to live and pay bills vs most us wanting to get our code out there. It breaks the monthly recurring revenue model most customers hate. It incentivises early adopters to "invest" by getting early access, but means uncertain just have to wait.
Doing this with articles, books, music, whatever - all sounds pretty cool to be honest. It requires creators to radically transform their human need to maximise revenue from "hits" though.
Somebody should tell him that the character of Mr Burns in The Simpsons was meant to be a satirical parody of evil tycoons, not a role model.
I'd wager that one day, his grandchildren (possibly even children), are going to call for his arrest and imprisonment, as a means to stop themselves being judged for his sins.
Developers are - on average - terrible at this. If they weren't, TPMs, Product Managers, CTOs, none of them would need to exist.
It's not specific to software, it's the entire World of business. Most knowledge work is translation from one domain/perspective to another. Not even knowledge work, actually. I've been reading some works by Adler[0] recently, and he makes a strong case for "meaning" only having a sense to humans, and actually each human each having a completely different and isolated "meaning" to even the simplest of things like a piece of stone. If there is difference and nuance to be found when it comes to a rock, what hope have we got when it comes to deep philosophy or the design of complex machines and software?
LLMs are not very good at this right now, but if they became a lot better at, they would a) become more useful and b) the work done to get them there would tell us a lot about human communication.
> Developers are - on average - terrible at this. If they weren't, TPMs, Product Managers, CTOs, none of them would need to exist.
This is not really true, in fact products become worse the farther away from the problem a developer is kept.
Best products I worked with and on (early in my career, before getting digested by big tech) had developers working closely with the users of the software. The worst were things like banking software for branches, where developers were kept as far as possible from the actual domain (and decision making) and driven with endless sterile spec documents.
I disagree, I feel (experienced) developers are excellent at this.
It's always about translating between our own domain and the customer's, and every other new project there's a new domain to get up to speed with in enough detail to understand what to build. What other professions do that?
That's why I'm somewhat scared of AIs - they know like 80% of the domain knowledge in any domain.
The typical job of a CTO is nowhere near "finding out what business needs and translate that into pieces of software". The CTO's job is to maintain an at least remotely coherent tech stack in the grand scheme of things, to develop the technological vision of a company, to anticipate larger shifts in the global tech world and project those onto the locally used stack, constantly distilling that into the next steps to take with the local stack in order to remain competitive in the long run. And of course to communicate all of that to the developers, to set guardrails for the less experienced, to allow and even foster experimentation and improvements by the more experienced.
The typical job of a Product Manager is also not to directly perform this mapping, although the PM is much closer to that activity. PMs mostly need to enforce coherence across an entire product with regard to the ways of mapping business needs to software features that are being developed by individual developers. They still usually involve developers to do the actual mapping, and don't really do it themselves. But the Product Manager must "manage" this process, hence the name, because without anyone coordinating the work of multiple developers, those will quickly construct mappings that may work and make sense individually, but won't fit together into a coherent product.
Developers are indeed the people responsible to find out what business actually wants (which is usually not equal to what they say they want) and map that onto a technical model that can be implemented into a piece of software - or multiple pieces, if we talk about distributed systems. Sometimes they get some help by business analysts, a role very similar to a developer that puts more weight on the business side of things and less on the coding side - but in a lot of team constellations they're also single-handedly responsible for the entire process. Good developers excel at this task and find solutions that really solve the problem at hand (even if they don't exactly follow the requirements or may have to fill up gaps), fit well into an existing solution (even if that means bending some requirements again, or changing parts of the solution), are maintainable in the long run and maximize the chance for them to be extendable in the future when the requirements change. Bad developers just churn out some code that might satisfy some tests, may even roughly do what someone else specified, but fails to be maintainable, impacts other parts of the system negatively, and often fails to actually solve the problem because what business described they needed turned out to once again not be what they actually needed. The problem is that most of these negatives don't show their effects immediately, but only weeks, months or even years later.
LLMs currently are on the level of a bad developer. They can churn out code, but not much more. They fail at the more complex parts of the job, basically all the parts that make "software engineering" an engineering discipline and not just a code generation endeavour, because those parts require adversarial thinking, which is what separates experts from anyone else. The following article was quite an eye-opener for me on this particular topic: https://www.latent.space/p/adversarial-reasoning - I highly suggest anyone working with LLMs to read it.
Some suggestions: I know none of us like "the algorithms choosing", but I think we can do better than alphabetical order. Number of clicks you see (popularity), or number of inbound links google tells you about would be good.
I also think you've gone to great effort, but it's still very light in some categories. I hope you keep going - what's your data source? Are you tracking outbound links from the ones you have indexed to find new blogs?
Thanks for the kind words. The source is user suggestions and my own searching and browsing.
I do sort of track outbound links, so that I can show which domains a blog links to most, which can sometimes give a sense of what the blog is about.
But, while I haven’t analysed the data, I suspect the links from one blog to another would be a very tiny percentage of the overall outbound links. It’s the kind of thing that might have been more interesting/useful in the olden days of blogging when more people linked to each other, and replied to each other, via blogs rather than social media.
I like the idea of some kind of algorithm minimalism, or at least parsimony; but I also think sometimes it might be appropriate? In this case, another approach would simply be randomization, which doesn't favor any name (Aaaaaron Aaaaanderson's blog :P ), this randomization can be consistent (such that you can find something you wish in linear time).
I think equally important is algorithmic transparency, that is, that the algorithm be publicly disclosed (although I think simplicity is a component of transparency: if you just dump a huge incomprehensible algorithmic mess somewhere that's not very helpful), so that you at least know what you are getting into, and better yet have some ability to choose and make educated critique of the current state of things (i.e. does the algorithm just maximize engagement like a slot machine? or does it optimize for some kind of helpfulness?).
LLMs are good at dealing with things they've seen before, not at novel things.
When novel things arise, you will either have to burn a shed ton of tokens on "reasoning", hand hold them (so you're doing advanced find and replace in this example, where you have to be incredibly precise and detailed about your language, to the point it might be quicker to just make the changes), or you have to wait until the next trained model that has seen the new pattern emerges, or quite often, all of the above.
Apologies, but your information is either outdated from lack of experience with the latest frontier models, or you don't realize the fact that 99.9% of the work you do is not novel in all capacities. Have you only used Copilot, or something? Because that's what it sounds like. Since the performance of the latest models (Opus 4.6 max-effort, gpt-5.3-Codex) is nothing short of astonishing.
Real-world example: Claude isn't familiar with the latest Zig, so I had it write a language guide for 0.15.2 (here: https://gist.github.com/pmarreck/44d95e869036027f9edf332ce9a...) which pointed out all the differences, and that's been extremely helpful in having me not even have to touch a line of code to do the updates.
On top of that, for any Zig dependency I pull in which is written to an earlier version, I have forked it and applied these updates correctly (or it has, under my guidance, really), 100% of the time.
On the off chance that guide is not in its context, it has seen the expected warning or error message, googled it, and done the correct correction 100% of the time. Which is exactly what a human would do.
Let's play the falsifiability game: Find me a real-world example of an upgrade to a newer API from the just-previous-to-that API that a modern LLM will fail to do correctly. Your choice of beer or coffee awaits you if you provide a link to it.
I’ve been making a project in zig 0.16 with Claude as a learning experiment. It’s a fairly non trivial project (BitTorrent compliant p2p downloader for model weights on top of huggingface xet) - whenever it doesn’t know the syntax or makes errors, it literally reads the standard library code to understand and fix it. The project works too!
Tbh, while impressive that it appears to work, that guide looks very tailored to the Zig stdlib subset used in your projects and also looks like a lot more work than just fixing the errors manually ;) For a large code base which would amortise the cost of this guide I still wouldn't trust the automatic update without carefully reviewing each change.
Eh, I've had good luck with porting codebases to newer versions of Bevy by pointing CC to the migration guide, and that is harder to test than a language migration (as much of the changed behaviour would have been at runtime).
I still wouldn't want to deal with that much churn in my language, but I fully believe an agent could handle the majority of, if not all of, the migration between versions.
A great idea with quite a few bugs. I would suggest watching people who have never played this game before try and play it and you'll notice a lot of things are going wrong that you've not seen before, and you're going to figure out how to make a lot of things a lot better. Really fun idea though, I'd love to try it again when it's less glitchy and the UX has had some work.
A technical question for you around the porting being a dead end:
I see from other replies that you now understand the code reasonably well and feel you can expand/extend it while keeping it in BASIC. However, I note you've also done project where you automatically ported Fortran to Lua - are you not interested in trying to do something similar for performance/maintainability reasons? Is there an advantage in keeping it in PowerBASIC?
I've wish listed the game, and look forward to playing it, it sounds like great fun - even the manual sounds like a good read.
I did exactly that originally. But here is the reality. Michael only knows BASIC and he has felt the agency to continue patching and working on the code, adding features even, since it is still BASIC. When others tried to port it to C++ be felt like he had no agency and wasn't motivated to help. So while he's still motivated to work on it, it needs to stay in a language he can work with. And thanks for wishlisting!!!
It seems to be a one-of-a-kind simulation product that could be used as part of actual financial/trading training. There's insane value here, giving the source code away for free is absolutely not a good strategy.
PSA: 99.999% of people should ignore most of the entries on lists like this.
I devour reading material. I love books - fiction, non-fiction, audio books, trade paperbacks, newly minted hardbacks, old musty stuff in a basement, all of it - and subscribe to Literary Review and Granta, and check in on London Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement when I can. I subscribe to quality newspapers and periodicals, and I'd rather spend an evening in a bookshop with late opening hours than a nightclub. Reading is great. Everyone should do a lot more of it - it's food for the soul.
But reading lists put together by other people aren't good for you. If anything, they get in the way of you figuring out what you want to read.
Here's some simple maths: life expectancy in my home country is 83 years for females, 79 years for males. I am male, have multiple (not imminently life-threatening), health conditions, and so with a little maths I can expect to live perhaps 25 more years. Sobering. But it is reality.
If I read a book a week (which is way higher a rate than the average reading rate, and slow for a fan of reading - but I like to absorb books a little more slowly), I am going to max out at 1,300 books in the rest of my life.
Most people read a few books a year. At that rate I'd have just 75-100 books to read in the rest of my time alive. If that were my number, I should probably make each one of those books count in some way.
You should do this maths yourself, and across a few dimensions. You only have so many books, films, music gigs, vacations/holidays, restaurant visits, whatever left in your life.
As an aside, you only have so many side projects, business ideas you'll get a chance to build and test in the market, and opportunities to invest in somebody else's ideas. You should do those maths too: figure out what your error bars could look like. They're probably not as optimistic as you'd hope for.
At first, this might feel terrifying. I prefer to see it as "focusing".
Do you really want to read all 842 of the books on that list? Is this the oeuvre you want to invest a sizeable chunk of your remaining life in? Are you confident this will make you feel whole, that you will get to the end and have no regrets about making this your mission? If you yes to all these questions, and are sure: brilliant, you have found a purpose in life few others ever will. Godspeed and good luck!
For most people though, lists like this are just another todo list that create a sense of inadequacy, FOMO or regret.
In 1880, the designer William Morris said "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful".
Apply this to your reading lists[0]. Curate. Edit. Find what makes your heart sing or your brain grow, and dive in.
Do not worry about what other people think you "should" read. Do not read "the great classics" if they do not interest you. Safely ignore award winning writers - from Nobel laureates, to Pulitzer Prize winners, to Booker short-listed authors - unless something about that book speaks to you and you almost yearn for it.
Because when you do that, you'll realise a) most books are junk to you (but might be great for someone else), and b) that as you start to develop the habit of reading the things that you genuinely want to, it becomes a healthy, mind-nourishing obsession.
Come on in, the pages are lovely.
[0] Actually, apply this rule to everything you can in your life. It can be hard to start, but worthwhile.
For someone who wants to sell the idea of not wasting time on reading, you're trying to waste a lot of time with your comment. You wasted mine for sure so I'll hopefully help somebody else with my short comment:
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- op basically says: don't pay attention to recommendation lists
- they assume you plan on reading all books recommended there or none
- they do not present an realistic alternative to finding books you might like
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Especially the last point is what I missed from your comment because it is actually a good idea to browse through other peoples recommendations to find similarities in taste.
Like in this list, I looked at the SciFi section and didn't find Neal Stephenson. Which, for me, is a sign of good quality together with other books I've already read. There are other books I have not even heard about. I might check them out and it would be a logical thing to do. Nothing wrong about it and chances are good that I might like it. They are certainly better than a wild guess.
There are 32 sci-fi books listed. Let's suppose you have read half of them, and you read 1 book each week. You've now just got your list for the next four months. Congratulations!
But wait, there's another list out there you're going to find tomorrow. And then another list, and another, and another, and they all have this same quality of having some books you've read and like, and nothing by Neal Stephenson. Then, when you're in the book store you see a book called "100 Sci-Fi Books To Read Before You Die", and you note it has these qualities but there are 80 books in there you've not read yet.
If you're busy pulling a sub-list together, you're doing the thing I'm suggesting: you're editing and curating, not just seeing the list in its own right. I'm definitely not suggesting you take wild guesses - note the magazines I read to find my own "next thing", and even that method is problematic.
I am not reading magazines, nor do I have the time to hang around book stores which0 here. don't even have qualified personal or a significant amount of Scifi literature.
So what is there left to do but follow recommendations online realistically?
Looking through the list I've found 2 books which might interest me. I'm done with the list now and won't return. If 1 of them is great, it is already a win.
Some of us lack access to good physical bookstores which are curated and allow for casual non-biased exploration. Amazon and other digital players never picked up on curation or segmentation, their store fronts are hot messes similar to digging through a random bin of books at a second hand store. To top it off they skew your opinion with customer ratings visible next to every single title.
So a list like this is a somewhat working digital alternative to browsing books in a curated bookstore.
Unlike Krasnol, I found your comment helpful. Especially, the idea that knowing what to ignore is at least as important as knowing what's out there. Ignore the haters :)
IETF have a habit of posting "fun" RFCs on the 1st April each year. Some of them are more famous for being completely daft ("avian carriers" and climbing into trees to watch 0s and 1s painted on the top of tanks being the two stand-out ones), but it doesn't mean that everything they do on that date is to be disregarded as nonsense.
> "I'm so lost, anxious and filled with doubt"
You sound burned out. Deal with that first.
Moving country at this point might not have been the optimal thing to do, but I wouldn't suggest you give up just yet: it does give you a new environment where all those old habits and circles and things are no longer around you. You get to reset. You get to define a new you. But you're going to have to do it slowly, and you're unlikely going to get a whole lot of answers from LLMs or shrooms, and a lot more from asking yourself - and answering honestly and openly - some questions you might not have thought about deeply (as in, repeatedly over many weeks or months, without distraction), in a long time, if ever.
What interests you?
Each word matters.
"What" points to a thing, and is a more interesting question than "Why am I tired?", or "How do I fix this?". You can probably write a list of things, but "Why" is about blame or justification and "How" is about method, technique or skill. "What", just is.
"Interests" is not about "passion" or "love" or "desire" or "think will make the most money". It is about what makes your brain feel tickled. It's the thing you can start to create (not what you consume), where you start diving in for 5 minutes and you're still there 2 hours later. I don't mean doom scrolling or media you like - rule out anything where you are not learning deeply about something that will help you create, or creating something directly.
"You" is obviously important. Don't try and build your direction based on what other people do if you're feeling like this. Don't try and copy - try and be your authentic self. You can ask others what interests them and think "Huh, me too, I hadn't thought of that", but don't be diving deep into internals of crypto or LLMs or buying a farm or becoming a buddhist unless those things interest you.
Again: What. Interests. You?
The answer might be "nothing". That's a sign of definite burn-out. It would not surprise me based on what you have written.
Take some time for yourself, explore your new home, go and see some sights and read some books (fiction as well as non-fiction - there's more truth in them, in my experience), and for a while (a month or two, maybe longer), just allow yourself to follow your nose. Focus on your physical and mental health for a while. Eat good quality food. Rest. Consider avoiding stimulants like alcohol and recreational drugs. See the next few months as a sort of extended vacation where you get a chance to reset.
You ask about how not to "waste your time" and how do you "focus" - maybe the best thing you can do for you in the long-term right now is waste your time and focus on nothing. Had you considered that as an option?
After a while - because you're capable, intelligent, conscientious, this is almost inevitable - an idea will start to emerge that you want to focus on. It might not be what you were expecting. It might be building something for yourself (I love writing software for an audience of one: me), or learning a new skill or applying for a job. It could be writing a book or producing art, or learning a musical instrument. It might be in your comfort zone, it might not be.
Whatever it is, you'll look at it and think "This interests me".
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