Average age is 16 on Discord, average time spent per day is less than 10 minutes, so it's being used as a messaging service (but connected to a greater gaming-type ecosystem). 90% of servers are less than 15 members. 30% of teens use it, which is significantly higher than the rest of the population.
I don't really have anything concrete to point to for my general feeling about American society slowly moving into a post-social media phase. Tiktok falling into relative unuse with most Americans except Hispanics is probably a main point of data. There hasn't been anything emerging to replace it besides (according to studies) the more cordial YouTube, which you cannot really say is a social media site. It is the most widely used of all of them, though, something like 94% penetration.
How do you suggest getting out of the echo chamber without leaving my job? I need to continue in my current role because I don't have a big safety net, but I want to get exposure to non-tech industries and find out inefficiencies.
As an aside, how did you zero in on seafood supply chain compliance? Were you in that industry previously?
How did your friends go about finding non-programmer markets? I can't leave my current role in tech because I don't have a big safety net, but I want to understand other markets and figure out inefficiencies. I've seen this advice about exploring non-tech industries pop up a lot and am interested in following through.
Easiest: Find a random industry. You'll see job openings for programmers. You'll probably be wildly overqualified. Get a job there. Make sure it's a job where you can keep your head up and learn to industry (and not be isolated in a cubicle).
Harder: Nerd out on something not computer science. Take classes in oddball topics. Go to industry conferences. Network and hang out in online forums.
I once hopped on a plane and went to a conference in a 90% unrelated industry that I had taken an interest in. Even gave a workshop there -- as an outsider looking in, around a relevant idea. Expensive, but I learned a ton and came out with a powerful network.
How do you even start doing this? I have poor self control and usually start projects/tasks right as the deadline approaches. I wish I was that productive all the time...
Mindfulness meditation is a big help here. It works for me but there are other methods, e.g. memento mori, psychedelics, journaling, minimalism, travel, nootropics, exercise until exhaustion, new social groups, always pushing a bit out of your comfort zone. It's a bit chicken and egg, but letting that seed be planted in your head and keep at it for a while and don't get caught up in dogma or any particular method.
Yes! But it depends what you want to get out of it. I'm a big proponent of project-based learning, so my question to you is: what would you want to build?
I'll lead with an example: I really like the idea of search indexes and search engines. I cobbled together a search engine on my own that indexes arXiv's metadata, very similar to Andrej Karpathy's Arxiv Sanity Preserver [1] in Python. I very quickly encountered that the "What can I rip off of medium blogs and StackOverflow" approach wasn't scaling well, so I had to dig into how each part of my tech stack worked to figure out where things were going slower, and how I could improve it.
You can "do systems engineering" in any language and just about any tech stack, but you'll often see it closely associated with compiled languages, because those are often chosen when we care about performance because extra abstractions often make it harder to reason about what's really going on in certain portions of your tech stack. It started in Python, but then dusted off my C skills, and then my C++ skills for different parts of the entire stack.
Before I get too carried away, here's the main point:
Try to find a problem where you have to deal with lots of data on a single computer/server/device. You'll quickly hit limitations on what your software can do. Figuring out why you hit those limits is gonna start you down a path to acquiring the "systems knowledge" that you seek.
It's actually quite difficult to hit performance limitations on your average server with just text. Video and 3d content are much more intensive mediums that very quickly let you hit those limits. It's one of the reasons why Twitch and YouTube don't have lots of competition, but we've hopped between link aggregator to link aggregator over the years.
Looks like there's a bunch of OSS companies doing well now, with their business model being getting paid for a hosted version of their software. Posthog is a good example.
This was around that time. That's my point. In the valley companies like ours got funding for OSS and developer tools at that time (Xamarin, Github, etc.). But in other places it took 5+ years for the dime to drop...
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