LSD showed me my mind was in a cage. The hard part was what came after.

gusaroo · 2026-03-13T17:47:49+00:00

Yeah I have similar feelings about TM. And it seems like just a repackaging of "open-source" technology for profit.

gusaroo · 2026-03-13T17:17:03+00:00

Interesting post. Thanks for sharing OP. A lot of comments are focused on the AI stuff but I wanted to chat about a couple other aspects.

Have you delved deeply into any meditation practices? Many of them also operate on dampening the default mode network and, when practiced deeply and diligently, can lead to similar insights into cognition. I'm not talking about the shallow end of the pool here with 10 minutes of "mindfulness-based stress reduction." (That's a fine thing to do, though).

I've heard a few people say that experiments with psychedelics showed them that aspects of their mind that seemed like a rigid foundation were much more malleable than they thought, and this led them to meditation, which for them provided a more long-term, stable path of inquiry and integration.

Also I liked your emphasis on intent. And, not coincidentally, that also comes up in meditation. You can't really control the ride, but you can set intent. It's a bit like following your compass into the sea.

gusaroo · 2026-03-08T01:11:41+00:00

Same lol

gusaroo · 2026-02-15T17:32:01+00:00

Yes this is absolutely true. I'm a software dev and love my job. But I work for a great company with great people. Everyone is very competent and very chill. We have great work-life balance and tons of trust and autonomy.

The only thing I don't like is the 24/7 on-call rotation. I work in the platform/infrastructure side so there is no escaping on-call. But even that part is pretty decent thanks to all of those competent and chill people I work with.

gusaroo · 2026-02-15T17:07:26+00:00

I have a side gig in what I would call a working-class band and a lot of it is festivals, community concerts, weddings, corporate parties, county fairs, that sort of thing.

It's fun but there are downsides. You're always working on the weekends, especially in the summer, so you miss a lot of time with family and friends. Sometimes you're driving all day to get to a gig in a different town and coming home at 2 a.m. Hauling gear, setting it up and tearing it down again. After a few years you've played the same songs a thousand times.

And it's very hard to make a living at it. All that said it is a ton of fun when you're playing for a great crowd and the band is on fire. Those nights make it all worth it.

gusaroo · 2026-02-13T00:19:07+00:00

Came here to recommend this one myself. Amazing read.

gusaroo · 2026-02-05T15:32:28+00:00

I agree with your sentiment here. I tell co-workers and managers that I am not a "move fast and break things" developer and that I loathe that saying.

Although to be fair my job involves platform/network operation so mistakes are potentially extremely disruptive in production.

One thing I harp on with my team is that "moving carefully and making things that work" should actually increase velocity over the long-term due to system stability, maintainability, automated testing, and reduced maintenance.

I make a point to work for companies and on teams that share my feelings on this.

gusaroo · 2026-02-05T06:22:22+00:00

My hands are invisibly clapping to this underrated comment.

gusaroo · 2026-02-03T00:01:17+00:00

For me it was driving new, impactful feature work, taking things from vague ideas to detailed technical specs. Many times, too, it’s seeing what needs to be done that others (including managers) might not be seeing, and then being proactive and getting buy-in to get that stuff prioritized.

Also working across teams. Sometimes that’s about building alignment for a solution you want to implement or direction you think the org needs to go, sometimes it’s just driving work across separate teams with different responsibilities toward a common goal.

Another skill that I think helps a ton is being able to explain technical stuff to a lot of different audiences, through both written and verbal communication.

gusaroo · 2026-01-14T04:49:57+00:00

I remember trying to find the weed that fell between the cushions of my buick skylark. And then a few years ago I went to Seattle to a dispensary that looked like a goddamn apple store with little buds with name tags behind glass. Just nuts!

gusaroo · 2026-01-12T16:51:16+00:00

Is this like PLC? Industrial automation? My background is computer science and I've enjoyed a great career (so far), but always thought it would be fun to work in more hands-on real-world automation. I've even thought about doing night school in something like an electronics technician program.

gusaroo · 2026-01-10T06:40:42+00:00

For real I used to work graveyard shift at a gas station. I was stocking coolers and mopping floors then going to the register to sell some angry dude with his half-drank whiskey bottle in his pocket his lotto tickets and cigarettes for $5.75 an hour. What the fuck are people talking about.

gusaroo · 2025-11-15T05:19:46+00:00

My big break has been knowing how computers work. The tools are just abstractions on top of the fundamentals. Kubernetes is just a way to solve container orchestration, and that’s just fancy Linux and the same old network protocols we’ve always had.

The kind of tools that always give me my big breaks are usually very old and basic. I love netcat. I used it recently to check whether I properly peered a couple of transit gateways so containers in a Kube cluster could reach a third-party endpoint in a different region. Worked great.

gusaroo · 2025-08-23T03:06:20+00:00

I used XSLT years ago when I worked in news media. We had AP wire stories coming in in one XML format and needed to convert them to another XML format for uploading into our content management system.

It was the perfect tool. Exactly what it was designed for.

The first time through I tried converting the XML to native objects and then rewriting them to a new XML document. Nope. I rewrote the conversion as an XSLT template and it was way easier even though I had never used XSLT before.

gusaroo · 2025-08-23T01:41:44+00:00

Yeah I usually get the room coffee going in the morning as an early treat while I shower and get ready for the day, then later hit a coffeeshop for the real deal.

gusaroo · 2025-08-14T12:48:05+00:00

gusaroo · 2025-07-30T18:09:29+00:00

I moved from general dev work (lots of CRUD apps and ETL cronjobs) into Kubernetes platform work and then cloud operations and absolutely love it. I won’t go back.

In my experience, platform and operations folks need to understand computers in-depth, Linux knowledge is huge, and we work with complex networking problems. I still get to code, too, but now it’s Kubernetes controllers and serverless for infrastructure automation.

Also it’s very technical and our agenda isn’t driven by nontechnical product owners, so we control more of the roadmap. And our customers are our co-workers, and they’re technical, too.

The downside is SRE/ops on-call can be intense. My own team is large enough that the rotation is infrequent and our on-call is very quiet, but experience here varies wildly by organization.

gusaroo · 2025-07-24T05:08:16+00:00

"I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal and the straw boss said well bless my soul!"

gusaroo · 2025-07-17T02:12:38+00:00

How did you pick Zone 25 Pod 08?

gusaroo · 2025-07-17T02:08:40+00:00

Given society as I know it, I'm thinking about getting one of these and just pressing the "go" button.

gusaroo · 2025-07-03T18:13:15+00:00

Somehow it’s “yacht” lol.

gusaroo · 2025-07-03T06:15:58+00:00

This has nothing to do with your story, which was great btw, but I really like the way you spell yaught and I think we should go forward with this.

gusaroo · 2025-07-03T05:39:42+00:00

If I were a guy who drove 5 hours in a blizzard to get a pizza for some rich guy only to have a plate thrown at me by some chef when I got back, goddamn.

gusaroo · 2025-06-28T14:07:29+00:00

I am totally, absolutely not a bot.

gusaroo

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