Posted by PinkG 6 hours ago
What's not completely clear from the post is what he dislikes with AI / technology. Does someone know?
I've been having trouble finding consistent work for the last year but was recently accepted into a recruitment network. Almost every posting on the network's job board is for AI/agentic bullshit (many of them in defense contexts) and I just can't bring myself to apply for any of them. I won't be able to fake the required enthusiasm. I've been through 4/5/6? hype cycles over the course of my career and I'm just over it all. Maybe the AI bubble will burst? Maybe it won't? Either way, it takes the fun out of what I've enjoyed doing -- even if it's because it's all anyone wants to talk about. Layer all of the surveillance* and age verification crap on top of that and ... I want off this train.
*Anecdote: I was a chaperone on an elementary school field tried yesterday and there were >8 cameras on the bus. This amount of surveillance and accompanying normalization of it hasn't prevented or even helped rectify multiple incidents my child has had while riding on school buses. So, all of the downsides and no upsides.
This post here does not seem to be like that. I suspect he's really planning on taking a hiatus from the 'net, something like a sabbatical at least. I do think he'll eventually return to the 'net in some form and he might even become active in whatever the free software world has morphed into by then but he does seem to have positive plans for the future. He's starting a magazine centred around an Orthodox Christian community, something which can provide the same type of fulfilment as working on free software projects can.
Amazing, really walking the talk at a level I've never seen before outside of novels or lives of the saints etc.
I only got good enough at programming to get a job in tech because I became obsessed with the Curry-Howard Correspondence as a backdoor into learning math.
I've always had a wide array of interests. I live on a half acre property with a giant garden and a shop that is bigger then my actual house. I've always split my free time between exploring and learning about computers, gardening, radios, and carpentry, fixing old machines, etc.
The shift in my lived work experience with AI has substantially demotivated me from programming and computers in my free time. A million times over I would rather pull weeds or clean my Bridgeport mill.
I've always wished I could go back to a 1990s experience where the computer lived in the den, the internet was only somewhat monetized, the future was utopian.
OP's plan to fallback to 1980s era technology is appealing but also somewhat depressing. Not only do I really like and enjoy learning about computers, but also making this kind of individualistic decision doesn't really get us to a better place as a society.
I wish we had heeded the warnings of researchers like Sherry Turkle who identified the impacts of technology on the individual as far back as the 1980s.