Why? Well... suicides. You're going to start seeing gambling-related suicides in the next couple of years, if you haven't already.

If you can learn anything from the UK, learn this:

- VIP schemes kill people

- Online casinos and video slots kill people faster than sports betting do

- The industry will always "self-regulate" to the point where its still harmful, but palatable enough that law makers will look the other way to keep the tax raised from it coming in

I have skin in the game (I write code that profitably trades on sports betting exchanges), and think it's possible to make gambling a healthy and fun thing to do, but the American market is ~5-10 years behind the UK market, and I can see it's going to get ugly before it gets better (not that the UK market is perfect yet, either).

I think Artemis will be cancelled by the end of the year, unfortunately. If the heat shield doesn't hold up as some observers fear/have warned, perhaps by the end of April.

I hope I'm wrong.

The Amazon flywheel is all about reducing costs to consumers. The moment that stops happening, consumers can get caught by offers elsewhere, and the flywheel can start to go backwards.

This applies at a business level (most software shops shouldn't have full-time book keepers on staff, for example), but applies even more in the AI age.

I use LLMs to help me code the boring stuff. I don't want to write CDK, I don't want to have to code the same boilerplate HTML and JS I've written dozens of times before - they can do that. But when I'm trying to implement something core to what I'm doing, I want to get more involved.

Same with writing. There's an old joke in the writing business that most people want to be published authors than they do through the process of writing. People who say they want to write don't actually want to do the work of writing, they just want the cocktail parties and the stroked ego of seeing their name in a bookshop or library. LLMs are making that more possible, but at a rather odd cost.

When I write, I do so because I want to think. Even when I use an LLM to rubber duck ideas off, I'm using it as a way to improve my thinking - the raw text it outputs is not the thing I want to give to others, but it might make me frame things differently or help me with grammar checks or with light editing tasks. Never the core thinking.

Even when I dabble with fiction writing: I enjoy the process of plotting, character development, dialogue development, scene ordering, and so on. Why would I want to outsource that? Why would a reader be interested in that output rather than something I was trying to convey. Art lives in the gap between what an artist is trying to say and what an audience is trying to perceive - having an LLM involved breaks that.

So yeah, coding, technical writing, non-fiction, fiction, whatever: if you're using an LLM you're giving up and saying "I don't care about this", and that might be OK if you don't care about this, but do that consciously and own it and talk about it up-front.

8-bit. 16KiB of RAM. BASIC as the programming language. 640x256 resolution in 8 colours.

I could make that thing sing in an hour. It was hard to get it to do much, but then the difficulty was the fun thing.

By the time we got to the early 2000s and I could buy something with more RAM, CPU and storage than I could ever reasonably max out for the problems I was interested in at the time, I lost something.

Working within constraints teaches you something, I think. Doing more with less makes you appreciate the "more" you eventually end up with. You develop intuitions and instincts and whole skillsets that others never had to develop. You get an advantage.

I don't think we should be going back to 8-bit days any time soon, but in the context of this post, I want novices to try and build software on an A18 chip, I want learners to be curious enough to build a small word game (Hangman will do at first, but the A18 will let them push way, way past that into the limits of something that starts to feel hard all of a sudden), to develop the intuition of writing code on a system that isn't quite big enough for their ideas. It'll make them thirsty for more, and better at using it when they get it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro

If major advanced economies are able to move their entire grid away from coal, it means the entire grid globally can move from coal.

"Ah", the critics say, "but manufacturing is so much more complex!"

Really? These are not countries without manufacturing. They have data centres stacked with the latest generation of Nvidia chips, electric rail, major capital cities, populations of millions...

... and of course, China agrees and is trying to move towards decarbonisation of their grid.

Yes, it'll take time, but it'll take even longer if you never start.

My hot take is that its almost certainly a recruitment and training issue: there seem to be just enough bad apples getting through and not having poor behaviours trained out of them to mean the self-reported "these guys are idiots" numbers are higher than in other parts of the World.

> "I'm so lost, anxious and filled with doubt"

You sound burned out. Deal with that first.

Moving country at this point might not have been the optimal thing to do, but I wouldn't suggest you give up just yet: it does give you a new environment where all those old habits and circles and things are no longer around you. You get to reset. You get to define a new you. But you're going to have to do it slowly, and you're unlikely going to get a whole lot of answers from LLMs or shrooms, and a lot more from asking yourself - and answering honestly and openly - some questions you might not have thought about deeply (as in, repeatedly over many weeks or months, without distraction), in a long time, if ever.

What interests you?

Each word matters.

"What" points to a thing, and is a more interesting question than "Why am I tired?", or "How do I fix this?". You can probably write a list of things, but "Why" is about blame or justification and "How" is about method, technique or skill. "What", just is.

"Interests" is not about "passion" or "love" or "desire" or "think will make the most money". It is about what makes your brain feel tickled. It's the thing you can start to create (not what you consume), where you start diving in for 5 minutes and you're still there 2 hours later. I don't mean doom scrolling or media you like - rule out anything where you are not learning deeply about something that will help you create, or creating something directly.

"You" is obviously important. Don't try and build your direction based on what other people do if you're feeling like this. Don't try and copy - try and be your authentic self. You can ask others what interests them and think "Huh, me too, I hadn't thought of that", but don't be diving deep into internals of crypto or LLMs or buying a farm or becoming a buddhist unless those things interest you.

Again: What. Interests. You?

The answer might be "nothing". That's a sign of definite burn-out. It would not surprise me based on what you have written.

Take some time for yourself, explore your new home, go and see some sights and read some books (fiction as well as non-fiction - there's more truth in them, in my experience), and for a while (a month or two, maybe longer), just allow yourself to follow your nose. Focus on your physical and mental health for a while. Eat good quality food. Rest. Consider avoiding stimulants like alcohol and recreational drugs. See the next few months as a sort of extended vacation where you get a chance to reset.

You ask about how not to "waste your time" and how do you "focus" - maybe the best thing you can do for you in the long-term right now is waste your time and focus on nothing. Had you considered that as an option?

After a while - because you're capable, intelligent, conscientious, this is almost inevitable - an idea will start to emerge that you want to focus on. It might not be what you were expecting. It might be building something for yourself (I love writing software for an audience of one: me), or learning a new skill or applying for a job. It could be writing a book or producing art, or learning a musical instrument. It might be in your comfort zone, it might not be.

Whatever it is, you'll look at it and think "This interests me".

"I will write X. Once I have sold $Y worth of licenses, I'll open source it".

Every purchaser is contributing towards the future state of it being open sourced. It balances the needs of developers to need to live and pay bills vs most us wanting to get our code out there. It breaks the monthly recurring revenue model most customers hate. It incentivises early adopters to "invest" by getting early access, but means uncertain just have to wait.

Doing this with articles, books, music, whatever - all sounds pretty cool to be honest. It requires creators to radically transform their human need to maximise revenue from "hits" though.

I'd wager that one day, his grandchildren (possibly even children), are going to call for his arrest and imprisonment, as a means to stop themselves being judged for his sins.

It's not specific to software, it's the entire World of business. Most knowledge work is translation from one domain/perspective to another. Not even knowledge work, actually. I've been reading some works by Adler[0] recently, and he makes a strong case for "meaning" only having a sense to humans, and actually each human each having a completely different and isolated "meaning" to even the simplest of things like a piece of stone. If there is difference and nuance to be found when it comes to a rock, what hope have we got when it comes to deep philosophy or the design of complex machines and software?

LLMs are not very good at this right now, but if they became a lot better at, they would a) become more useful and b) the work done to get them there would tell us a lot about human communication.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Adler

Some suggestions: I know none of us like "the algorithms choosing", but I think we can do better than alphabetical order. Number of clicks you see (popularity), or number of inbound links google tells you about would be good.

I also think you've gone to great effort, but it's still very light in some categories. I hope you keep going - what's your data source? Are you tracking outbound links from the ones you have indexed to find new blogs?

LLMs are good at dealing with things they've seen before, not at novel things.

When novel things arise, you will either have to burn a shed ton of tokens on "reasoning", hand hold them (so you're doing advanced find and replace in this example, where you have to be incredibly precise and detailed about your language, to the point it might be quicker to just make the changes), or you have to wait until the next trained model that has seen the new pattern emerges, or quite often, all of the above.

I see from other replies that you now understand the code reasonably well and feel you can expand/extend it while keeping it in BASIC. However, I note you've also done project where you automatically ported Fortran to Lua - are you not interested in trying to do something similar for performance/maintainability reasons? Is there an advantage in keeping it in PowerBASIC?

I've wish listed the game, and look forward to playing it, it sounds like great fun - even the manual sounds like a good read.

But wait, there's another list out there you're going to find tomorrow. And then another list, and another, and another, and they all have this same quality of having some books you've read and like, and nothing by Neal Stephenson. Then, when you're in the book store you see a book called "100 Sci-Fi Books To Read Before You Die", and you note it has these qualities but there are 80 books in there you've not read yet.

If you're busy pulling a sub-list together, you're doing the thing I'm suggesting: you're editing and curating, not just seeing the list in its own right. I'm definitely not suggesting you take wild guesses - note the magazines I read to find my own "next thing", and even that method is problematic.

I devour reading material. I love books - fiction, non-fiction, audio books, trade paperbacks, newly minted hardbacks, old musty stuff in a basement, all of it - and subscribe to Literary Review and Granta, and check in on London Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement when I can. I subscribe to quality newspapers and periodicals, and I'd rather spend an evening in a bookshop with late opening hours than a nightclub. Reading is great. Everyone should do a lot more of it - it's food for the soul.

But reading lists put together by other people aren't good for you. If anything, they get in the way of you figuring out what you want to read.

Here's some simple maths: life expectancy in my home country is 83 years for females, 79 years for males. I am male, have multiple (not imminently life-threatening), health conditions, and so with a little maths I can expect to live perhaps 25 more years. Sobering. But it is reality.

If I read a book a week (which is way higher a rate than the average reading rate, and slow for a fan of reading - but I like to absorb books a little more slowly), I am going to max out at 1,300 books in the rest of my life.

Most people read a few books a year. At that rate I'd have just 75-100 books to read in the rest of my time alive. If that were my number, I should probably make each one of those books count in some way.

You should do this maths yourself, and across a few dimensions. You only have so many books, films, music gigs, vacations/holidays, restaurant visits, whatever left in your life.

As an aside, you only have so many side projects, business ideas you'll get a chance to build and test in the market, and opportunities to invest in somebody else's ideas. You should do those maths too: figure out what your error bars could look like. They're probably not as optimistic as you'd hope for.

At first, this might feel terrifying. I prefer to see it as "focusing".

Do you really want to read all 842 of the books on that list? Is this the oeuvre you want to invest a sizeable chunk of your remaining life in? Are you confident this will make you feel whole, that you will get to the end and have no regrets about making this your mission? If you yes to all these questions, and are sure: brilliant, you have found a purpose in life few others ever will. Godspeed and good luck!

For most people though, lists like this are just another todo list that create a sense of inadequacy, FOMO or regret.

In 1880, the designer William Morris said "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful".

Apply this to your reading lists[0]. Curate. Edit. Find what makes your heart sing or your brain grow, and dive in.

Do not worry about what other people think you "should" read. Do not read "the great classics" if they do not interest you. Safely ignore award winning writers - from Nobel laureates, to Pulitzer Prize winners, to Booker short-listed authors - unless something about that book speaks to you and you almost yearn for it.

Because when you do that, you'll realise a) most books are junk to you (but might be great for someone else), and b) that as you start to develop the habit of reading the things that you genuinely want to, it becomes a healthy, mind-nourishing obsession.

Come on in, the pages are lovely.

[0] Actually, apply this rule to everything you can in your life. It can be hard to start, but worthwhile.