Poverty (of youth or otherwise) is also a pretty powerful motivation to “tinker.” I spent a lot of time with OSX86, and ended up getting proficient enough (multiple all-nighters trying to get it to boot and get the right kexts loaded early on) to run semi-stable Tiger thru Lion on random PCs and my girlfriend’s Vaio Laptop. Then, one day I could afford a MacBook and basically stopped being as curious about that. Decade or so later, ProxMox allowed me to run Capitan thru Mojave virtually, while more recently it makes more sense (and less legal dubiousness) to just buy macs as/if I need them. Overall, I’m still pretty curious, but not curious enough to risk a “hacky” solution when I can mitigate it for relatively low $
I agree: Curiosity is not enough, you also need the time to explore it without easier dopamine rewards to distract you. It's quite ironic how having money can end up hurting you here as you can afford whatever entertainment you want.
I probably wouldn't be an engineer now if it weren't for poverty. I was in my twenties living with my mom, working part time for an educational center and though I enjoyed the work and found it fulfilling, it wasn't anything that could sustain me long term.
Then my mom goes, you can live with me for another year, after that you're on your own.
Asked my dad, a software engineer, if he could teach me how to do what he does. He recommended a boot camp and I learned enough to get an entry level role, and still here I am, ten years later.
I 100% agree. My parents were both disabled. A malpractice lawsuit left us with a little windfall. My parents saw where the future was going and bought me my first computer. Being poor made it so I had a lot of free time as a little kid, so I learned that machine inside and out. I made my own games. I troubleshooted any hardware problem, learning as I went. After getting the internet, things took off from there.
Through many attempts to make ingesting the ponyium more bearable, I’ve found that taking it with more intense flavors (wintergreen mint, hoppy hops, crushed soul, dark roast coffee, etc) improves its comestabilty. Can’t let it pile up. We’ve always eaten ponyium right, and we all like it, right, guys, folks?
> Kagi
This seems to be true, but more indirectly. From Kagi’s blog [0] which is a follow up to a Kagi blog post from last year [1].
[0]> Google: Google does not offer a public search API. The only available path is an ad-syndication bundle with no changes to result presentation - the model Startpage uses. Ad syndication is a non-starter for Kagi’s ad-free subscription model.[^1]
[0]> The current interim approach
(current as of Jan 21, 2026)
[0]> Because direct licensing isn’t available to us on compatible terms, we - like many others - use third-party API providers for SERP-style results (SERP meaning search engine results page). These providers serve major enterprises (according to their websites) including Nvidia, Adobe, Samsung, Stanford, DeepMind, Uber, and the United Nations.
I’m an avid Kagi user, and it seems like Kagi and some other notable interested parties have _already_ been unable to do get what they want/need with Google’s index.
[0]> The fact that we - and companies like Stanford, Nvidia, Adobe, and the United Nations - have had to rely on third-party vendors is a symptom of the closed ecosystem, not a preference.
Hopefully someone here can clarify for me, or enumerate some of these “third-party vendors” who seem like they will/might/could be directly affected by this.
[0] antibabelic > relevant https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search
[1] https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search
> [^1]: A note on Google’s existing APIs: Google offers PSE, designed for adding search boxes to websites. It can return web results, but with reduced scope and terms tailored for that narrow use case. More recently, Google offers Grounding with Google Search through Vertex AI, intended for grounding LLM responses. Neither is general-purpose index access. Programmable Search Engine is not designed for building competitive search. Grounding with Google Search is priced at $35 per 1,000 requests - economically unviable for search at scale, and structured as an AI add-on rather than standalone index syndication. These are not the FRAND terms the market needs
I believe they try to indirectly say they are using SerpApi or a similar product that scrapes Google search results to use them. And other big ones use it too so it must be ok...
That must be the reason why they limit the searches you can do in the starter plan. Every SerpApi call costs money.
And I can't prove correlation but they refused to index one of my domains and I think it _might_ be because we had some content on there about how to use SerpAPI
In Shroud, Tchaikovsky does very alien (“real” aliens, not “uplifts”) very well. Anthropocentrically, it does not “end well.” Literarily, it vies for my favorite SciFi read of ‘25. Technically, I read “There Is No Antimemetics Division” last year, but I’d already kind of read it... or at least I think I thought I had.
“We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear.”
Same, I got so much fomo from reading the gas town post I think you’re alluding too. Someone else can link it but it’s not “worth the read” in the way this was communicates so many ideas and captures/distills the zeitgeist of that time.
I guess the gas town one does capture our moment, but embracing YOLO spaghetti-o with reckless abandon, is a) depressing, even though I also feel like a middling programmer and b) actually seems to be dazzling these newer beleaguered bureaucrats precisely because they think they could just talk to the LLM instead of TMitTB.
Anyway, if that post and its ilk leave a bad taste, this was mouthwash for me. Lucky 10,000 I know, but I had never seen this (or felt so seen, as they say). I had to go check that he wasn’t wrong about PHP being Personal Home Page. I somehow never picked up that the recursive naming thing is a backcroynm.
>Happy to take suggestions and answer questions about the quirks I ran into along the way.
Got up out of bed from doomscrolling to play with/implement this! My less-technical partner tends to reach for Apple Notes and I have offered/threatened to make something, but they've kept (begrudgingly) relaunching VSCode after a "oof, I know it was just real quick." Thanks for the inspiration/headstart.
The last time I commented extolling the virtues of uv on here, I got a similar reply, pointing out that PEP 723 specs this behavior, and uv isn’t the only way. So I’ll try again in this thread: I’m bullish on uv, and waiting for Cunningham.
I am all in on uv as well, and advocating for its use heavily at $dayjob. But I think having as much as possible of these things encoded in standards is good for the ecosystem. Maybe in a few years time, someone will make something even better than uv. And in the meantime, having things standardised speeds up adoption in e.g. syntax highlighting in editors and such.
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