Steamboat Spaghetti

This blog... it is written primarily for me.

The target audience is generally me, and whoever among my list of friends are still following my self-reported adventures since 2006.

I feel this urge to say it here and now because it is very easy to get seduced by the many different YouTube channels that I follow that somehow I am writing for a ``monetisable audience''.

It's a blog, a more informal mouthpiece for me to say what I want [subjected to basic levels of civility], a public semi-record of what is going on through my mind at a point in time.

It is a place for me to share in an impersonal personal way my thoughts and feelings, a mental purge out into the void, a testament to my existence long after I am dead, assuming that the hosting company of this blog (Google at the time of writing) is still continuing to do so.

So, what I write here is not likely to be well-received, nor is it supposed to be. And it is okay; gotta keep things real.

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I managed to advance Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine (20th Edition) to page 340/3790 (completing Part 2, Section 6 and about halfway through Section 7 (out of 9)), and have started on Land of Ingary Trilogy: Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, reaching page 48/778. It's a quiet sort of Friday really, as I kept to reading and playing bits of Cyberpunk 2077 (I will be heading back into Night City later on after this post gets published).

The past keeps creeping up on me, and honestly, they generate varying levels of anxiety for some reason. It does make me rather tempted to physically switch off my cell-phone for the next month or so.

But I won't do it because it is unproductive. If I cannot confront my past head-on, I have no hope of moving on into the future; this is the least that I owe for future-me.

Am I bitter? I don't know. There are, perhaps, many things to be bitter about. But then again, there are also many things to be thankful and grateful about---it is axiomatically true that I am who I am today because of what had happened to me in the past, from the past.

I read one of the earliest posts I had here, and am going to update it slightly here, some fifteen years or so later.

Of the people I brought up in the old post, I think I'm still in actual close-ish contact with YT, somewhat close contact with Cui and everyone else has basically faded into the background. And no, I have no idea who ``David Garrett'' is---I might have known who he was then, but I definitely do not know who he is now.

World's still a messed up place, and having a group of friends as a safety net is still a good thing to do. But as the decades roll on by, this group of friends will keep on shrinking till almost nothing is left, not because of malice, but because of how everyone's life choices and needs do evolve over time.

Am I bitter? I still don't know. I think I kind of like living with myself in my own head---I have been doing so for a long time, even before blogging was a thing (think 1990s). Bad skin, more intellectually curious than my peers, combined with voracious reading meant that for a long time, I had been different. Not better, just different.

Eventually I learnt that it was better to play nice, and learnt how to do so. I'm no extravert, but have learnt how to play enough of it to appear that way.

Then somewhere along the way, I think I got brain-damaged. I'm not sure if it is because of the couple of times that I landed quite hard from the throws, or if it was a side effect of growing old, or the side effect of undergoing too much [unnecessary] stress.

Now I'm just not that willing to play nice, especially if it compromises whatever few principles I have.

My whole field of study is a lie. No one is using machine learning for the greater good---they are using it to exert more control, to bend other people's wills to their own. I feel that all these ``artificial intelligence'' and ``machine learning'' are just hiding this more nefarious reason, especially when they are undertaken by corporations. Or people who are intellectually lazy but crave to wield power that is not gained through understanding.

I feel dirty for having signed off fourteen years of my life to get a degree in a field that is actively abused and exploited by conscience-less businesses.

I feel dirty for having developed so much interest and love in computer programming, only to watch the discipline be treated worse than blue-collar workers through hastily put together incomplete requirementsby customers who think that their domain expertise trumps the system design and analysis expertise, instead of working together to get a better system going.

I feel stupid for sticking to having good fundamentals when everyone and their dog just wants a warm body that can check all the superficially thought-up job requirements because it is the ``hottest'' trend out there.

Exploit and abuse; superficiality, and eventually for me, ageism.

The world just makes me sick.

Am I bitter? Maybe a little.

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Honestly though, despite all the ranting, my sabbatical is going rather well. I am mostly better rested and have a little more clarity of mind, that is, until I get triggered for one reason or another. I read, I write, I play some video games, I watch videos, I pray, I think, I get some anxiety about the future, I anger at and then forgive the past.

If there's one thing that I need to adjust, it will be to have more physicality. I have re-started the exercise component of the Hacker's Diet, but have decided to take a rest day today. Now that my hiking boots are back, I want to incorporate more longer walks. And probably to cycle more, using the boots in lieu of the sandals to overcome the stupidity that is bad angkle skin.

I also know now that with high probability, I am not going back to software engineering/machine learning. I would be committing a sunk cost fallacy if I kept on going back to something that was no longer giving me joy, and was starting to actually make me cynical.

It doesn't matter if I have a Masters degree in it. Human Resource departments don't care about the Masters degree in Computer Science anyway---``oh, you don't seem to have AWS certification, Azure certification, CISSP, 10 years of Android, iOS, PHP, Java, Node.js, Python, R, C, C++, and FPGA development; by the way, we can only pay you SGD 4k''. Doesn't matter that I have been writing computer programs in various languages since I was fourteen years old, and it doesn't matter that I have been doing a smorgasboard of system design/implementation for nearly ten years. I mean, yeah, I'm bitching about HR here, but honestly, I just don't have that joy any more. I still love computer programming and system design, but not enough to sell my soul to ungrateful and sometimes downright evil people.

I also don't think that the Lord will be pleased with the talents that He has given me be used this manner that does not glorify Him.

I just need to start figuring out what is the next direction. God has been putting in some directions in my heart about this, and I will need to take some time to apply some Logos on my end and then consult His will to see what would work out.

I want to say, ``never look back'', but really it is more of ``never go back'', since it is important to look back in order to learn and remember the lessons of why one is no longer at where one was.

That's enough for today I think. Till the next update.