Somehow no one there sees that people die after retirement, maybe it makes sense not to retire at all?

as for me, I don't know where I am going to be one year from now, not talking about 30 years.

It makes sense to live life which that is now and then just off myself when time comes.

The most important thing that we have is youth and health, money is just a proxy for that. No amount of stuff worth it really.

So I think it is important to live life wisely, so when the death comes I would be at peace.

Now to understand what that means is hard.

PS. My yoda style writing is this way bc I am severely out of English practice, so I am sorry for that. Also, I think it is charming.

I don't get why people get offended by it. we are not living in a "fair world" whatever that means.

You can die tomorrow or live another 50 years, nobody knows why. All of it is just luck.

I am still going to run out of time sooner or later, I should make it worth it. Otherwise what is the point.

I am trying hard, but I just can't.

The problem is that I see this as a fundamental waste of time.

I mean, I get to eat something and I have roof over my head and I am grateful for this.

The big question is what I am passionate about. I would really really love to work on longevity research, on hard problems.

But I am not even sure about this, I would love to be challenged. I would love to do things that are hard.

I mean, there is no point in all of this, at the very least I could shoot for the stars for the time that I have left on this cursed planet.

I've been sort of doing this backend stuff for 12 years already I don't want to die doing only this, you know.

So I am asking a general question, what would you do in my place.

Thank you,

with all the love in the world, Em

UPD: as always fix typos

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38926840

Points: 4

# Comments: 4

that is the second part of my answer, as soon as you can be noticeable you stop being comprehensible by those whose means of communications are less evolved.

you either can have a peer to peer communication, which is blocked by our capability (and currently speed of light)

or you are unable to comprehend more advanced means of communication.

again to my analogy, ant can see human impact on the planet, but it can't comprehend that it is human impact and not some different form of nature landscape.

> Maybe there is a galaxy-wide civilization but either they don't see the value in transforming the environment? Or maybe there are fundamental limits to technology of which we're not aware, such that no galaxy-wide civilization would ever be able to transform the environment?

if we are speculating here, I think civilizations akin to to ours are extremely common, there is no reason to think that we are special. We are just weak enough to not to be able to connect due to our technological limits.

I also think that advanced civs are pretty common, it is just we are unable to understand and detect them so we think the cosmos is empty.

it is really important to establish some sort of vocab to ensure that we are talking about the same thing here.

By comprehend I mean you, as an ant, "understand" a bug in a sense that you can predict its movements, eat it, force it to go away, or breed the thing if you find its symbiotically useful, in a sense you have internal world model of a thing, comprehend.

hence, ant in a strict sense, does not comprehend humans, it doesn't have world model of us, as a thing. most that it can do, it can see us as a force of nature that somehow happens to it.

on the other hand, we understand it almost perfectly, we can play with them, be benevolent, or malevolent toward their entire "civilization" we can joke with then playing with their communications, we don't get everything but we understand the gist of it.

> It's far more plausible we could have some comprehension of even a very advanced civilization than not. For us to not be able to comprehend them, they would have to entirely be using physics we don't understand at all. Not physics we know + physics we don't, but only physics we don't know about. Which, given how much of low energy physics we understand to great deals of precision, seems extraordinarily unlikely.

no, just no. it is pure speculation, we think too much of ourselves.

that is next to nothing, observable universe is 93 billion light-years around 0.1 stars per cubic light-year (Google response) universe is humongous and very very sparse, our current limit is light speed.

> advanced alien technology

that goes against my second claim, lol, they (if they exist) are capable of observing and understanding us, we can't observe them and, quite likely, we are unable to understand them.

every other civ that is as primitive as we are is bound by the same light speed constraint

could you elaborate please? i can’t say that i understand your statement

this one is tricky how do we define similarity? ants to ants is easy because we can assume they are the same or the difference is negligible.

How much detectable technological signature we emit for others to detect? I am not a physicist but I guess that would be next to nothing for any considerable space distance.

So every other civ that is tractable to us is not detectable (just like us!) Any other civ that in theory can be detectable is incomprehensible just like humans are intractable to ants.

Even if we exist as a civ in current state for a million years (which we won't given out history) our signature will still be negligible for likes of us to detect.

The rest is just empty talking for the talking sake.

it is hard to say almost 99% product is not engineering but what it enables company to do. In a sense this division is psychological: either company cares about engineering and makes it a priority or it doesn't.

I think good proxy would be tooling which company uses, niche languages like Clojure/Erlang, open source activity, well known people in decision making positions rather than specific business type.

It can have its main product not in software, but it can bet on R&D in order to outrun their competition.

And the other way around is true too, that is how you get bad software products which somehow always stays afloat because of exclusive focus on sales.

I agree that AWS is indeed a software product, this one is obvious.

when you ask whether business will halt and die if the system you are responsible for is down or suddenly absent

or

it is going to be a mild inconvenience.

I think, defined like this makes it less ambiguous

edit: fix msg

I am asking because I am working in a company with similar business model and I am trying to figure out what category does my work belong to.

thank you.

EDIT: fix msg