When I was 15, so.... like 1997? Whatever. I had been writing PHP for a year and was having a bad time at school and life in general and I applied for a job at NeoPets and got through all the interviews and got a $150,000 offer with a relocation package to SF. I was living with my parents in Washington state. They never asked how old I was and I had an orientation call with the HR lady and they were so excited to hire me. Video calls were not really a thing then. After the HR call I walked out of my bedroom and told my mother I had solved all of my problems and was moving to California and she said "WHAT! No you aren't!". Looking back, this disconnect should have maybe been diagnostic criteria for ASD. Lol.
I no showed to the job, obviously.
I did not get another comparable pay package till well into my 30s.
I suspect you have your story mixed up. Neopets wasn’t created until Nov 1999, didn’t have non-founder staff til the following year, and HQ was always in LA (actually Glendale) not SF.
Yeah. It's been a loooong time. I was an emancipated minor at 15. I did get a job at neopets at the height of the dot com boom and I did not end up going. Maybe I sold that PHP job and got emancipated and then the neopets thing happened because it was really hard to be a kid building websites for small local businesses. eh. It's not a thing I've thought about much at all in the last 20 years. When I see neopets in the news though I am always still very impressed that they survived the dot com crash and are still around.
For sure at the time I had no concept of the difference between any California cities. I guess over time LA turned into SF in my head because what tech comes out of LA that isn't for the movies? I actually ended up taking a job in LA about eight years ago and it was hilarious hearing people talk about Silicon Beach like anyone was writing code out there and it wasn't just a content farm. LA is a tomb. Changing that detail in my memory and now knowing both cities, yeah. That job for sure would have killed me before my 18th birthday.
It sounds like your information is accurate and from wikipedia or whatever. So putting that together that they probably just started when they hired me also makes sense for how they signed a contract with a child.
Yeah. Small town kid with undiagnosed brain problems with a 1997 $150,000 salary. I'd never had more than a few hundred dollars to my name before. For sure my life would be very different but it's pretty hard to say what would have happened to me.... but it probably would have been a dangerous mess knowing the route I've had to take through the world to get to some self awareness. It's fun to think about though.
I'll have to ask my mom. We really haven't spoken about it since. I wouldn't be surprised if she completely forgot that happened. My memory from that time.... there was so much going on for me and not much of it good... yeah. My memory is spotty. I'll have to ask her and get the adult version of how that affected them. I guess I did get in front of a judge and became an emancipated minor that year and sold my first PHP contract. I think that was the result? What a stupid life.
At that time if you could upload PHP code to an FTP and it connected to a mySQL database you were a pretty rare animal. I mean, this is not long after PHP became a thing at all. Most important stuff was Java or Perl out there on the web. I also was very handy with photoshop, HTML, and cut up and layout. I've always kind of been visual first. I don't think I became a "good" programmer until I was in my late 20s but I've always had a bit of an edge in that I have natural design instincts and an inability to fully recognize that I can't do something.
Anyway, it was pretty easy to demonstrate that I had the chops for what they were looking for by showing them my websites on the internet and talking about my code. The insane treadmill of javascript frameworks was still a decade away. I still can't white board code any algorithms but to quote Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) "Yes, I am a terrible coder, but I am probably still better than you :)"
I know in our current culture this experience I'm describing could be seen as a good thing or some sort of mythmaking. It's not. It's a failure of the school and social system to take care of a distressed gifted kid.
EDIT: I just remembered that I started with Macromedia Flash before I got into PHP. I didn't understand what vector art was though so I made stuff with Paint Shop Pro and when things scaled they would be all jaggy. Lol. I think that was the real bullet for Neopets. That not only could I post a form to a database but I had flash chops... Wow. I have not thought about how much time I spent working in flash in a looooong time. I should see if I can find any of those works in my archives. I can only half remember two animations. I bet there is some fun stuff.
You have a failure to engage with your human heritage to dream about something that hasn't existed before while a new world crashes over us like the spring back of a rip tide. Dare to dream friend. The pigs need a committee. The world and how thoughts are communicated is wild west right fucking now. I'm not saying don't be realistically pessimistic, but seriously.... Nothing that we've known for the last 30 years is a given and we need optimistic thinkers saying fuck it to whoever is doing loser shit because not only are we all gonna die anyway, but we are gonna die faster if "a job is a job".
Hunt bliss friend. You contain multitudes and the world needs you. Not tomorrow but yesterday. Pigs will tell you you're wrong and your peers will argue for their jailers but your jailer will pretend to be you when talking to their jailer when you tell them they are fucked in a moment but don't make it a big deal. To solve... just really... we are all super fucked if hierarchies do not become more collaborative.
We are in a snow globe. The earth peoples like an apple tree apples. You do not have to accept a game of telephone to steal your will and your will is the ripple in the pond the world needs.
EDIT: Go to a local ham radio meetup. Everything is waves motherfucker. With or without you I'll bankrupt the phone companies in 5 years.
> With or without you, I'll bankrupt the phone companies in 5 years.
I hope you're at least 5 years into your mission because slaying that dragon will take at least 10. How can I find, contribute, or fund your work? (decimal before dev)
I love a good manifesto. I'm excited to read it over the weekend. The initial pitch appears to be in line with my interests. Big fan of the minimalism in the pitch.
Thinking about how gravitational waves pass through us all the time stretching us out and squishing us and changing how time passes has for some reason been one of the most comforting realizations I've ever had. I still don't quite have the right words for why, but to me it kind of answers questions like if we are in a simulation (my hunch is no) and weird head trip questions that can be depersonalizing like that from my perspective last Tuesday I started hallucinating all of this including everything I think is my history. Not that I think that, just something about the foam of turbulent gravity washing over all of us invisibly. Yeah, comforting.
In our current climate more so than just the supply chain oversight that some customers will want and the other customers that will pay a premium to support an alternative to Google/Apple, also unless you are a massive corporation, you are at the back of the line for procurement of components and assembly. The big folks are feeling it too. Localized supply chain is critical to making sure we can have nice things going forward. Some people are willing to put the money up.
Mexico is a very solid place to look. In fact I think over the next five years our partnership with Mexico for manufacturing is going to explode. They have the people and facilities to do the work and are our neighbors.
Purism though, with what they are doing. Like OP at the top of the thread said, is making a statement, and a powerful one, by doing what they are doing and it's part of their mission because they are making phones and people, correctly, have a lot of anxiety about their current ad slabs.
I think your reasoning for Mexico manufacture is on point and you'll really see rewards establishing that production relationship.
If you don't mind me asking, what are you building? Your username says to me guitar pedals. Link?
We're building an EEG headband that improves the efficiency of deep sleep (https://soundmind.co)
Pedal handle is like bike, not guitar, though I recently started playing guitar.
I've never heard somebody suggest a guitar, I usually have people ask "why are you nicknamed after a flower" (PetalPete) :)
That is absolutely fascinating. I've spent over a decade doing R&D for computer interface. I've played with EEG off and on. I've done a lot with myoelectrics. I spend a lot of time trying to find color, light, sound, and rhythm that sum up stressful light up rectangles into a more human mode.
I'm super curious about your manufacturing journey and your product. No pressure on response turnover or really any larger goal, but would you mind if I email you some time? I think we might have some overlaps that make for enriching conversation.
conservation of energy and enjoying a public forum with poetry and prose. I'll hit you up and show you what I mean. And also it'll be weird because alternative interface it's hard to point at something and say, "It's like that" right? All we know is glowing rectangle. Just know that nearly religiously, I'm not trying to big time you or being cryptic or contrarian. I've got a goal. I do love talking to folks who got it enough to tell me "I have no idea what your talking about" or "this sounds stupid".
I dunno. I turn 40 next month. I'm kind of sorting out what that means. What you see is what you get with me. Test it. But yeah man. I will hit you up.
On a related but adjacent note, I've got massive respect for independent hardware manufacturers. I know a lot about what that dream looks like. I have not been able to get where you're at with anything that made the right sense.
I think gmail has been out more than three times in the last 15 years. I remember in like 2013ish was the first gmail outage I remember and it was so shocking that everyone just left the office. heh. I've been trying to fully degoogle for six years. It's hard. I was an early GHA adopter and have multiple domains and stuff. That journey is finally wrapping up and FastMail has been a fantastic solution for me as I inch closer to self hosting. I've been very happy to give them money.
People do drugs. It's just becoming less taboo to talk about it. Putting humans under the influence of daily booze and speed in charge of the biggest and most populated ships that steer our society.. yeah. We can see the results. It's not new though. It's part of how we got here. I know the article isn't in judgement or is but walks a linguistic line that's razor thin to technically not be directly judgmental. They do frame the drugs like they are illegal when probably they are prescribed. It's reporting the fact that execs are comfortable disclosing and maybe the drug specifics are changing a bit. Not the booze and speed, but the addition of ubiquitous ketamine or LSD or whatever, but judgement of drug users by puritans is so fucking counter productive. I really appreciate those in those positions who are willing to talk about it even though they are only doing the disclosure for "I work so hard and am under so much stress that I'm high as fuck all the time" clout/flex. We have such a skewed understanding of what drugs are and what they do, I think it's a net good that they are self reporting.
The Kinect Azure is pretty badass. I see why they would say that and it is very funny. I work in computer vision and NUI R&D and it's really hard to understate the accomplishment that is Kniect. I get why most people don't want to play dance games and don't like the machine looking at them but it is REALLY hard to package up solid solutions for the problem the Kinect solves and the Azure and surprisingly it's cross platform SDK are IMO one of the most beautiful tools every produced by humans.
Then you'll love this project. The Holographic demo supports the Looking Glass display and I'm pretty sure natively supports the Kinect Azure but also works with a webcam.
I have been trying to hook a client on a useful demo to get someone who is not me to spring for that big display. Lol. The portrait is like $300 though and it looks good on that.
I'm fine with whatever. I'm getting to the point where I wish I was liquidated or vaporized in 2018. Shut off the power, tell me I have to live in the woods, take away my car, starve me. Wait. That's what is going to happen anyway. Yeah, they should have just done that to me in 2018. I'm sick of everything. With every key press I type entering this note into this stupid internet guestbook masquerading as a temple for a piss poor religion reminds me of everything that big tech has taken from me. All of my productive years. Nothing to show for it really because all of the work was based around malinvestment and captained by well heeled idiots. The scale of what was stolen from the best minds of my generation. Instead of building facebook.... you know... we might have been able to get ahead of this. But you know. Whatever. Boil me yesterday.
If it helps, I come from a different horseshit treadmill - advertising production. I'm just here to talk to people who are smarter than me, cause I got sick of reddit.
You've made the right choice. Keep making it and build stuff that matters. There world has changed and folks chasing the dragon of what was are about to be decimated.
I no showed to the job, obviously.
I did not get another comparable pay package till well into my 30s.