As kids in a rural area in Eastern Europe, summer "vacation" was sure to be filled with "fun" farm work. I recall being amused at hearing one of my friends towards the end of the summer say: "man, I can't wait for school to begin, so I can get some rest".
Yes, pretty much this. If they worked in the fields 12 hour per day as in a Victorian industrial setting, they would have perished from exposure, not having time to attend obligatory work around the house and to process the food and materials used to make food. Basically peasants worked all the time to maintain a level of "comfort" like in the article's picture: https://i0.wp.com/juliawise.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/S...
Also idealization of rural life and past rural life tends to come almost exclusively from city dwellers, basically people who never set foot in a rural area let alone grow or live there.
I grew up in rural Romania and even though the conditions were (and are) exponentially better than what the non-industrial non-mechanized non-chemical (herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers) past offered, all I thought growing up was get the funk out of there. Agriculture (and it's relatives, animal husbandry) sucks and I hate it! :)
And without mechanization it's incredibly labor intensive to tend to a farm. Just to keep the animals alive over winter you have to dry and deposit a lot of hay, but before that you gotta scythe it. Scything is no walk in the park and basically you gotta do a lot of that every day to cover enough area to keep the cattle fed. Then plowing without a tractor and using animals: not just dangerous but backbreaking work. Then hoeing the weeds, funking need to do it all the time because without herbicides, the weeds grow everywhere and by the time you "finished" going once over all crops, they've grown back where you first started. At some point my father had this fantasy of what is now called "organic" crops, in fact cheapskating at paying the price for herbicides, so I did so much hoeing that it got out of my nose. I don't recall me saying it but my mother told me that at some point in a middle of a potatoes hoeing session I said that I'd rather solve 1000 math problems than do even just another row of potatoes. Definitive moment in my career choice, which is a lot closer to solving math problems now than hoeing organic potatoes :)
Yes, I lived in a rural area in my youth (not too bad, very close to the city), and I had friends who were sons of farmers. Much of the work was mechanized, but still there was plenty of boring, tiring work to be found.
I am always amazed by those who idealize the rural life; they obviously never had a part in it, otherwise they would rather not do it. People who end up doing this all their lives usually are stuck there with no real opportunity/alternative.
>in fact cheapskating at paying the price for herbicides
This is a pattern I have noticed as well. In my opinion, many of the organic proponents don't actually do the hard work and are often stingy to a fault. It is effortless to argue for something that requires way more work when you have to take part in the work. I think it is just rhetoric to ask for something of perceived better quality at a lower cost.
I recall starting to program in BASIC on CP/M and ZX-Spectrum machines and they didn't have procedures, only GOTO. Just like assembler, you can use all the JMP you want and not use structured programming and procedures but ... it will all become an unmaintainable mess in short time.
Very likely in a number of alternate futures (if not all of them), given the original set of CPU instructions, people would gravitate naturally to C and not some GOTO spaghetti or message passing or object oriented whatever.
I remember jumping out of gosub on the Apple ][ and eventually running into an out of memory error as the stack on the 255 byte page $01 overflowed. As math was also done on the stack math functions broke. Simplifying expressions only delayed the inevitable doom. I had to abandon the project and only later understood my first encounter with a memory leak.
The BASICs of the time often had GOSUB which remembered the return address. Also, while the stack not being prominent in the high level language, they very well used one on the assembly level. For example on the C64 (probably other 6502/6510 based systems) it always started at $100 ($ being the old convention of writing hex), right after the zeropage.
Yeah, I think it was but I was just starting in programming and GOSUB didn't made much sense to me as it's not a proper structured programming procedure with input and output params but more like a hack with data passed through global variables. And by the time I learned structured programming I already moved to Pascal (HiSoft Pascal : https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Hisoft_Pascal ) and there was no turning back to BASIC.
>> Do people want to live in a world where they can't trust anything they didn't personally see with their own eyes?
Maybe it will all turn out for the better, in an unexpected way. Before the advent of the Internet and then the flood of cheap "content", there were newspapers and TV news. These had real professionals behind them and some level of integrity and proofcheck of the facts, so at least for reputable names, you could reasonably trust what you saw presented by them.
When the garbage content will completely take over the real landscape, like litter in India let's say, we'll be left with no choice but to turn back to the old news channels: real journalism. And I think it's almost inevitable as there's no stopping to the littering people. Funnily, much of this content originates in the litter-filled Asian countries, where the promise of a few bucks made on the "content platforms" attracts huge crowds with no scruples whatsoever and if AI attracts views and likes, let's drown them in AI.
I personally have a visceral feeling of hate when I'm tricked by some video being AI and by reading comments, I'm far from alone.
> we'll be left with no choice but to turn back to the old news channels: real journalism
This sounds naively optimistic IMO. It's not as if people were immune to false information before social media and LLMs took off. Technological advancements and free access to information promised us a better future of a well-informed society. Instead, it's increasingly turbo-charging the worst instincts of humanity, putting our very freedoms at risk. Grim as it sounds, I'm not seeing a way out of this.
There recently has been a race to the bottom, but Fox has been false-outrage-baiting for decades before any of the other outlets did so. Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, et al. too.
And really nasty too, at least until Fox and Alex Jones lost their respective lawsuits.
No one is innocent here, but they aren’t equal (as in the same).
>> At least I realized I loose interest in my side projects the moment they become a chore
Unfortunately, any reasonably complex side project eventually becomes work. It's still useful to keep grinding, as it builds perspective on why things are built the way they are, even when you have "freedom" to to implement them any way you like. What you don't have is infinite time though so if you wanna actually be able to use the darn thing, you have to settle for an imperfect design which soon enough will start to show it's limitations but instead of rewriting, you keep duct taping if because something that just works today is infinitely more business valuable than perfect tomorrow. Particularly when you realized from experience that tomorrow still won't be perfect, just late.
For clarification, I'm talking about building an automated trading system. And to get an idea of the complexity involved, just take a look at the "order" class in Interactive Brokers API. If you thought (side, price, quantity) is what defines an order, you're being naive: https://interactivebrokers.github.io/tws-api/classIBApi_1_1O...
Also even when you start with a mindset "I don't need all of this, my stuff will be simple", as I said, over enough time, use cases pile up and your original "simple" design either has to give way or become "useless".
I think it's an incredibly spoiled perspective that anything that becomes a chore is no longer fun or worth doing. Practicing piano is a chore. Repeating the same piece, the same finger movements for an hour or two isn't necessarily fun. But it is satisfying at the end of the day and it is fulfilling. Fun isn't necessarily the goal. I can spend hours banging my head against the wall while trying to build a piece of software. It can be tedious, frustrating, and tiring. It's rarely "fun". But in the end, it's satisfying and it's fulfilling and tomorrow I'll do it again because I want to.
> you keep duct taping if because something that just works today is infinitely more business valuable than perfect tomorrow.
See, that’s exactly what I was arguing against. Side projects are allowed to be for fun, they don’t need to have business value at all! Not everything you do needs to be a hustle. Doing something for the sake of doing, not achieving, is a great way of honing your skills while relieving stress. Human minds are not built for KPIs, but experiencing the progress of making something to your own design.
What you are working on seems genuinely useful, and if that gives you joy, all props to you. I however advocate for programmers that find joy in programming to work on a project far removed from any economic value, and just focus on the act of creating.
In the old days, TV was chock full of ads, sometimes to such a degree that you watched more ad time than movie time during a movie, assuming you didn't switch to other channels in between, always either missing the beginning of next part of the movie, or resigned yourself to watch some ad content afterall in order not to miss that beginning.
Ads will always be around, I guess. Doesn't Google offer a pay search version too, without ads? Like youtube...
>> By EOY I had to sell my house, figured I could use the (significant) profits to buy time or I could travel and make the time a little more enjoyable, so I set out to explore most of Europe thinking, well I'll for sure find a job before I run out of money!
Very reckless finance management, so I wonder if this correlates with not finding a "managerial" job.
First, "set out to explore Europe" immediately says "expenses". Without an income, that's teenager-level mentality.
Secondly, unless the house was still on mortgage, definitely it's cheaper to live on your own property and only scrap money for bills and food than paying rent on top of those. Also, and I'm not generalizing here, but people in general have parents / relatives. If times were that tough, I would retreat to my parent's house and rent the city apartment, that definitely buys me time.
And last but not least ... there are blue-collar jobs out there as a last resort. A friend of mine who lost his QA job, couldn't find anything else so he apprenticed as an electrician and now has got a license and works as such. Says he makes about the same as previously. There's "stacking the shelves at Lidl" also, not paying much but at least you're making something. And if you're willing to put up with the hard physical work and risk of accidents, there's always decent-paying construction jobs.
I'd say 2-3 months of looking are acceptable. After 6 months, some "plan B" needs to kick in, including the very mentally difficult idea of letting go of the past. You may have been a managing director but for the moment, the only option could be Lidl employee.
There is actually meticulous financial planning required to stay afloat for 2+ years, and i do think it correlates with my professional abilities! Sure, it was reckless to leave but the alternative was to stay and fall into a depression from the routine, constant rejection and financial diet, so i picked what i had to.
I'm not entirely convinced wrt your meticulous financial planning.
I think I was earning less than you yet managed to save the vast majority over my 15 year career earnings. Then my partner died and I was left raising a toddler by myself. It wasn't easy, but at least I don't have financial problems, thanks to a little financial planning.
Literally "T-shirt with Bluetooth", that's what 99.98% of "AI" stickers today advertise.
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