My current project is a mid-century modern-inspired dining table. I'm delighted by the design, and I'm tickled to be building it. Not all projects are as fun. Last year I built a very large liquor cabinet that involved rather more problem-solving than expected. I should've charged more for it, and I am, as ever, grateful that my partner works a salaried job that comes with health insurance.

As a small point of order, I was never actually asked to add an RSS feed to a DBMS. I've definitely implemented things that made just as much sense to me though.

I remain delighted by how much that GitHub comment still resonates with folks, and I remain astonished that the issue is still open after almost 8 years.

ETA: I remain wholly unqualified to discuss the state of actual agriculture and homesteading. My partner and I garden, but make no pretense of ever having our small home be self-sustaining economically or even in food.

It is an incredible comment, haha, as you can tell I still think about it semi-regularly. Incredible that the issue is still open as well.

Best of luck with the dining table! I took a good look through your site while I was looking back up that thread that I remembered and your pieces look great. Actually, if you're in the Upper Valley, you probably aren't far at all from where I grew up. It's over near Windsor, around Mt. Ascutney.

Edit: If you or your partner like knitting, I'm sure I could prevail upon my parents to offer some of our yarn to you as a gift for the inspiration!

We're in West Fairlee now, but I've driven through Windsor a million times going to and from the Claremont MakerSpace when we were still renting outside of WRJ. I love Ascutney and really ought to get down and climb it again.

Please feel free to drop a line the next time you're in the area.

Ascutney is great -- I definitely recommend starting from the Brownsville trailhead, there's an oddly beautiful view partway up where the abandoned mining operation has some remaining tracks leading out along a thin little cliff and you get an incredible view of all the fields and forest because of the rocks that blocking the trees from growing beneath the cliffside.

How's the diner in Windsor? Despite driving by it, I've never been in. It sure looks the part!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_donkey

Why does everyone who sits behind a computer long to be out in the fields or workshops?

My flip answer to that is that they haven't spent their youth on a farm, worrying about a hailstorm that wipes out the entire wheat crop for the year, or you lose 25% of your cattle herd to a recently diagnosed virus diarrhea. My grandparents were homesteaders who at some point in their life lived in houses with dirt floors.

The fact of life was that due to technology, the productivity of the American farm increased by almost two orders of magnitude during my Grandfather's lifetime. This meant that a tractor that my dad purchased when I was about 3 for the equivalent of 1500 bushels of wheat cost about 9000 by the time I went to college.

Thus, the economics of a family farm, or sole dude wanting to get away from the computer and grow something is painful.

A couple of kids that do an excellent job of building a homestead are the couple behind the youtube channel Ambition Strikes. They call at an off-grid homestead, but through their unbounded energy and creativity have created their own substantial mini-grid. I have a lot of respect for them and what they have done.

The article notes It is difficult to think of any field more forcibly disentangled from any sort of understanding of the impact of your labor than the majority of positions in tech. This is discussed in some detail in the book "Stiffed" by Susan Faludi. She discusses the community nature of the naval shipyards, in which everyone apparently was connected meaningfully to their work and the workers around them. She contrasts that with the workers in aerospace whose work is so abstract that it was hard for a professional working there to describe to their kids what exactly they do all day.

I'm guessing from the other thread, this was way back in Rickover's youth as well? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43450884

https://youtu.be/R6-0_VEl978?t=4m14s

It's the ol' "person selling you X didn't get rich from X, they got rich selling people X".

Few of us can replicate their energy and resourcefulness.

For similar, but documenting tree farming life in NZ there's Marty T .. which is almost 100% field fixing and shed restoring old tractors, bulldozers, excavators, and any bit of machinery related activity that might be useful in a rural setting - power from hydro, building rafts to move machinery, etc.

I came to understand the "purposelessness" of my career very early on; when I decommissioned a bare metal server from a datacenter after finishing the deploy of it's replacement and realised that the old server was the first unit I'd racked when I started in the position 4 years ago.

That was ~20 years ago. Nothing I've had a hand in building / maintaining has "survived" for more than ~7 years.

My Dad worked to build houses. Prior to my IT career I'd laboured for him and played my small part in the creation of many homes around where I grew up. They'll be there for a hundred years maybe.

Quitting the ephemeral world of IT to work on building a homestead and creating tangible things that directly keep humans alive seems like an obvious calling to me.

The constant evolution of "tech" is a blessing and a curse.

The companies? The websites? Google, for example, has been in existence since 1998. If you're working on a farm, the crops don't live longer than a year. The livestock longer than that, but probably not decades - my (limited) understanding is that most cows are slaughtered around age 2 or 3. But the farm itself can, in certain circumstances, last for generations.

If you're talking houses, sure, solid walls can last decades, centuries, millennia even (cf the Pyramids). However, I think this is because stone is particularly durable. Roofs, windows, doors, anything that isn't made of really good masonry will tend to decay much quicker than that. Even states like the Roman Republic and Empire (which had probably a good ~2000 year run if we count from 509BC to the fall of Constantinople in 1453) will eventually crumble and fall.

Now a tech company is a newer type of institution than a farm, but some of them are quite old - GE was founded in 1892. IBM was founded in 1911. We can also take Bell telephone and Standard Oil, both of whom were broken up by anti-trust cases, but whose descendants still live on today, as other examples of tech companies that have had lifespans similar to or greater than houses or farms.

Of course, I understand that "I built some software/racked some servers for a company 20 years ago and they're still business" isn't the same as "I put the bricks in that wall twenty years ago and the house is still there". So I agree that the individual artifacts we create in the tech industry are somewhat fleeting, compared to things made of metal and stone, even if, compared to things like music or other performing arts, where the song disappears the minute you stop playing, software running on computers is relatively lasting. And artifacts created with software, while they are a relatively new thing, may prove quite durable. Films made with Final Cut, or songs made with Pro Tools, or heck, even video games like Doom, may prove to outlast every house that you ever worked on. It's possible that 200 years from now, people will still be watching YouTube videos made today, even if, in a Ship of Theseus like fashion, every line of code and every server that YouTube is currently using has been replaced since then.

Some previous roles I was involved in solving "this could end the business" situations, so I do thank you for making me realise that I laid bricks (or more importantly; helped detect and repair serious foundation problems) for my employers.

It's not that it has strictly to do with being outside or away from the computer (that's nice though) but for me it's that you still get to build and be proud of what you've done.

When I do work away from the computer and more in farm/homestead situations, I'm still drawn to using technology to solve problems (e.g. Automating certain tasks with microcontrollers), so it's not a rejection of my $job.

I think it's that I'm a builder and a problem solver at heart, I love finding issues, fixing them and being glad. Homestead is often that 100x.

Have to disagree with the article though, I don't think it has anything to do with a mythos.

Are you saying this from experience homesteading? Or from imagining what homesteading is like?

Once you get past the storybook fantasy version of homesteading, a lot of it is drudgery and unwelcome surprises. You may love finding and fixing problems now, but when the problems are coming faster than you can fix them, each one requires a lot of labor (or cash) to fix, and you haven't touched your fun project for months because you're too busy putting out critical fires, it doesn't seem so fun any more.

Of course farming and carpentry will be more fun to a software engineer who is doing it as a hobby or in retirement, than the work they did in their job. Even if you “switch” to it as a source of income, it is far different to have another career and set of skills to fall back on, than to be doing it out of necessity.

Now, every now and again, when I am stuck working late on a deal and all I want to do is go home and hack on my latest project, I wonder if I made the right choice. But ultimately I know I wouldn't be so excited to fire up an IDE if I relied on it for my livelihood.

As for farming, I grew up in a rural area so never had any illusions about it. I do admire the resourcefulness and ingenuity of many farmers, but I know it's not for me. Most of the retirees I know like to do "a spot of gardening" in their retirement, and honestly I think the kind of micro-scale "farming" a lot of office workers dream of is not that distinguishable from gardening, so many of them will probably get their wish eventually.

Golden handcuffs. I hate em too.

I'm sure doing homesteading at the fringes of Canada is different than doing it in the middle of Europe.

I think that for certain individuals that sort of mythological status ascribed to being a frontiersman or a person who can do everything themselves definitely influences how they perceive a potential job or method of living.

Thanks for reading though!!

In conversations with the IT world, I have definitely found a pretty high level of romanticism" often associated with the idea of leaving the modern world behind, going off-grid and running a farm.

It dovetails with the same kind of naive transcendentalism that espouses that natural = good, a simpler kind of living, etc.

The difference is doing it out of necessity vs. doing it out of choice. Nobody fetishizes being worked to the bone in fear of making ends meet. Tech people are by and large well-educated and comfortable enough to dream of a utopia where they can be close to nature and do tasks that feel meaningful and human in an of themselves (vs. hyper-abstracted acronym-laden functional teams value-adds that often only provide the indirect satisfaction of "I'm doing my job and my boss is happy"). "I made a chair" and "I grew some carrots" are instantly relatable and valuable to anyone.

Source: I quit my tech job and moved to the woods 8 years ago, but would only do so because I don't need to worry about grinding a survival out of it.

1. We crave tactile skillful experiences

We have thousands of years of evolution that encourage us to want to use our bodies skillfully. We're a tool-using species and humans that didn't derive some intrinsic satisfaction from manipulating the physical world deftly probably didn't survive long enough to make babies.

It just straight up feels good to watch ones own hands turn a piece of wood into a utensil, a hank of yarn into a wearable garment, or a patch of dirt into edible vegetables.

2. We want to feel resourceful and secure

We have emotions like anxiety and worry to get us to prepare for the future. Of course, we can't fully predict the future, so part of that is a general feeling of resourcefulness. "I don't know what's coming, but I know I can handle it when it does."

Working in tech is in many ways the opposite of that. We're like hothouse flowers or thoroughbred racehorses. We are fantastically good at this one specific thing that happens to be highly valued right now. But there's an underlying anxiety that if the world stops needing more software... what's our plan B?

You don't have to go full apocalyptic prepper mentality to have a gnawing worry in the back of your head that if this whole software thing doesn't work out, what else am I good for?

A craving for manual skills that transcend trends, time, and specific corporate employment is a natural hedge against that frightening level of specialization.

But speaking as someone who has a small herd of sheep, a few pigs every year and processes his own 50~ meat birds on the property every year. I know how much it sucks to watch a lamb and mother die in childbirth. I know the itch of thousands of hay cuts after clearing a field of bales and putting them up.

And I also have a 2g fiber line to my house and work a tech job remotely for my primary income. My desire to do the land things is not based on mythology. It's because the food tastes better when I helped raise it. It's a slight independence from some of the modern just-in-time food conveniences. It also means I have to work with my neighbors, cause who else is gonna help you cull a dying sheep in a pouring rain and put it down and get it in the compost?

I don't do these things because they're easy. I do them because I feel a little more alive once it's over and I've shared a difficult moment, or a delicious meal with a friend or my children.

I've never been so proud as when I figured out how to rig up the water nipple in a way that the pigs wouldn't rip it off the wall for the umpteenth time. And my solution probably wouldn't work for most other farmers. It's a design of circumstance and an appreciation of material and the brutal-ness of animals. Livestock are 10x worse on your designs than your average web site user.

In fact, I'm also very grateful that I got to try a wide range of shitty manual labor job as a student. So many people would kill for a cushy office job.

EDIT: Might I also add, I think some engineers - especially those that have reached FIRE, enjoy the idea of LARPing a homestead / farming life. If you have enough money to not feel the stress, you can have a smaller farm.

The harsh reality is that operating a small farm can be brutal. You're at the very bottom of the food-chain, as far as the agricultural business goes.

They still had some dairy cows though.. and I still remember (over 30 years later!) the almost physical wall of smell that assaulted you going into that barn when it was all closed up because it was -20ºF outside. Nothing romantic about that!

What gets me about the homesteading fantasy: it’s, like, so incredibly easy to disabuse oneself of the notion that digging up tubers is a good time.

I gotta admit, that on a day where it's just about chasing some elusive bug or bugs, even I say to myself: "What the hell did I do today?" even though I might have spent 8-10 solid hours actively working. If the bug is hard enough to find I feel like I accomplished nothing nor have anything to show for it.

And sometimes, when you add to the fact that as devs we have all these perks in the office like free snacks, being able to go out for lunch, free sodas, free coffee, or WFH etc. and for what? We accomplished nothing!

Conversely, you might meet blue collar workers who has to, absolutely has to commute to a job site (no WFH for them), busts their rear to get something real and tangible done. Like for example, setting up electrical, or building a frame, or fixing a major plumbing issue, or doing drywall, or painting an entire house, or doing an entire roof in the heat etc. And sometimes these people barely get their bathroom, lunch and/or coffee breaks. It really makes us seem spoiled in comparison.

And yes, I know that it's kinda denigrating to use the word "real" to describe anything but software, but, what I mean, is that most non-software people only understand finished and shipped software as real. They don't that understand DB schemas, software specs, MVPs, for example, etc. is also real as well. And they certainly don't understand time spent on thinking about data structures and algorithms as anything real or tangible. Especially if you spend most time planning properly before you code.

Anyways, we want to prove, at least to ourselves, that we can actually create something that everyone can see, touch, feel, pick up, eat, stand on, sit on, etc. And we want to prove that we can have same high standards and craftsmanship this kind of work that we have for code.

Yeah, some of us have a chip on our shoulder about that.

When I was growing up, the metric for having done something were things like: All the hay is baled and we moved it all into a loft, or we finished shingling the roof.

Working in a technical position, it feels much vaguer. Maybe I finished a project, but then again, maybe there's a bug, and I'm back working on what I thought was done. Maybe I made a tool accessible online, but now there's a new tech stack and my tool is irrelevant unless I update it. It feels very Sisyphean at times I suppose, in a way that making a physical product and then seeing someone use it or eat it really doesn't.

It's interesting that it feels like that though, because I certainly didn't have to throw hay only one time, and I didn't have to scrape paint from a wall only one time. I suppose I'm interested in why it feels more real and less repetitive, and maybe part of that is what you point out, that people outside of the field just don't understand what the work that tech workers do consists of in actuality.

An ex-manager had a phrase that stuck with me, that we are building the factories. Ultimately software gets used to do something, there are lots little "products" being emitted each time it is used. If you are looking at physical products on the shelf, people don't normally think "who fixes the factory that built this when something goes wrong? who makes the factory more efficient so the producer doesn't go bankrupt? who changes the factory when a new design needs to be produced?". This kind of work is rather ephemeral and Sisyphean by nature, so sometimes I like to remind myself that there are these tangible products people rely on but they are just a layer removed. (Nowadays I'm two layers removed - I build a factory to build factories, i.e. compilers and platforms and such).

(This particular business line essentially processed data - it was much more complicated than that but fundamentally was remote-sensing -> data-in -> data-out, so the "data factory" metaphore kinda made sense in that setting).

I feel this every time I touch CSS. Sometimes I spend hours just fiddling with it, and my code commit is a few characters. And what's worse, it's the thing I stumbled on in the first 10 minutes of debugging, but that, for some reason, never worked that I tried again out of desperation, after not getting anything else to work (an hour later) and that I'm now trying again for some reason. Yet, for some reason, it works this time. CSS makes me feel stupid.

Most / all of software work, including coding, is actually architecture / design (at varying levels of zoom) the equivalent to construction in buildings is fully automated in software (compilation etc)

"Plato saw Diogenes washing lettuces, came up to him and quietly said to him, 'Had you paid court to Dionysius, you wouldn't now be washing lettuces,' and that he with equal calmness made answer, 'If you had washed lettuces, you wouldn't have paid court to Dionysius."

- Simplify (whether or not this is misguided, it's part of the appeal).

- Autonomy. Being able to, even partially, move off-grid decreases your reliance on society.

- Physical / nature. Sitting at a desk all day definitely has a toll.

There's several No true Scotsman comments here, but IMO there's nothing wrong with attempting this lifestyle. If someone decides (and can afford) to live more simply, it doesn't bother me any. Good for them!

I think the negativity might be because every frikin' one of them tries to turn into a snake oil selling influencer, and we're just seeing influencer fatigue setting in.

That scene in Office Space where he complains about having 8 different bosses really resonates with me.

I love programming, if I could get paid to work on what I wanted, how I wanted, when I wanted, I would (and hopefully at some point I will), but run of the mill corporate JIRA ticket churn isn't exactly something that deeply satisfies my soul, and I can understand fantasizing about getting as far away from that as possible.

I would rather posit that most tech jobs have a negative societal impact and it's difficult to find a company which isn't focusing on fucking the maximum amount of profit out of their customers while utilising the cheapest lubricant.

But there are a lot of tech jobs that aren't like that as well, and I think people have similar feelings about wanting to escape into a more natural world in those ones too. The sum total of which are positive and which are negative is certainly up for debate though. I actually have another post I started writing about the negative second-order effects of certain outcomes of software development in the last decade or so.

Thanks to tech companies, people can communicate more easily with each other.

People call Google out for being an ad company. Their mission is to organize the world's information and make it accessible. Showing you an ad for burgers near your house when your recent YouTube watches have all been for burger reviews is doing exactly that.

Facebook helps people connect and stay in touch over long distances (and so does email). I have a brother in Canada, I live in France. We talk via WhatsApp. Basically every person I know living in a country far from their family uses WhatsApp or a similar service to communicate. Once again, those much vilified ads that everyone always complains about are helping people find things that might improve their lives.

Netflix entertains people. It gives them an escape from the tedium of their boring office jobs in tech companies (;D)

Amazon (and Ali Baba) has unified the world's market place. You can now get basically anything from anywhere, delivered to your house in less than a week.

The long tail of platforms like YouTube and Instagram have enabled hobbists and enthusiasts that would have spent their whole lives in isolation to connect and share their passions.

We're having this discussion on an online communications platform made by a tech company (Y Combinator). It is enabling us to both learn more about the world and improve errors in our thinking by communicating, despite that fact that we very probably live in completely separate world and will never have a chance to meet in real life.

The abundance of computing power and internet connection has spread knowledge throughout the world and is probably responsible for a fair amount of scientific progress. Any 10 year old with a basic smartphone now has access to basically the sum total of humanity's knowledge, especially if they use SciHub and LibraryGenesis.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to read a Wikipedia article about the Roman empire, maybe in Dutch or German to improve my knowledge of those languages, using Google Translate if I have to, and thank God that I get to live in these wonderful times. <3

> so few Americans are familiar with the actual work behind jobs in the agricultural sector or related ones, I would argue that for many Americans the reality of this type of work is almost indistinguishable from fables or myth in their psychological context, due to lack of exposure. Due to that seeming separation from their mental context of what work is, it enhances the feeling of escapism which this work-fantasy provides

These fantasies always seem perplexing to those of us who grew up with exposure to actual farming life. Running a modern farm is hard work. Taking it a step further to the idea of homesteading would bring unthinkable amounts of labor, difficulty, and a realization that the old office job wasn't so bad after all.

Of the few people who actually pursue these fantasies, it usually takes the form of a hobby farm or some backyard gardening with ample injections of cash to keep things moving.

I think when you're someone who grew up with exposure to the lifestyle of farming, it gets easier to see that the escapism is possible because of how rare it is for people to interact with people whose main employment is farming on a regular basis.

It is honestly pretty interesting from a historical perspective to think about what this means as a shift in the populace's opinion towards certain kinds of work, because we're really entering unforeseen territory in US history where no one will even really understand first-hand what a version of the US where the vast majority of humans living there are engaged in agricultural labor on a regular basis lookd like, if that makes sense.

Sure you save money by milking your cow, but how much is one vet visit? Unless it's in your blood, trying to go from techies to farmers is just stupid.

Edit to add: one of the principal differences between software and farming is we are one "git checkout" away from having another chance to fix it. In agriculture, you get another chance... next year.

There are a multitude of reasons why one might not like being a programmer, but most of them have nothing to do with programming itself. It's other people. Other engineers or managers or parasites. People who think antisocial behavior is okay, or worse, that it's the way to get ahead in life.

Toxic people make everything suck. I worked extremely hard to stop being even a little toxic. I wish more people would realize how their behavior affects others.

A few years ago something snapped and I started cancelling things like landscapers. Even trivial crap like mowing my own lawn and cooking my own meals is, on average, significantly more rewarding than sitting at a computer all day. There is definitely a psychological impact to letting other parties manage large aspects of your residence.

If "shower thoughts" are helpful to you, try a few hours of hard labor in the sun. You may be amazed to discover how far the spectrum of background metal processing capabilities extends. Any notion that time spent at the computer is proportional to progress with code/work/etc. is absolutely insane to me. It's almost as if you get more things done on the computer the less you use it.

A Georgist perspective on this would be that it's the decreased costs in other goods and services which have (partially) contributed to the increased cost in housing, as any increase in disposable income allows you to bid up the price of land. Not everyone does, but enough do so that it has this overall effect, and the effect is stronger where housing supply is already limited.

The lack of exposure isn’t accidental. Romanticizing farming doesn’t extend to romanticizing farmers. It’s not like you couldn’t go to a county fair, take a stroll around and ask yourself what this thing is all about. Or, actually talk with the farmer at your farmer’s market. Keeping the people at arm’s length is key to maintaining the romantic idea of farming as something to be escaped to rather than a difficult and sometimes dangerous job. Even some reading about silo safety would be edifying.

Eventually, you get tired of it. Doing something simple becomes ever more attractive. Me, I still teach tech, but I also build stone walls.

It's not so much about ownership, but about operating on concrete things that you can point to, instead of spinning up virtual machines in the cloud.

Building software without agile or tickets or meetings feels just as good. It's what I've been doing for the last five years. It feels nice again.

I think programmers - good ones at least - like building things, like seeing things go. We care deeply about what we can make in the world. We are in a OODA loop, where we put in effort, fix things, and they get better.

But often building stuff becomes jammed up, organizationally. There's other people injecting priorities and concerns. There's a whole org, that's utterly dependent on us, that thinks it want things, but don't understand what we are bargaining over, doesn't have the essential capabilities to see the truths, affinities, struggles, and joys we feel. We're on our own island of empathy with products. And the outcome is always so unknown, riding this organization ship.

The idea of going out there homesteading speaks, to me, to a desire to have a loop where there's less people injecting themselves. A very recent highlight from Tools for Conviviality (Ivan Illich, 1973) comes to mind,

"Survival, justice, and self-defined work. I take these to be fundamental to any convivial society."

Via https://bsky.app/profile/gordon.bsky.social/post/3ll5hgh3el2...

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tjic

Or have "income from a publisher in New York", a criticism a contemporary made of Thoreau in his Walden period.

I'm surprised nobody else has said it yet, but this name is ridiculous and probably at least partially why this post isn't being taken all that seriously.

After some point you'd rather you didn't have to do that 9-5 at all and become depressed a bit by the fact you have to spend so much time a day on something that doesn't fundamentally concern you and you don't therefore fundamentally care about. The fact it takes up your time and energy, and you don't get to get out of it until you are old and worn out unless you hit some lottery in the meanwhile.

I wouldn't say it will suck the life out of you. I suppose that depends on your personality. But I'd agree that there's more physical labor involved, even today with modern machines, than most people fantasizing about the idea probably realize.

But even knowing how hard the work can be, there are days when I step away from the keyboard at 5pm and head out to shovel manure or harvest crops for a few hours with a lighter mood than I had all day, because there's something "real" about it that's refreshing after a day of working with the unreal.

So I get why people dream about it. I'd just warn them to spend a week or two's vacation as an "intern" on a farm to see what it's like before quitting the keyboard job and buying 40 acres.

Metaphorically, farming can be far less life-sucking. There is something refreshing about just getting stuff done without any of the corporate BS to navigate. I just think that a lot of people in the tech industry aren't seeing the downsides, and only see the ways in which it's better than their career.

I definitely wouldn't tell a tech guy with no farming experience to just jump into it. Get a few chickens or something, and see what it's like to depend on you for food and water every day, whether it's 100 degrees or a blizzard that day. Or plant a 10x10 garden in your backyard and see what it's like to pull weeds in July heat.

And don't expect to make money (or even break even) at it. Farming today only makes money if you go large-scale, which isn't what anyone dreams about, or if you find a niche and are really good at marketing something like artisan cheese. Even people who know what they're doing struggle to make that work.

Is it though? It's not like the repetitive work of milking cows or shoveling manure every day is any less of a drudgery than office work.

And, if anything, farmers hereabouts seem to be more prone to the sort of self-destructive behaviours you'd expect from people who's life lacks meaning. Drinking all you've earned for example. Or getting into fights over nothing in particular.

For many, the "homesteading" labor is an fulfilling and concrete complement to lucrative but abstract desk work, not a replacement.

It takes the place of idle hobbies like consuming more media on screens, lifting abitrary weights or running in place on a treadmill, etc

It's natural to assume we'd be pretty deeply wired to productively tend to our own lives and our own well-being in very concrete way, and many people who intentionally take up neglected homesteading tasks at their own pace and convenience often find it ameliorates many of the odd feelings of depression, anxiety, restlessness, etc that hung over them previously.

We probably shouldn't be doing anything in particular all day, but doing concrete productive things in a world where so many things are abstract and alienating can provide great balance.

Every industry that has suffered from over production ends up cheapening and removing significant elements of artisanal beauty. If the AI hype is to be believed we are in the cusp of that for software engineering and just about any other knowledge work for that matter.

Fields -> factory -> office -> ?

Second, even if my job gets destroyed by changing tech that doesn't make farming an attractive option. It's dangerous, it wears your body down super hard, and the pay is garbage (which isn't very just tbh, but economics rarely are). I don't know what I'll do if my career goes up in a poof of smoke next year, but farming will be very low on the list no matter what I do.

I literally didn't start a software career until nearly 30 because I heard this growing up.

I'm growing very weary of all of these world-ending proclamations.

As AI takes over creative work, we won’t need humans to sit at a desk, so they can be employed in subsistence farming while AI VCs make record profits.

I like reading discussion on this topic. Not that I've ever seriously considered this, but still interesting to read about.

I spend a fair amount of time reading Bret Devereaux's acoup.blog, and one thing I learned from there was the idealization of the small, independent farmer by Rome's literary elite (who themselves were wealthy urbanites).

History repeats itself, it would seem :)

Most programmers don’t really seem to understand that programming isn’t really their job. It’s an illusion. Their job is to create value to the shareholders. That’s not really that much fun, and once the joy of writing and reading code is slowly squeezed away from their position is when those with sanity still intact start thinking “Man, I ought to get the fuck up out of here and find a real job or something.” The really lucky ones are outdoorsy folks that can afford to do the homesteading thing, or are willing to forego the immense compensation that tech work so often allures them with.

Just my two cents. I was blessed to retire in my thirties, so I could be entirely out of touch, though I hear many things.

It's the people we work with and for that turn the job into a dismal grind.

The author gives strong wordcel vibes, it's sad to read tbh.

And no real insult taken if you see me as being pretty verbal, I am, though I can rotate a shape too as evidenced through my job.

I think a big part of this is the same thing behind the impulse to rewrite a hoary old software system from scratch: Our tendency to underestimate reality's true level of detail.

The goal of capitalism is to get enough money to live on the revenue of your own wisely-invested capital instead of providing the wage labor paid for by other people's capital.

Capitalism's primary focus is production. The more you produce, the more you are rewarded. Quantity has better profit margins than quality. So the winner is someone who can produce the most and reach the most customers. Digital products happen to be the best for it. They are, relatively to other products, easy to scale, produce, and even easier to distribute. Quality needs to be just good enough to make a sale.

Also have never probably experienced harvesting things in the heat. It fucking sucks.

Cows also don't care how bad the weather is, you still need to wake up at 5 am and feed and water them :)

Doesn’t the Financial Times periodically run a column called “How to Spend It”?

A hobby farm sounds like a lovely and wholesome alternative to some of the luxury pursuits they outline.

As the blog post hints at it's not really limited to programmers or cubicle workers as such, it's deeply ingrained in the US psyche. Practically you can just hop on any social media platform and see examples. A few days ago I saw some pictures of the new BYD factory in China and it's quite funny to see the difference between Chinese reactions "it'll make us independent" or "jobs there pay better" to English media which have a lot of "that's so big and dystopian", "it'll automate away jobs" etc.

There's an observation by Fukuyama that Americans modernized before they urbanized which has left them midway between urban dweller and villager and that's really what's behind "cottagecore" and also behind the inability to build and automate and the constraints that everyone in American politics complaints about all the time.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_in_the_Garden

There are many ways to find hobbies which provide tangible meaningful value to yourself and society, reconnect you to the physical world, and even help your community that don't involve homesteading off-grid. I strongly encourage everyone I know in tech, coworkers included, to find some type of hobby that does that for them. I agree with the article author though that the idyllic fantasy of farming is bunk, and most people would be better for both themselves and their community to find something else physical to do with their time.

Why is farming or woodworking seen as less alienating than being at a computer?

And why does it feel so impossible for us to form the communities that would give us the kind of meaning that we really seem to desire when we're working in these sorts of positions? It seems almost universal that working at a computer means we feel isolated, even when we talk in meetings all day.

I think the nature part makes sense, after all, being in a field is certainly more natural than an office, but I think lots of farming is actually pretty lonely from when I've done it, with the exception of animals. But when thinking about the profession, it just feels more social. There's something there about the way we view types of work and their importance, almost metaphysically speaking.

Every day we work on reinventing grand rube goldberg versions of a PDP-11, insulated by a nice fluffy layer of know-nothing management, with the slow obfuscated goal to entrap, control and exploit any sector of the economy that actually does anything.

- Logistics of people moving goods? Profits eaten by software.

- Marketplaces of buyers/sellers of people? A percentage to the house of software.

- Farming? Land speculation by software.

- That one tiny minuscule coat pocket of economic required liquidity aside, the entirety of finance is parasitical and moved en masse to software a while back.

- Eductation! Theres an app for that.

Sure the investors have let it be a pleasant middle class job because building a green field full of grass is great way to catch a hog or the brightest people you can, smart people being the required instrument of your fuckery but thats finally coming to a close. Don't have to make the grass so green when you own everything anyway. And we're at the point where they're onto nakedly buying governments.

The extensively cultivated naivety of this site aside (when it comes to power), I think most of you know whats coming and that you probably shouldn't be entirely dependent on the tech companies in the future. But as always, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

We were nice and tried to explain calorie counts per person for a year and micro nutrient requirements but we still laugh about that one. And that guy was in food service. Most people do not understand the complexity of our food supply, not only overconfident programmers.