I built a lightweight grassroots advocacy tool for this.

It figures out who your reps are and sends them a pre-filled note based on what matters to you (you can edit/customize it before it sends). Includes a call script too if you're up for calling...

https://secure.legisletter.org/campaign/cmbpf5js80000l70d5fn...

ljl good stuff

"A digital nomad who splits time between critiquing Facebook's UI decisions, unearthing obscure electronic music tracks with 3 plays on YouTube, and occasionally making fires on German islands. When not creating Dystopian Disco mixtapes or lamenting the lack of MIDI export in AI tools, they're probably archiving NYT articles before paywalls hit.

Roast

You've spent more time complaining about Facebook's UI than Facebook has spent designing it, yet you still check it enough to notice every change.

Your music discovery process is so complex it requires Discogs, Bandcamp, YouTube, and three specialized record stores, yet you're surprised when tracks only have 3 plays.

You're the only person who joined HN to discuss the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer from 1983 and somehow managed to submit two front-page stories about it in 2019-2020. The 80s called, they want their FM synthesis back."

edit: predictions are spot on - wow. Two of them detailed two projects I'm actively working on.

I love cosine.space - great discovery engine.

I'd love to be able to upload audio / have it analyzed in the DAW and then for ai to create riffs on it. SUNO is amazing at this - but it's useless without the midi output / DAW integration.

Exact same situation - 2 years deep here but at a breaking point cannot continue this trajectory.

I'm depressed studying computer science. Been thinking about quitting seeing how people with years of experience can't even find work.

CS professor here. Don’t quit. CS has been one of the most enlightening experiences of my life. I have made many friends along the way, been able to participate in inspiring projects, and felt like I worked in a vibrant field that gave me a powerful lens on the world. Yes, it is hard work. But the work is worth it.

Since coming to CS my highs have been higher and my lows lower than in other disciplines. And I came late. I started grad school in my thirties. But something that I learned when I was young, from well before my time in CS is true in this discipline too: if you do good work, people eventually notice. There will be a snowball effect.

It’s true, it doesn’t work out for everyone. But nothing does. And if you don’t take the opportunity to do something difficult, you’ll never know if you could have done it. I personally could not live with that thought. Those who do not try cannot succeed. But those who try—and retry when things don’t work out—probably will not fail either.

++1

Thanks for this energetic and super-true comment!

Even if OP finishes and decides not work in tech/IT for the rest of the life, having a CS background is VERY solid background for a looooot of jobs. Also, usually you get a good payment.

And never forget what MAdreessen said: "Software is eating the world"

:)

Recently became a data analyst. It couldn’t be more true, my CS background definitely helped me

> Jack daniels here. Keep drinking.

\s

Absolutely do not quit. The loudest people are ones that cannot find a job, people that do are not going to be writing blogs like "My 27th year as a hacker" - no one will read that shit.

There are roughly 1.5 million software developers alone in the United States. If you love computer science you will excel in this industry for many years after you graduate. Quit only if your heart is not in it, the worst people I've worked with in my 27 year career are ones who obviously went with this career only because it can be a decent way to make a living.

But worry not, if you are end up loving what you do you'll be great at what you do and people that are great at what they do will always be wanted.

100%, and to add to this... people who are just doing it for the money should absolutely quit, because they tend to end up wanting to switch roles or often quit a couple years in anyway.

People that actually enjoy writing software / solving problems are the ones that get ahead.

> people who are just doing it for the money should absolutely quit

I hate to tell you this. But any job that pays as much as a software dev in the USA is going to have 50% or more people who do the job for the money. You can learn to love what you do. But when you're 18 trying to find out what to do, for a lot of people money matters most.

I love being a software dev. I got obsessed when in college, made a lot of pet projects just for fun, kept that energy up throughout my career till I got married and had kids, and I am so glad I made that choice. But if it didn't pay what I knew back in college it pays, I wouldn't have done the job.

I've also noticed that over the years those are the candidates who are most unable to find a job. And having interviewed a fair number of candidates, the number of passionate devs out there is smaller than you'd expect.

I've been really surprised by that as well. Often, I'm the only dev on the team that does development and learns new things on the side.

I disagree.

I have been in it for the money and also in it because I like it. I don’t like it for 8 hours per day but I do like CS.

I don’t love it though, and have transitioned since. But having the skill, the background and the grit (due to not loving it), it’s awesome.

Just to give a more nuanced perspective. I think the whole love it or leave attitude is too binary.

Computer science opens the door to a wide range of work. The lower end of that range is indeed insecure and doesn't pay very well. However, get into the right industry, and you can match a lawyer for income -- without all the hastle and hurdles that junior lawyers have to go through. We're talking easily the upper 4% of income as a junior, eventually going up to 2% or 1% as you gain seniority.

The reason is, there are some skills which are highly in demand, and few people are strong in those skills. In particular, I am thinking of HPC engineering and cloud computing infrastructure engineering. Companies and institutions own large server fleets, we're talking hundreds or thousands of servers. They want whatever is running on those fleets to have high performance, security, and zero downtime.

This kind of work requires strong Linux systems administration and programming skills, an understanding of enterprise networking and storage technologies, confidence with at least one orchestration stack such as OpenStack or Kubernetes, and strong CI/CD and IaC skills (look up GitOps.) As a junior, you don't need to tick all these boxes, but people should be able to see that you're able to learn whatever you're missing.

These skills don't usually come directly from a computer science degree. However, a computer science degree is the primary way to get your foot in the door with building those skills. If you want a junior job in cloud computing and are cold-calling because you don't know anyone yet, then it will help if you have good marks in a computer science degree (although it's possible to prove your chops in other ways, like having a history of strong contributions to open source.)

Later, after you build some experience, and you prove that you can keep learning, you get the job done, and you can get along with people, you'll eventually have recruiters chasing after you, and companies willing to listen to whatever income you pitch to them.

Second on Cloud Infra and SRE stuff. All the big players need it and you have a lever which can move the moon. If you are good at what you do you will have a massive impact on the company. You hear lots of stories like “I saved my company XXX million dollars per year by turning off versioned objects in S3”. I think the hardest part I have had is there is a lot of tacit knowledge in infrastructure, usually you are not the first person to solve a particular problem and anyone who has good industry experience can tell you immediately what you should do. For example I was looking at distributed storage and for kubernetes and was testing out OpenEBS, I spent about 2 months setting it up and getting it working only to find it had some critical shortfalls. Later I was talking with another person from industry and they are like “yea you should just use rook/ceph, everyone uses it”. And lo and behold rook solves my problems and works great.

> match a lawyer for income

The low end of lawyers is also way, way lower. Law in the US has a massively bimodal income distribution, way more pronounced than Tech with Finance / Big tech paying more. In law your new grads at big firms may pull $200k or whatever, but the median for the rest is like $50k.

It's pretty brutal if you're not top xy% of your class.

You will find work. One thing to keep in mind is the job market goes in cycles. Right now, finding work is hard but things will eventually pick up. Here is some advice for job hunting:

1) DO NOT GIVE UP 2) You don't need every skill the employer is asking for. What you need are the major skills the job requires and the ability to pickup the rest on the job. 3) Only apply for jobs where you are a good fit. 4) While job hunting, spend time each day learning a new skill. It can be a programming language, a technology, or something interesting. 5) Once you get a job, save lots of money. It helps you make it through lean times and sets you up for a nice retirement.

One last thing. If your depression does not let up after 6 months, I strongly recommend seeing a therapist and a psychiatrist. I wish you luck. Things will get better.

In the US, any good therapist is very expensive and not covered by insurance.

This isn't true. Honestly every time I've looked, a therapist taking my typical insurance just took making about 50 phone calls. Most people make five phone calls and then give up.

"just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

sure, 5 calls may be giving up to early. but 50? if i give up after 40 calls does that mean i haven't been trying hard enough?

There's a reason I said "good therapist." That's completely different from "any licensed therapist."

You're just proving my point - you had to make 50 calls to reach "any licensed therapist" covered by your insurance.

Why do you think the other 49 weren't in-network? It's because, if they're good, they can make much more out-of-network, direct billing patients.

At least in the original post, my reading was not that they couldn’t find work, but that they had quit to go do startup stuff.

The (tech) job market is definitely not great at the moment, but I do think people are overstressing how bad it is a bit, and in any case these things are cyclical. I started a CS degree in 2003, just after the dot-com crash, and finished in 2007, just heading into the financial crisis. Both of those kind of cratered the job market for a bit, but it recovered.

There's jobs out there. My company has turnover, which means people are going somewhere, and we're hiring, too. Make Connections!! Any kind of foot in the door is leagues better than cold-applying.

If it helps, I have years of experience and got 2 offers (good ones too) after applying to a handful of companies in March this year.

If you are skilled, can talk to people and aren't afraid to put in the yards to prepare for interviews you'll do just fine.

The way I see it, it's not CS per se, it's about solving problems.

You hone that skill, and it will shape your future, whatever field.

You'll never be jobless having that particular skill.

Don't give up.

Tech job market flucuates like any other field. Its in a downturn right now. Won't be forever.

Still, you have to do what is right for you. The downturn might end tomorrow. It might take a decade. Nobody knows.

if you love computer science don't quit - I'd definitely triple down on real world projects/output rather than just studying though.

I intentionally left to work on projects I wanted to pursue, built a startup that isn't currently covering costs (1 customer on an annual plan), lived in Thailand for 6 months (with kids going to to school there), the burn rate on return has taken it's toll (California)...but yeah recently put feelers out for potential work and see it's going to be quite the mission to find work (personally).

Didn't see an email in profile, so I'll ask here. What was your experience with schooling in Thailand? Public or international school?

“Can’t find work” can have different meanings for different people. Maybe they just haven’t found a job with the pay grade they want.

What’s a better alternative?

try 10 years because i havent made a dime since 2016

If this is not by choice, I hope you solve your problems and I hope things get better. Please do not give up.

go work at Costco

its money

I just came across a comment of yours (1 yr ago) on setting up an LLC in California as I'm about to pull the trigger/looking for recommendations on who to choose for formation/setting up etc

You mentioned not to do it in SF! This thread is kinda of connected - do you mind elaborating on why not to setup your LLC in SF?

"Siri add an alarm for an appointment for the dentist tomorrow at 10"

Sets appointment for 10pm

Will the Siri team be fired or are they in charge of openAI integration?

Switching to 24-hour clock solves that problem.

Personally, 12h clock always confused me, so I wouldn't blame Siri.

Siri still uses AM/PM for me when speaking, despite having a 24-hour clock configured.

Its given that a dentist appointment is never usually at 10PM - this doesn't seem probable. LLMs are good at generalizing

And also, that would still be more useful than the current situation where Siri would just answer that it can not give you the weather forecast because there is no city named "Appointment at 10".

Or it may create an appointment at Athens.

Siri without it isn't though. It's so garbage as to be useless.

they're actually fine-tuning anon remillio accounts on X for exit liquidity on their vested social/ai/meme coins.

just wade through documentation to access it?

clicking on the AI studio link doesn't show me the app page - it redirects to a document on early access. I do as required - go back and try clicking on the AI studio link and I'm redirected to the document on turning early access.

frustrating.

Weird landing page - I’m expecting to see infographic examples but the images I see are of people looking at screens and smiling