I’m in the the unique (and at times, unenviable) position of spending the last 4-5 years building out a music app (getradiant.app for the curious) and I agree with what others are saying here, it’s about exposure.
My music taste has expanded and shifted a lot in the past half decade, which also happens to coincide with the first half of my 30s, mainly because I’m exposed to new stuff constantly through my consistent testing of my app.
Your 30s is typically when people start noticing the growth of the circle representing their radius of musical interest start to slow. Mainly because it collides with having less time for choice (life gets busy, responsibilities increase) coupled with a decreased capacity for new experience.
I’ve also noticed TikTok has exposed me to a ton of new stuff.
So the TLDR; is, the time you have to discover on your own will become ever more limited. Your best bet to keep the party going is to find one or two low-effort, lean back discovery services and stick with them.
I’m going to hard disagree with this. A lot of the enjoyment I get from creation is the process of others enjoying what I’ve built.
Further more, building for others is great for building out areas you’re weak or inexperienced in. Like, I was poor on the accessibility front until I found the thing I created resonated with the visually impaired folk.
I think you're agreeing with the article without knowing it. Because you're doing what you enjoy at the end of the day.
For example, I design logos and small branding for my (mostly) CLI tools which I write for myself first. Seeing these projects at completion levels comparable with other, bigger projects brings a lot of joy to me. A coherent README.MD, nice documentation and good written code is what I aspire to do, and I do it for myself first.
If others like it, that's great. If it doesn't get any attention, then it's OK, because I wrote that tool to fill my needs first.
The article wasn't saying "do what makes you happy". It was saying "if you do this you will not be happy". If I end up happy you don't get to loop back and go "Well that was the goal! You agree with me!". The author also forgets that the author is their own audience. That audience is what one imagines others might be. The pursuit of that audience's approval is valuable.
>A coherent README.MD, nice documentation and good written code is what I aspire to do, and I do it for myself first.
Did you conjure the definition of "nice" and "good" in this context from thin air? No. You defined good by what others told you was good. You're working for an audience. You're disagreeing with the article without knowing it.
> The article wasn't saying "do what makes you happy"
I disagree. Quoting the blog post itself:
so stop optimizing for a non-existent audience and instead focus on what makes you enjoy the activity.
"Focus on what makes you enjoy the activity" means "do what makes you happy" in my parlance.
> Did you conjure the definition of "nice" and "good" in this context from thin air? No. You defined good by what others told you was good.
Absolutely no. I was always interested in visual design and set out to replicate what I saw and liked. I don't cater to anyone. My blog posts, coding style, and other things got negative comments, and I took note of them and thought about them, but I didn't agree with all of them, either. I only compete with myself and sharpen my axen the way I like. I'm chopping my own wood, so I don't need to optimize anything for others' wood.
In other areas of life, I have always chosen what to do, listen, watch and like. I don't yearn to fit in. In fact, I spent at least half of my life in a pretty opposite state.
I also get a big kick out of sharing my work with the world. But I think it's quite easy to lose yourself in it. Whether you're conscious of it or not, you start optimizing for what you think the audience wants, and not what you want (which is what the article is getting at I suppose).
So, I make a conscious effort to work on projects that are "just for me" from time to time, and I try to make that decision up-front.
I think I get the most out of my "for the world" projects overall - it's where I really push myself, like you describe - even though they're "leisure activities". But I still need the just-for-me projects to stay sane.
Yeah. I've been a lone programmer for a long time. It's very difficult to maintain focus and motivation. Sometimes it feels like it doesn't matter and that there's just no point to it all.
Yet people somehow find my work and tell me what they think of it. One day I came to HN and saw my project on the front page. At first I thought someone else had had the same idea as me. Then I started getting emails about it, about my website. Every time it happens it's incredibly motivating. It feels like I finally reached out to someone.
Making things just for yourself and your own enjoyment can be a very lonely activity and you might find yourself with some kind of audience anyway even without trying. That experience can change everything.
depends on the project for me, but I'm totally with you
there's the things I do for me, because i would like for them to exist and have fun making it. But for anything that's not exactly that, having someone else care is extremely motivating
It’s tangential at best but there is a better way than all of this nonsense.
Your employer can declare and direct tax owed from your paycheck directly each month. Come end of year you can click like 3 links in a tax portal to ensure you’ve not overpaid and that’s the extent of your tax worries.
We obviously don’t have a perfect system here in Ireland (far from it) but Jesus Christ America, your tax system is absolutely insane to Europeans.
We have required payroll deductions here in the US for federal, state and (sometimes) city taxes and if you are self-employed we have required quarterly estimated tax payments. Federal deductions include Social Security tax, Medicare tax, and income tax and employers send this money directly to the federal government. State and city deductions are usually just income tax (here is Massachusetts we also pay a tax for paid family leave).
The insane part in the US is that then every year we have to fill out a bunch of forms filling in information the government already knows. For many people this should instead be as you said "click like 3 links".
It gets really complicated when you have investment or partnership income, sell stocks or property, etc. I still do my own (complicated) taxes every year but it gets more and more complex every year and takes more and more time.
Technically it is the standard in the US as well. That’s what income tax withholding is for, and most people’s mortgages or rents bundle in property taxes as well. Then the other chunk of taxes that most people pay are sales tax and gas taxes, all paid as you earn/spend.
The real distinction is the backwards filing process. You have to fill out information on W2s and 1099s that the government already has.
I think this could be streamlined without pissing off the third party tax filing industry. Just make it so that all of the information on those forms can be provided all at once to the tax filing software companies when a person puts in their personal info. TurboTax already kind of sort of does this when you put in a couple of pieces of info from each W2 and it fetches the rest, but it could be streamlined into a standard.
Then for people who file manually, there could be a system where the government sends a consolidated group of summed values for use on the manual forms. I feel like this could be an acceptable compromise that works within our broken lobbying system.
- RISC-V has miles to go, I worry that with the current pace of ARM it may never catch up.
- The assertion you can’t buy UMPCs in 2024 is patently false. GPD and a whole host of manufacturers make em.
- A non mobile optimised blog in this day and age? That was a chore to read on the go.
> RISC-V has miles to go, I worry that with the current pace of ARM it may never catch up
That's a weird assertion. This machine is basically competitive with a Pi 4 (certainly miles ahead of Pi 3, both in CPU power and in having 8 or 16 GB RAM vs 0.5 or 1 GB).
The initial version of the RISC-V spec was ratified in July 2019, and the C910 core in this chip was announced in the same month. The TH1520 SoC hit the market in June 2023 (my board was delivered that month), four years after the CPU core was announced, and also four years after the Pi 4.
Note that the Arm A72 cores in the Pi 4 were announced in February 2015, so it was 4 1/2 years from core to Pi 4 using it, slightly longer than the THead C910 core announcement to Lichee Pi 4A shipping.
The Arm A53 also took about four years from announcement to the Pi 3 and Odroid C2. And the Arm A76 took four years from announcement to the RK3588 and Rock 5 shipping.
This is just the industry.
If the SG2380 machine(s) really come out this year then they will be faster than the A76 RK3588 boards and Pi 5 and around 2 to 2.5 years behind. But their P670 cores are equivalent to Arm A78, which is not available on an SBC -- and there are 16 of them, which is also not available in any cheap Arm-based SBC.
That's halving the gap.
SiFive's fastest core, the P870, is around Arm Cortex-X3 performance, and announced just 16 months later (October 2023 vs June 2022).
> RISC-V has miles to go, I worry that with the current pace of ARM it may never catch up.
Only assuming development progress happens linearly. In fact, technical progress goes exponentially. It took years to even get to the point to have RISC-V SoCs and now we are seeing the first laptop products. The pace will accelerate, especially with the promise of RISC-V being a cheaper platform to build hardware on than ARM and X86.
This line of arguing would imply that an established company selling established products would not need to fear any competition as long as it can keep the pace of its innovation cycles. While this line of reasoning is not wrong it completely ignores the possibility of "disruptive innovation" to use a buzz word here. I honestly think RISC-V could be a shooting star that will come to many as a surprise. And as long as RISC-V lags in performance behind ARM it could still compete successfully in price due to free licensing of RISC-V versus expensive licensing of ARM64. This has been AMD's strategy for many years (before they had better integrated GPUs compared to Intel). And think of how IBM completely lost its PC business to cheap competition.
> but there's not a ton of high performance Risc-V stuff happening.
Uhhh ... yes, there is.
Several companies designing very high performance RISC-V were founded in 2021 or so. Most of them have top designers fresh from designing the latest Apple, Intel, AMD chips and they are aiming to match current x86 and Apple performance.
You'll see their products in the market around 2026.
Sansa Clip+ was very close to audio player perfection as far as I'm concerned. Simple but functional, no frills, had exactly the features it needed, no less and no more, and at a very reasonable price. Rockbox made it better, but even without it was pretty darn good.
I don't recall what happened to mine (lost? broken? gave it to someone? don't recall), but I wish I had bought 20 of them when I could to last the rest of my life.
This immediately reminded me of the Palm Pre iTunes/iPod protocol reverse engineering debacle from the oughts.
It became a game of whackamole where by Palm would update their OS (RIP WebOS) to reintroduce support for iTunes to their devices and Apple would bend over backwards to break it again.
Did Beeper not anticipate that this was inevitably coming and put fallbacks and rotational serial numbers in place if Apple start getting blocky?
My only major gripe with it is React. Either go all the way and build something for Svelte that does this lowering the bar to the bottom on both creation and understanding of the UI layer or
Do this with Rust and target Wasm abstracting away the hard / tedious parts of working with lower level languages and creating graphical applications.
Like this + Tauri would be an absolute powerhouse but as good as it is, it’s still just another React maker.
This seems like a weird gripe. There's probably a high chance that a team/company has a bunch of React components already built, or they have a bunch of devs who know React, and just need an editor for it.
If it’s as good as you say, set up a sponsorship goal and we’ll contribute. 11 is massively expensive to use in embedded in an application so anything that’s lightweight enough to be self hosted and can produce 11 labs like output has my dollars.
I hate Gizmodo. They really do find outrage in everything, seemingly getting off on it more than their readers.
As others have said, paying 15 bucks an hour for Turk work rather than outsourcing it to Africa is a step up but even if they continued offshoring, the cost of living in other places is significantly lower and pay, surprise surprise, is significantly less (in saying that…2 dollars is a bit exploitative but that’s the market right or wrong).
My music taste has expanded and shifted a lot in the past half decade, which also happens to coincide with the first half of my 30s, mainly because I’m exposed to new stuff constantly through my consistent testing of my app.
Your 30s is typically when people start noticing the growth of the circle representing their radius of musical interest start to slow. Mainly because it collides with having less time for choice (life gets busy, responsibilities increase) coupled with a decreased capacity for new experience.
I’ve also noticed TikTok has exposed me to a ton of new stuff.
So the TLDR; is, the time you have to discover on your own will become ever more limited. Your best bet to keep the party going is to find one or two low-effort, lean back discovery services and stick with them.