Published on 12, July, 2020
Anyone else have a series of obsessions that seem to come and go in rotation?
When I get into a hobby, I throw myself into it fully and pursue it with passion whilst I'm learning at a decent rate. Then when the learning slows down because of the plateau that inevitably comes, I lose interest and move on to something else, often an old hobby.
Because I value efficiency, I'll often sell all of the hobby equipment - sometimes regretting it shortly afterwards.
I've been through astronomy, photography, shortwave radio, ham radio, electronics, hifi, religion, piano playing, guitar playing, motorcycling, advanced motorcycling (to the point where I was qualified to teach this). On the odd occasion that I find myself without a passion I get into a hell of a mess with addictive behaviours too.
Yep, love research, learning, and gadgets - then get bored as soon as I master something and move on. It's loads of fun but a pain for developing specialism/career etc. I finished a PhD but move across sectors and disciplines, enjoy problem-solving and research and make a living from it but it's a choppy and stressful process. Wish I could figure out how to sell researching and solving problems to make a living from it without having to deal with 'teams' and getting bored :D
Hello mirror. I started a PhD but didn't finish due to family pressure of the "you need to get a proper job" sort, even though I was working 4 days a week.
I suspect, as I think a reasonable number of us have, that you've reached the point where you don't generally need an awful lot from other people in order to learn something, and can pretty much teach yourself most things you want to learn. My experience has been that isn't necessarily helpful for work because most workplaces insist they need people who claim to have particular skills. My experience is that it usually doesn't take me more than a couple of months to exceed most people who claim to have have particular skills. There have been exceptions, but those have been relatively rare.
I love researching stuff and learning. I'm less into gadgets and technology these days because most "in-stuff" isn't really that innovative in the scheme of things.
I've decided to try and narrow my interests into one area and then work out how to make money from that. The interest I've chosen has a very large scope, so I'm not going to run out of new things any time soon, plus it's something that a large proportion of the population aren't very skilled in.
Yes, researching is second nature now, don't need guidance. Yes, moores law seems to have levelled out and cloud systems /iot don't really offer the same pottering pleasures and have become depressingly hipster. Anyway I'm overwhelmed by work but I still enjoy pottering with linux when time. Sadly I took humanities which doesn't provide a whole lot of marketable skills ;) I might retire in a couple of years and give myself over to the pleasures of study and pottering.
What interest did you choose? I recently incredibly stupidly moved from tech policy to arts policy and I'm weeping with boredom and bafflement!
Agreed cloud is just client-server - in practical terms the issue in tems of open source is that the move of almost everything onto a restricted range of service and infrsstructure providers means the end user loses another huge chunk of autonomy and gains hugely increased exposure to data abuse, lock-in etc. It's more a question of degree than architecture. Nevertheless I still do whatever I can for personal computing locally and regret I no longer have the time to run my own servers. IoT again differs only in increased dependency - but given there's not much of the infrastructure of my daily life I could fix mysrl already, I'm sure I'd get used to it. But until they sort out privacy and security I've no intention of filling my home with an easily hackable 360 degree surveillance system.
Yes, moores law seems to have levelled out and cloud systems /iot don't really offer the same pottering pleasures and have become depressingly hipster.
Well I think here's my point. "Cloud" systems are mostly just three-tier architectures where the user interface is a web browser. The idea of partitioning out and distributing the UI is nothing new - hello X Window. IOT is also nothing new - it's called "client/server". Oh you have things with sensors hooked up to an internet, yeah they were doing that with coffee machines in the 70s/80s - yawn. By the way, good luck with managing all of that...
From a computer science pov, the slow down in Moore's law is actually interesting. It means you have to actually come up with better algorithms rather than just relying on the clock speed increase coming down the road to give you adequate single-thread performance.
What interest did you choose?
Mathematics. ~30 years of work has kind-of sapped a lot of the interest out of computers etc. these days. It's no longer so much fun like it used to be. Part of that is having to do what other people want though. I'm interested in what can really be done with computing / programming to help people learn/use mathematics.