[neutronicus]

> Some switched to farming. Others opened coffee shops. One bakes bread now. That’s the level of abyss we’re talking about. These are people who know they can’t do anything online anymore. Not because they lack the skills. Because their brains were so filled and indoctrinated with complexity that they found decorating a cookie more fulfilling than maintaining 87 files of Kubernetes manifests plus CloudFormation templates plus Terraform state plus whatever abstraction layer Amazon invented that quarter.

This is a very dramatic way to say "because they got so fucking rich they don't have to anymore"

[mschuster91]

> This is a very dramatic way to say "because they got so fucking rich they don't have to anymore"

A lot of pretty normal people without much to their name are deciding to call it quits over the AI craze. I'm one of them, I'm heading for electrical engineering - even if the "engineering" part gets replaced by AI sooner than later, I'll still be more qualified running wires than some robot.

Besides, opening up coffee shops and bakeries isn't that capital intensive. Don't need millions for that, there's a reason a lot of non-chain restaurants are founded and operated by immigrants.

[neutronicus]

How are you effecting that transition?

I've been filling the war chest against the potential need to re-train. I'll do nursing school if I have to but if there's a path for someone who spent many years studying computational plasma physics to get into EE I'd want to look at that.

[mschuster91]

I'm heading off to the local university for three years. Thankfully I live in Germany which means no student loan BS and the university is maybe 20 min with a bike away.

[neutronicus]

Ah. Damn.

I'm in the US myself and I have a family so minimizing costs (including opportunity cost of the time spent) is critical.

[mschuster91]

Look into apprenticeships if you're just wanting to get into the trades, that way you can already earn money while training. Maybe your state government has some sort of "board of electricians" that deal with licensing, maybe they can help set you up.

[jaapz]

The wording also suggests decorating a cookie can't be as fulfilling as working on a complex software project.

This "author" certainly never baked his own bread or grew his own vegetables. Let alone becoming a professional, which is hard work, probably more hard work than sitting at a desk asking claude to change this or that react component.

[neutronicus]

Yeah, a lot of software devs think somewhat wistfully about possibly running a bakery or whatever.

To me that sounds more like letting circumstances nudge you into implementing your "Coast FIRE" plan than taking some kind of principled stand.