Well, for context I've worked as a frontend developer the past 2 years, but I want to dive much, much, much deeper into computing. Because most people I talk to in my career, present-self included, don't know anything about computers at a deep level, or networking, or graphics, or Electrical Engineering etc.
I've had an epiphany where I realise I waste too much time on smartphones and social media, TV and media, my career and the pursuit of financial stability, and I don't really understand anything deeply. Nor do 99.9% of people, and I want to change that about myself.
So - I've rid myself of all social media accounts (years ago - except HN), sold my TV and consoles (except switch - past year), blocked at a network level all news sites (recently), I've rid myself of a smart phone and now just use an old brick + a notebook to write thoughts in (past 3 months). I want to keep taking this process further.
I've lost interest in web stuff, its not that interesting if you think about it, and its a very high level of abstraction.
I've seen the light - there are amazing areas of computing out there if you look outside of career economics min maxing - Graphics, Emulation, Firmware/Embedded, Hand-written Assembly.
With all my new found free time, and desire to peel away layers of abstraction:
In Computing/ Electronics:
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- Going to complete Nand2Tetris to fully understand computers from the ground up. Already 4 projects deep.
- After the above, learn an HDL like VHDL or Verilog to emulate retro consoles via FPGA's, starting with chip emulation, then gradually moving to retro consoles. These old games were amazingly optimised.
- Write at least 1 small program in an assembly language. Just want to see how hard/constrained it is compared to C.
- Take Ben Eaters course to build an 8bit computer physically from scratch, or just try it myself without guidance. To crack into the Electronics side of things.
- Keep working on my pseudo-3D terminal ASCII renderer written in C and ncurses (you can walk through fully detailed 3D ASCII forests etc, but the code is dogshit currently)
- Take as many papers from OSSU [0] as I can reasonably fit into the year esp Mathematics and Graphics papers
- Complete my content blocking browser extension
- Continue modding old games, go deeper, like Fallout
- Commit to extended "No LLM" periods (days/weeks/months) because its making people stupid, present self included. And what are LLM's but statistical averaging machines. Average in, average out.
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In other areas of life:
- I want to understand how the clothes I wear are made, from scratch. So you take a plant, process it for fiber, process the fibers? Then knit the fibers together to make an item? I want to run through that process with my own hands: everything except planting the plant itself.
- Same with how our homes are made. Wood. Wood gets processed, you get timber, you get planks etc, you build a structure. I want to fell a tree and build a dog house, though realistically this wont happen next year.
- I want to develop self control with food. I currently eat meat, but I wouldn't want to slaughter an animal by my own hand. So, in my own eyes, I am a pathetic person for eating meat and off-handing the slaughter and process step to a third party. So, I want to stop eating land based meats, because the result is not something I could produce by my own hand. I have tried to go pescatarian before, but it didn't stick forever.
[0] - https://github.com/ossu/computer-science?tab=readme-ov-file#...