Ask HN: Comment here about whatever you're passionate about at the moment

[mckirk]

Hello stranger.

It has occurred to me that one of the crucial elements of the early internet was the feeling that there was somebody out there, _somewhere_ on the globe, that was actually responding to that particular thing you were putting out there. It was a special feeling, because it was a sense of connection. Just being online and being part of the few select communities that existed back then was a commitment, and I believe that's in part what made it feel special.

With all the world gaining access to the internet, I think we've gained a lot, but lost this sense of wonder: Since online interactions have now become commonplace to the point of para-social meaninglessness, any single post or message doesn't really feel all that _real_.

HN is still the closest thing I know to that primordial kind of internet, and so I'm putting this post out there. It might get buried instantly, or it might survive, and on the off chance that it does:

I encourage you to comment here about whatever you're passionate about at the moment, however niche it might be. It might let you find some likeminded people and maybe recapture a bit of the best aspects of the internet in those early days.

In any case, I sincerely wish you a great day, from one surprisingly-real-but-currently-text-based being to another :)

[blinding-streak]

Thanks so much for posting this, I love the spirit of it. I'm passionate about my sobriety journey. I just got home from a dinner party of ex coworkers and friends. Being the only one not drinking is hard for me and a huge change. I used to lead the charge with booze, it was the thing that took my crushing anxiety away. It made everything more fun. Well, that can only last so long when you abuse it so much and it fucks up your life.

I successfully made it through tonight and will hopefully have many more successful nights. Love and strength to anyone else out there in a similar boat.

[proton_9]

Didn't think I'd find something like this on hn. Good luck to you mate. I'm on the journey too. Almost 2 years now, was on the verge of brink and posted something on hn to which Dan, the moderator emailed me and told me to hang in there. At the time had no one, still keep a small circle and no immediate family. His words gave me strength to survive and possibly how I ended up in recovery instead of the other side.

[frans]

May I suggest the book "This Naked Mind" by Annie Grace? I learned about it here on HN [1]. I have no alcohol issues, but there are some eye-opening ideas in that book that should appeal to everyone (unless you already are on zero alcohol)

"Alcohol is the only drug on earth you have to justify not taking."

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32714527

[holler]

Congrats on having the courage to make a change!

> it was the thing that took my crushing anxiety away.

Paradoxically it's also the thing that creates the crushing anxiety when abused. One day at a time, be kind to yourself, life is a journey.

[djur]

Congratulations and good luck. I think it's the hardest habit in the world to break for some of us, in part because the rest just can't understand. People are either unsympathetic or too sympathetic, if you get me. Keep on building those "muscles" to carry you through social situations. Sobriety has many rewards.

[nonrandomstring]

I'm passionate about my sobriety journey.

Passion is an awesome word in this context. Meaning: irresistible motive, intensely emotional heat, rage, or love. That is love for you (yourself) - the good non-narcissistic kind of self care. And you're getting a reward. Abstinence does not have to be suffering. Thanks for sharing this. Carry on.

[lake_vincent]

I am having a bad night with drinking, and needed to read this. Commenting live, next to a toilet bowl!!

Thank you, stranger, and I wish you well on your journey.

[voidee]

Good work! I stopped drinking two years ago. After year one of the pandemic, I came to the realization that alcohol brought zero positives and many negatives to my life. Being in lockdown with few options to go to pubs provided the space to make the break.

My local friends are all moderate to heavy drinkers, but they also respect my choice and it’s not awkward to be the only one not drinking. If you don’t have a friend group which respects your choice, try to find social groups based around an activity. Otherwise it could be very difficult.

Best of luck on your journey.

[sebmellen]

Good luck on the journey.

You may greatly enjoy this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ3v2oGm6Sk.

[chad_strategic]

If only the booze was the problem.

But I think I would be remiss if I didn’t leave this here. Victories are nice but it a long journey…

If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self- seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook on life will change. Fear of people and economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that A higher power is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us - sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.

Written by an anonymous recovering drunk…

[Donckele]

At social events just think how you’ll feel jumping out of bed without feeling shit. Remind yourself of times spent head in the toilet. Think of all the brain cells you save. In time do the same with tobacco, coffee and sugar.

[zmorek]

Alcohol culture is so pervasive and toxic

[replwoacause]

You aren't alone. I started drinking more during COVID. Before that I only drank socially or once in a while, but then I decided to explore the world of bourbon. I bought a bar cart, got into reading reviews, and really luxuriated in the experience of searching/buying/sipping/rating. It's a fun hobby, but it is also pervasive and expensive and I've lost sight of how much is too much. Drinking 4 oz every night has become the norm, because it is the perfect relaxant to the end of a stressful workday, but getting drunk every night isn't good.

[tomcam]

Good luck on that journey and congrats on making it through that dinner.

[mr-wendel]

Good on you, and may you find plenty of wind to keep that ship sailing. I'm totally with you on this.

My extra two cents: generally refuse to answer "why" and the "how long" questions. My personal responses are "because I won the drinking game" and "not long enough". I find these to be more far more truthful and useful of answers anyway.

[Simon_O_Rourke]

I wish you the best of luck on your journey - it's a difficult path, I've had friends and relatives who were similarly afflicted and it's a complex addiction to resolve when it takes hold! Keep at it, a day at a time!

[lvturner]

I'm so pleased to read the comments in all this thread. Thank you everyone.

I've recently decided that I can't deal with hangovers when I over-indulge or even the negative impacts on my sleep of a single beer.

It's a real societal struggle to be completely dry, but when I break it down logically the pros to having a drink or two don't outweigh the cons.

[sirsinsalot]

Same here. It ain't easy. I became very dependent in lockdown.

The anxiety cycle led to some existential problems.

I'm trying to reconfigure my relationship with booze. If I can't, I'll drop it altogether.

Good luck to you.

[mettamage]

On a sobriety challenge myself until 10 aug 2023. I used to be a social drinker. I’m doing this to get a solid basis in being sober. It allows me to say no more easily in later years

[joemazerino]

Congratulations. Sending you strength for your future Temperance.

[jmcantrell]

It's totally understandable if you don't want to answer this, but how did you know you had a problem? How did it fuck your life up?

[davisonio]

Congrats

Starting drinking every night is so easy, but stopping altogether is so hard. very commendable to those who decide to stop.

[nunez]

Congratulations to you. Sounds like a very difficult journey.

[moltar]

I’ve been in your shoes for over a decade now. If you need a sounding board or an accountability buddy - hit me up!

[sixstringtheory]

Wishing you a successful and rich life experience.

[vbezhenar]

Hello from Astana, Kazakhstan. I just spent wonderful night playing World of Warcraft, coding some lua addon for it and tinkering with VPS. It's Sunday's morning and I'm going to prepare more coffee. Now I need to endure till the evening so I can actually attend work at Monday with proper schedule. At work I'm working on creating an ECG device which hopefully will be useful and cheap for local hospitals. And some other projects which are more boring.

Have a good day or night or whatever time you're happening to have around.

[malikNF]

>ECG device

An ecg device saved my dad's life, it caught a weird heart murmur he was having and alerted the doctors to an issue with his heart. He's now better becuase we detected it early, its so wonderful there are people like you working on these devices that makes modern medicine do its thing. Thank you!

Also, how do you prepare your coffee?

[tomcam]

Man, building an ECG. What is your job description? What kind of organization are you working for?

Also your English is excellent!

[kerryoco]

What kind of addon you making? WoW addons were what got me started coding ~10 years ago, after several false starts and burnouts in the quicksand of Dreamweaver and the like.

All hail Pylus the creator of GHI, and his custom scripting environment :)

[archon810]

Please take care of your future self and try to get proper sleep every night. Sleep is so important.

[rakejake]

I am currently in this phase where tech stuff does not interest me very much. I still work a tech job and do a fair bit of coding, but mostly put a stop to obsessively reading every tech article on this website, code up something new in my free time, learn a new language etc.

Sometime during the pandemic, I stopped caring, perhaps fell into a bit of anhedonia. Thankfully, reading HN kept me informed about boreout (the relatively unknown cousin of burnout). Past few months, I made a big decision to move back to my home country and generally be more social, get more involved in the arts, watch movies, listen to music, read books, just take things easy. I think I am doing fine in my new job. The roaring interest in tech is still not back, but I'm confident it will be back eventually.

Until then, I'm happy reading about the good work done by other people. Perhaps one such idea might spark an insight in me and make me go to work. Cheers.

[THENATHE]

My father passed away about 3 weeks ago, and the current thing that I am passionate about is setting myself up to be and stay doing things that would make him proud and honor his memory

When I say I was close with my dad, that doesnt even scratch the surface. Im 24, and I can think of maybe three weeks worth of days across my entire life where I didnt talk to him (and most of those were solo camping without cell service). Me and that man would do everything together, talk every day, share ideas, the works.

I dont want his death to be the end of my relationship with my dad, so I am currently making changes in myself that he would want to see: less soda, more exercise, more social interactions, keeping up on my health conditions more, etc. As well as doing things that I think honor his idea: trying to catalogue all of the family assets like pictures, audio recordings, letters, stories; making sure that I am not holding on to crap, and then actively protecting the good stuff I am holding on to; living every day in a way that I think is on par with his high but reasonable expectations of me as if he were still here.

I hope that as long as I live I never stop missing him or living as if he is always watching. At the end of the day, I think possibly his greatest wish for me would be to live in a way that would always make him proud, because the things he would be proud of me for are both things that I can be proud of myself for, and things that EVERYONE should be proud of.

[djur]

For the past five years or so, I've taken singing lessons. I really recommend it to anyone who has even the faintest interest, even if you feel like you can't carry a tune in a bucket. What I learned the first four to six lessons was enough to make a substantial difference both in my vocal quality and in my comfort in singing for long periods (one of the first things you learn, essentially, is how not to shred your vocal cords). One thing I love about singing is that it's one of the most democratic arts. You don't have to buy or maintain instruments -- you were born with it. Almost everybody is capable at least of some degree of singing. There's no gadgets to buy to improve it. And no matter what kind of music you like, there is a place for vocals. You can sing by yourself in the shower or in front of a band or in a chorus or in a congregation, if that's your thing.

Aside from the benefits of being able to produce aesthetically pleasant sounds and the fundamental pleasures of mastery of a skill, I recommend it to anybody who wants to become more aware of and comfortable with their body and/or with expressing their emotions.

I'm sure that there are good free online lessons for singing, and I've used a lot of videos for practice, but I really encourage seeking out a teacher if you can. Covid has been bad for their business, and there's no replacement for face-to-face instruction. (The good news is that, unlike something like the piano, it's absolutely feasible to get useful instruction over a video call!)

[TaylorAlexander]

I converted my mountain bike to an ebike and I’m having a blast with it! I just moved to Oakland and there’s pretty good bike infrastructure here, so I can use the bike for transportation even for relatively large distances. I’ve been using it to get groceries, run to the bike shop, and see friends. For the nerds, I added a Bafang BBSHD mid drive motor and EM3EV 52v 20.5AH pack to my Norco Fluid HT bike. I added a rear rack with Ortlieb panniers. It’s a rock solid bike and thanks to the high power of the BBSHD the bike accelerates quickly and easily reaches 30MPH/50KPH. This means I can keep up with the flow of traffic on most surface streets and don’t have to worry about cars zipping past me - I’m usually tracking behind the car in front of me so there’s nowhere for an approaching car to go. I have a full face downhill mountain biking helmet and a smart helmet brake light from my good friends company called Brakefree that lights up when I slow down. The gear and the speed of the bike leave me feeling safe enough. And it’s a blast! Earlier this week I rode the bike 8 miles through the city to a park up in the hills. It’s fast to get there and feels very different than sitting in a big energy guzzling car. And once I got to the park I just kept rolling right on to some trails. What a wonderful feeling! I’m more convinced than ever of the power of micro mobility in cities. We need more protected bike infrastructure. When we think of cities we often imagine roads as a given. But we’re deciding which infrastructure to lay down and maintain - and we don’t have to make it all so focused on automobiles.

EDIT: I want to emphasize one point which might interest people. As I said the speed helps me feel safe as I move with the flow of traffic. I run my bike at 1500 watts. This is twice the legal limit of 750 watts, but this isn’t well enforced. In the UK, the legal limit is just 250 watts. I think policy makers assume that a smaller number is safer, but I’m not convinced this is true. While higher speed means more risk of high speed collisions, lower speed means more risk of being hit from behind. It’s worth looking at raising the legal power limits, and whether this would increase safety for bike riders. I think it might.

[PebblesRox]

I have been having a lot of fun lately telling bedtime stories to my kids (ages 5 and 3). It's a collaborative improv effort with my 5yo since he likes to chime in with suggestions.

The fun part for me is incorporating various mathematical and programming concepts into the storie like functions and boolean logic.

Last night's story involved a subtraction function that would spit out negative M&Ms if too few regular M&Ms were supplied as the input. The characters learned that they had to store their regular M&Ms separately from the negative ones in order to avoid a cancelling-out reaction if they came into contact with each other.

Tonight we will explore what comes out when negative M&Ms go into the subtraction function.

Another popular plot line in these stories involves a baby gate with a filter function that controls who can go through. The functions have gotten more and more complicated as my 5yo gets familiar with the concept, and now I have an idea for a baby gate code injection exploit that I'm excited to tell.

I've posted a few polished versions of these stories to my blog and hope to add more soon.

https://bancosparenting.wordpress.com/tag/pickle/

[M4v3R]

I’m from Poland. 20+ years ago as a teen I got to play Final Fantasy VII and even though my English vocabulary was pretty limited I felt in love with it. I was thinking about all the people who couldn’t play it because of the language barrier. So I got online and found some folks that were willing to help translate it to Polish.

The only problem was that the game files were proprietary and while the modding community did a very good job reversing them and writing tools, these tools were a bit incomplete and not very suited for such a project. This inspired me to learn how to program (I knew what was possible because when I was 10 a book about QBasic found its way in my hands and I loved it) so I could create tooling for the project, and then also to make a website for the project. Then together with my newly met friends we made a website about Final Fantasy in general. I had to learn PHP to create a simple CMS for the team members to update the site. Then I’ve learned JavaScript to add some interactivity and also to load content without refreshing the page (this was before AJAX was a thing).

Fast forward 18 years and I’m a lead front-end developer, a job that I completely owe to this passion for the game I had as a teen. I never forgot the joy of coding tools for FF7 though and so recently I joined a community that’s still active around this game, and in my spare time I’m working on tools that will be useful for speedrunners. I also recently joined Twitch and I’m streaming the creation process from time to time, which is super fun! To be honest while I do enjoy my day job my secret dream is to work in some kind of gaming related position, because that always was and will hold a very special place in my heart.

[_ewbb]

Incredible, I've been scrolling through these comments thinking of my own passion which is Final Fantasy VII speedrunning. Fell in love with the game as a kid and only recently discovered the FF7 speedrunning community who are amazingly kind and generous. The runners themselves are incredibly helpful and can be found on Twitch. There's also a Discord where technique, glitches, and skips are worked on and improved.

I'm working on running in the 100% category which currently has a world record of 17 hours 38 minutes, it's a marathon of concentration. I'm not a young single person so finding the time to do a run has been the hardest part.

For casual players there are a ton of mods that make the game more challenging, updates for the graphics, and tons of other really interesting modifications. I love the New Threat V1.5 mod and the Chibi style character model updates.

[Subsentient]

Sometimes, I think about what I really want. What I want most in the universe, for myself. There's plenty I want for everyone else. I seldom let myself think about what would be good for me lately.

Sometimes, like tonight, I do know what I want for myself. It's impossible, but it's my greatest desire for my life.

I want to be "uplifted". I want my brain capacity to be expanded by orders of magnitude. I want to understand, I want to comprehend, I want to see it all and fully understand the shape and implications of all things in my sight. I want to be more than a human mind. I want to be far, far wiser. It's not power I want. It's knowledge. It's understanding.

[zuric]

Great post! So great that this will be the first time I post a comment here on HN. I’m from Sweden and I’m passionate about two things currently.

The first thing is that me, my wife, my mother and my father is building a house from scratch to me and my wife. I’ve never built anything before so a lot of what free time I have goes towards reading up on how to do it. We started building 1,5 years ago and started taking down trees in the small forest where the house was to be located three years ago. Anyone on HN building their own house?

The second thing I’m tinkering with is coding a game in swift playgrounds using only the iPad. It is a fps game built with Metal using only SDFs for rendering and collision.

[MivLives]

I fell into a sorta wikihole and now I have no one to present my findings to.

North Korea has an animation studio, and there's a good chance you've seen some of it's work.

It's called SEK (or Korean April 26 Animation Studio). The things they were outsourced to work on were The Simpsons Movie, and Futurama: Benders Big Score. There's also an episode of Avatar, and Teenage Mutent Ninja Turtles(2003) in there too.

Which is interesting but what's really crazy is the other stuff they make. There's internal NK animation, mostly propaganda and children's works like Boy General.

MondoTV is an Italian animation company that used to import and dub anime but then decided to do original shows. Most are based on something historical (Ulysses, Genghis Khan, Pocahontas), something out of copyright that Disney did before (The Story of Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Pocahontas).

These two entities would collaborate on something of titanic portions. Of course it'd end up sinking into obscurity. The Legend of the Titanic is a 1999 animated movie about the Titanic in the same way Disney's Robin Hood is about medieval politics. That is to say randomly filled with anthropomorphic animals.

This movie is not to be confused with the other animated Italian movie about the titanic that also is full of talking animals, 2000's Titanic: The Legend Goes On.

And this is a concept with legs. Mondo and SEK worked together again on a sequel In Search of the Titanic where they end up defending Atlantis because they're trying to find the wreck of the ship. Spoiler: They save the ship (no one died on it anyway but they still lost the boat).

And because the Titanic was still red hot six years later in a sequel to a sequel of a very strange Titanic movie, a tv series came out. Fantasy Island not to be confused with the other one. This one has the Titanic at it. And talking mice and 26 episodes of misadventures and new friends.

Finding stuff like this reminds me of how absurd the world is. I know it's probably not like... what was expected here but sometimes you just get really weird into specific things because you feel like you're witnessing history created via madlibs.

[jonah]

I just finished a four day (in-person) course entitled Advanced Direction and Control of the Search Function put on by the California Office of Emergency Services (CalOES). It is intended for Search and Rescue team members - both volunteers and sheriff's deputies - who who are part of "overhead" teams managing large multi-day "campaign" searches for lost and missing individuals.

It was a tightly-packed, intensive course covering everything from lost person psychology and the common behaviors of people in various types of situations based on analysis of past incidents to how to use the latest specialized technology to streamline the strategic planning, deployment, and evaluation of large searches.

I joined my county's SAR team five years ago and it's been an incredibly rewarding (but time-consuming) volunteer avocation. There is so much to know and California has a world-class system of training, certification, and management for our SAR teams.

One fantastic aspect of the CA state government is the OES and our mutual aid system. This system provides a formalized structure for counties to assist each other when they have something going on - like a wildfire, earthquake, missing person, law enforcement issue, etc. that they can't handle with their own internal resources. A county makes a request to the state - a fire example: "we need 5 type-1 wildfire strike teams, 3 fixed-wing water dropping aircraft, and 4 bulldozers tomorrow morning to help fight this fire that just broke out in our county." OES then puts the request out to surrounding counties who if available, mobilize and show up where needed.

Edit: If you're interested in how practically all emergency incidents are handled, reading up on the Incident Command System (ICS) and National Incident Management System (NIMS).

Anyway, that's getting rambling and more something behind-the-scenes that I know about and have experience with. I'm quite honored to be able to participate in these operations which can be directly lifesaving. AMA.

[jamesknelson]

Thank you so much for this post, and Hello from Tokyo!

I'm currently working on an old fashioned website editing app, with a UI styled after today's note taking apps. I'm hoping that being able to work on my blog across devices without an internet connection - and without a like button or analytics script - will help me focus on what I want to write, instead of focusing on what will "sell". I'm thinking of putting an old fashioned "address book" page where I can list who I'm following, and manually publishing interesting emails I receive in response to my posts. It probably won't become big or earn me any money, but at least I'm having fun building it.

Thanks for reading, and wishing you all a great day too!

[dev_throw]

I love niche forums like HN because it satisfies my itch for mind expanding content. The closest I got to that was OG StumbleUpon, if you know, you know.

I'm unfortunately not passionate about much nowadays; in treatment for stage 4 cancer, so I'm fairly exhausted all the time. I'm glad I can still maintain my cognitive abilities during chemo so I can still do my job.

[eslaught]

I spent my morning working on a science fiction novel. (I won't post more here, but you can find it through my profile if you're interested.)

Are there any other writers in the house?

On a completely unrelated topic, one of my earliest "internet" memories was wandering into open source communities and trying to figure out this CVS thing and connecting it to GNU Savannah so that I could download some code. Those were some very formative times. The community was a bit more "prickly" than we're used to with Rust and some of our modern open source projects, but they were committed to technical excellence, and the fact that a random kid could show up and be in conversation with these people at so clearly far above my own level was (and still is!) nothing short of astonishing.

[sixstringtheory]

I’m loving raising my new kid. Funny enough, one of her favorite books right now is Hello Hello by a Brenden Wenzel. I love the way she’ll carry it over to me and crawl into my lap, waiting for me to begin, turning each page for me, how she says hi to the animals in its pages. I don’t care how many times she wants to repeat it, watching her learn and enjoy reading is absolutely delightful. I feel like I’m giving her a superpower by teaching her to enjoy reading. I’ll also read literature or magazine articles aloud to her, and it’s amazing how talkative she’ll become for the next little while, stringing together sentences of babble.

Personally, one of my life goals is to read a book by an author from each country. It’s a little fuzzy since countries have come and gone through history, then there are territories, autonomous regions etc, and maybe not a huge selection of books from each that have been translated into English. I just want to gain a worldwide perspective. One I’ve been slowly chipping away at and had put down for a while but recently became very relevant again is Reading Lolita in Tehran: a Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi. Also recently finished the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Cixin Liu, The Every by Dave Eggers (not really part of the goal, I just like his work, I‘d recommend that and it’s prequel, The Circle, to this crowd) and am saving the 6th and final volume of Knausgård’s Min Kamp for the long arctic winter ahead.

[MrVandemar]

Hello from Redmond, Western Australia. It's rural, close to the South Coast of WA. We live in a straw-bale house on a farm where we run a small number of cattle, horses and donkeys, and we grow a lot (but not yet all) of our own fruit and vegetables. We steward of 50ha area of pretty pristine Australian bush in a biodiversity hotspot, and we've replanted the roadside and house area and put in some windbreaks with native trees and understory.

I split my attention in far too many directions, but I'm writing audio-description for film and television as a hobby; biodiversity and conservation and hiking (we live in a biodiversity hotspot); and tinkering with code (roguelikes!). I also irrationally love HTML as a markup language.

But I am terrified of the increasingly bleak looking future, and despite putting a lot of effort into conservation and living with as small a footprint as possible, I don't see much hope for our broken civilisation, much less our species.

[pdimitar]

I am passionate about not working and finally doing some hobbies and being a lazy slob at least once a year. At 42 years old I am nowhere near close any of that though and I am slowly losing hope and despairing. But it's the world we're living in, nobody is giving you money for existing so what can you do. I am severely burned out and me switching jobs in the last several years didn't help because I don't want to work no matter where I am, perpetuating the vicious cycle.

Heed this warning, everybody who reads this: learn finances and contracting and negotiations EXTREMELY EARLY in your life. At 22 you should be an expert. If not you'll be a loser like myself who can achieve literally 90% of what any programming task might require of him but has zero savings and is crippled by a burn-out.

Also... try not to be born in a family where the parents are more busy with physically fighting each other and not with raising the kids. :D It helps.

I am grinding hard at my new job and I'll also try to pursue a side hustle with much more money potential. Even though I'd prefer to go somewhere with my wife and not think of any work for 3 years but alas, and again, this is not the world we live in.

Having strong technical intelligence does not correlate with success. Took me 90% of my conscious life to even realize it. Don't be stupid like me.

[mckirk]

To everyone who commented on here:

Thank you so much! Never would I have expected this to work so well, but it has, and it still blows my mind. Seeing how people have used this thread to share glimpses of their life and how people have connected with others honestly makes me so happy. I posted this thread really late last night before going to bed, then woke up and was floored by the response. The internet can still be beautiful, and it's absolutely made my day.

At this point we are at over 600 comments, so I guess it'll be down to luck whether this response here will still manage to bubble up... but that's a very good problem to have I think :) I also wish I could respond to everyone who took the time to comment and show my appreciation directly, but I think I'd need a transformer-model clone of myself if I wanted to achieve that in any reasonable span of time ;)

Anyway, I'm happy if I could improve your day a bit with this. As someone in the comments here rightfully pointed out, a post like this can only work once in a blue moon, and I'm glad that this apparently was the right time for it.

So long! <3

[marceloabsousa]

Thank you for this post. It’s nice to see that it wasn’t buried. From the times of IRC, I do miss the feelings of the early times of the internet.

I’ve the privilege to invest a lot of time thinking about what I should be doing my life professionally. In the end, the best I could think of was to be an enabler for others - which for me meant ‘to give them time’. I realised that I also needed to use my expertise to try and give this purpose a better chance of success. I have a PhD in static analysis and programming languages and got experience with writing code analysers.

So I’m on this quest to combine these two core ‘ideas’ - use static analysis to help developers save time and hope that they can improve their life with that time.

I managed to start a company around this mission and build a product focused on reducing the time on pull requests. it’s been a very hard journey so far and feels like I’m just getting started still. It makes me sad and sometimes lonely to see that we are ever more connected but that many times it feels that no one really cares. In my early days of using the internet it was much easier to make meaningful connections.