That's a great article too. I hope we'll see it comig back frontpage once in a while.

He differentiates between "things that last" (knowledge that transfers) and the rest...

Something has to be said about dodging a lot of the last shiny new tech that's going to invariably be tomorrow's long lost and not regretted turd. I make my friends laugh when I say that if there's one tech I know nothing about I don't feel bad because...

I think of all the long gone things I never bothered learning.

Just think about the graveyard of crap you're better off for never having wasting one cycle learning: tech is full of it.

It makes people smile but they know deep down it's true: most of the noise shall disappear.

Don't feel bad about not knowing it all: just look ten years in the mirror at all that was shiny and new and that's now totally obsolete.

It's literally how I cope with not knowing it all.

And I somehow managed to bet, for three decades, on techs that did stay a very long time. For example I adopted Linux in the very early Slackware days: I did dive all in and learned all that I could. And I've been using Linux on the desktop (and on my laptops and on my servers and on my VMs etc.) ever since.

Hypervisors and hardware-virt? Bought the first consumer mobo that supported it and was running Xen happily more than two decades ago.

Much less sexy but: one day I ran into one my best friend who had left the city and he told me "I found this new language, it's called Java, it's going to be big" and I did dive into Java. Only certification I ever got: Sun Certified Java Programmer. It was was it was (the cert), nothing stellar. But it was obvious Java was here to stay.

Then I saw a post on HN in the very early Clojure days: I decided I had to learn Clojure. It's not the most used language but, darn, is it stable (and on top of the JVM, mostly: so the Java thing helped).

I'm using Emacs since so long I don't exactly remember when (I did try it when I discovered Linux, back when Emacs took 45 minutes or something like that to compile on my 486 but really adopted it only later on).

I basically use the same window manager and same windows layout (and virtual desktops) since 15 years: when I upgrade my Linux distro, I just reuse my configuration.

Monitor is 9 years old (38" 3840x1600, I love it because I can do many different layouts, including 3x 1280x1600 side by side "columns).

Chair is 13 years old (out of warranty since one year) and still going strong.

Keyboard is 10 years old: Happy Hacking Keyboard.

It's a fast-paced, ever evolving world and all that helps brings some quietness.

P.S: as for present techs, you bet I'm using LLMs: three subscriptions and lately I'm support for my less-tech savvy brother who's running models locally using GPU passthrough on a Proxmox rig I helped him set up. But I like to think I'm using them in a sane way: not drinking the kool-aid.