Sailor, software engineer, musician, terminally online.

I miss the pre-adtech internet.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • I’m currently working in medtech, I don’t want to dox myself because the company is quite niche but it involves using machine learning to diagnose a particular disease much earlier when it’s more treatable. I’m managed by an experienced senior engineer who’s probably forgotten more about about the profession than I know and the workload is reasonable and well compensated. Yeah it’s a startup so you temper your expectations in terms of long-term job security but there’s definitely good companies out there, don’t get me wrong there’s a lot about the industry and the broader socioeconomic context it exists in that’s awful but there’s a lot of good opportunities too. I could bitch about the ecosystem for hours but at the end of the day I’m a bit of a drama queen, I’m well paid for interesting work and you can’t say fairer than that.

    There’s certainly much more than adtech, you could actually exclude business to consumer industries entirely if you wanted and make an excellent living in the business to business sector where there’s lots of interesting problems to solve. If you’re thinking of training as a software engineer or similar and entering the industry I’d still very much recommend it if it’s something you enjoy and are good at. Give frontend a wide berth if you’re worried about framework churn too, the vast majority of my work is backend where the churn isn’t as bad and there’s always plenty of work for you if you’re decent at SQL and a couple of common languages used for that purpose.

    We’re not all patent-shagging tech bros, if you want proof of this you can look at how most of the industry runs on freely shared code that’s written in enormous volumes for no other reason making the lives of programmers easier and therefore improving their productivity. If this almost anarchistic process stopped even for a month the whole thing would fall over and never get up again!







  • Vintage audio is the best, I’m planning on building a Mullard 5-10 hifi valve amp from the 1950s in the relatively near future as my second valve project (a micro-power valve AM radio transmitter is my current work in progress). The parts are spendy especially the transformers but valve/tube stuff is just so cool and the fact you can just build a 70 year old design using datasheets of the same vintage and have it work just as well now is so refreshing to my programmer brain that’s used to stuff going out of date when you blink. Also I’m a magpie for glass and glowing things.

    The downside is of course that the voltages involved tend to be rather unpleasant, the 5-10 design calls for 250 volts off the top of my head and some amps use 500+. Also they’re unspeakably inefficient by modern standards, it’s essentially a statement of ‘I’m putting rule of cool over sensible cost-sensitive engineering and you’re going to love it’ which I’m very here for.





  • I’d buy a nice house somewhere a bit wild and in the middle of nowhere on the south coast of either England or Wales, something old with character and a big garden with a good pub nearby. I’d also buy a classic wooden sailing yacht and put enough funds aside to maintain her as well as kitting her out for serious passage-making. When I’d done that I’d figure out how much money I need to make work optional for the rest of my life and how much would keep my family comfortable in an emergency, as well as a small ‘shit hits the fan’ fund kept in something you don’t need electricity to access like gold just in case. I’d then donate the rest to charity, the bulk to enviromentalist lobby groups and charities directly helping people (the RNLI comes to mind for example) but also to a few niche causes like keeping the ailing pirate radio ship Ross Revenge afloat and starting a breeding programme to save the highly endangered otterhound. I’d also like to have a few documentaries made, and I’d drop a few content creators I like some donations too.

    Honestly all I really want to do is go sailing and not have to deal with the rat race, I don’t want to live an oligarch’s lifestyle and I definitely don’t want the sort of attention and arseache that money would bring you. That money would be far more effectively used for good in the hands of others so I’d end up donating the majority of it, I suspect on the order of 80% of it at least.







  • Here’s an opinion that’s actually unpopular rather than simply controversial: domestic flights in the UK other than to Northern Ireland (which isn’t on the same island so fair enough) should be forbidden on the grounds their contribution to climate change cannot be justified.

    Instead we should renationalise the railways by letting the franchises expire without renewing them and expand their capacity as far as we can. Instead of pissing around with HS2 we fuck the NIMBYs over with an Act of Parliament which they can’t swat away or delay and extend it all the way up to Scotland.