My current goal is to get a job as a developer and work towards combining my career with my revolutionary activity. But I’d like to build skills that are as applicable as possible to digital revolutionary struggle. Any thoughts?
Can confirm, also some parallel path for training and spreading knowledge in the industry is desperately needed. Like for continuing education on applied electrical engineering. So much knowledge, practice and the like is siloed off and proprietary in each individual tech company. Lots of the smaller government contractors are staffed with engineers who are shockingly incompetent as a result, it's like the blind leading the blind, repeating rules of thumb from 1989 hardware electronics.
Definitely. Something as simple as the basics for "how to get a custom pcb made" world be good to have somewhere independently controlled and with up to date information for people interested in turning their arduinos into something mass produced
The number one thing I've seen there is that in a lot of companies it's common for the team doing the schematic and the layout to be totally different. like to the degree where the design engineers will often act as if they're above working with the proles (layout techs). This is especially common in older east coast companies with roots in MIC work.
It's something that's definitely been segmented since they were doing this shit with wire wrapping and literal drawings done by drafters. It's mostly division of labor, like how anyone can be trained to use solidworks. I elaborated here
I typed up a whole rant about that in particular but I hit something wrong and lost it and also my edible is kicking in, so I'll get back to you.
Just post bad takes and get people mad enough they start posting long rants with a good bibliography.
The revolution will require contributions of all types and magnitudes. Everyone has something to contribute. From each according to their ability and so on and so on. :zizek-ok:
There are many fields in technology which will prove useful in building a new world. Radio/Wireless communications, networking/routing, software development, systems administration, digital publishing, guerilla marketing and agitprop, black hat and white hat security diciplines, cryptography, automation, manufacturing, reverse engineering, DIY repare, recycling and re purposing old and abandoned equipment and that is probably only scratching the surface.
Just like no specific ideological sect is going to make the revolution happen on their own, no particular technological discipline is going to unlock the door for us. It is our responsibility to contribute what we can. To be a part of a trend which moves things in the direction of the future we would like to see.
With that in mind, focus on something which interests you. If it interests you enough, you can take the grill pill and excel at it. If you can excel at it, you can take that talent and focus it on improving people's lives.
If you want to fuck the corporations, start chipping away at the semiconductor oligopoly by giving a voice and exposure to alternative processor architectures. You'd be quite literally seizing the means of computation, and the means of computation are the means of production in the digital struggle.
@thisguyfucks appears to be a good start if you are looking into learning good fundamentals - he's expressed will to share
I'm a veteran software dev and recently quit my job to study security engineering full time and to try to get an entry level job doing that.
The problem with software jobs is generally always that you're doing shit work (relatively speaking I guess it isn't, but I'm sick of it) to make rich people richer. Or in many cases, you're on a death march of a shit project that's stupid and pointless and doomed to fail and you're wasting some rich guy's money, but in either case you're attempting to enrichen the rich. Software is fucking expensive and only the rich can afford it.
The biggest things in my opinion to further social good in software:
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Build tools that allow uncensored and anonymous communication . This is a huge rabbit hole but it spans a lot - let people browse the internet privately, send messages private, consume information privately. Right now virtually all web traffic is monitored and stored. Between your ISP, the servers you're hitting (Amazon's), maybe even the VPN you use that claims to not log anything (one was recently caught doing this) - there is very little privacy. There are some tools that allow all of this in bits and pieces but none are mainstream.
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In conjuction with the first point, create software platforms that prevent coordinated inauthentic behavior. Bots. As technology improves it becomes more and more impossible to tell bots apart from real posting. It's going to get worse and worse and people with billions of dollars will be clicks away from massively influencing general opinion in the same way it's currently being done by buying media and news outlets.
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Work in furthering AI. AI is going to be the lynchpin of moving past scarcity and having the human race continue to exist past biological bodies.
The first two points are difficult to make any money doing. There's no money in federated, private, anonymous services. And there's a super high ceiling for the skills needed to work on these platforms and problems. Those skills can get you related work but probably not for anything socially "good".
I think AI is the best route. There is money to be made (again, enriching the rich) but the expertise allows you to contribute to the community as a whole, too. But AI is the sort of field where it's pretty necessary to have a PhD or similar and that's not for me.
I chose security for selfish reasons. It's technical and my background helps and I find it the most interesting option of my employment avenues.
Another option: get a do nothing job that pays a lot and wastes someone's money. They're out there. I've had jobs where I did virtually nothing and no one cared. It didn't pay great personally, but the high paying ones are out there. I've read stories from people who work at Google making $300k+ a year and they admit they do virtually no work because they aren't interested or motivated to do it. If you can manage the balancing act of working hard enough to get hired and then knowing how to bullshit and not actually do any work, you can do your small part in draining money from shitty orgs like Google
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