I'm OK being left behind, thanks!

Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable.

"You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered.

That struck me as a bizarre sentiment. What is there to be left behind from? If BitCoin (or whatever) is going to liberate us all from economic drudgery, what's the point of "getting in early"? It'll still be there tomorrow and I can join the journey whenever it is sensible for me.

Part of the crypto grift was telling people to "Have Fun Staying Poor". That weaponisation of FOMO was an insidious way to get people to drop their scepticism.

I feel the same way about the current crop of AI tools. I've tried a bunch of them. Some are good. Most are a bit shit. Few are useful to me as they are now. I'm utterly content to wait until their hype has been realised. Why should I invest in learning the equivalent of WordStar for DOS when Google Docs is coming any-day-now?

If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours.

I didn't use Git when it first came out. Once it was stable and jobs began demanding it, I picked it up. Might I be 7% more effective if I'd suffered through the early years? Maybe. But so what? I could just as easily have wasted my time learning something which never took off.

I wrote my MSc on The Metaverse. Learning to built VR stuff was fun, but a complete waste of time. There was precisely zero utility in having gotten in early.

Perhaps there are some things for which it is sensible to be on the cutting edge. I took part in a vaccine trial because I thought it might personally benefit me and, hopefully, humanity.

But I'm struggling to think of anyone who has earned anything more than bragging rights by being first. Some early investors made money - but an equal and opposite number lost money. For every HTML 2.0 you might have tried, you were just as likely to have got stuck in the dead-end of Flash.

There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate. Are you genuinely saying that they'll all be left behind because they didn't learn your technology in utero?

No. That's obviously nonsense.

It is 100% OK to wait and see if something is actually useful.

"LongCovid is new"

Post-viral diseases aren't new.
Dysautonomia isn't new.
ME/CFS isn't new.
Endothelial dysfunction isn't new.
MCAS isn't new.
Auto-immune issues aren't new.
Chronic inflammation isn't new.
POTS isn't new.
PEM isn't new.
Blood clots aren't new.
Tinnitus isn't new.
Mitochondrial dysfunction isn't new.
Migraine isn't new.

#LongCovid #LongCovidAwarenessDay

[EDIT: now sorted thank you SO MUCH!]

Heads up my dudes, my son needs to do work experience this summer and he's a programmer. Nearly 15, can do 3 decent languages, main in Java, been programming since 4. All he wants to do is be a developer. Anyone offer work experience these days? Two weeks in July. London or Dartford way or anywhere in between. Ta! Retoots appreciated!

#workexperience #help

I've spent my whole career working with neurodivergent people in tech.

Here's to the people who thrive with interrupts, who work best when juggling four different things, are pretty great incident responders, and can code while talking on slack.

Here's to the people who need four uninterupted hours to get anything done, but what they get done is fantastic, and they have the in depth knowledge to explain nuances you didn't even know were there, making them the folk who find the long term remediations after incidents.

Here's to the people who take great joy in picking the lint out of a codebase because it's fun, who refactor for the challenge, who see bad process and ache to get changes in to reduce the friction.

Here's to the people who seem to know everyone, who reach across teams to tap experts who don't get the recognition others do, and work best when working WITH.

Y'all are amazing

Our call for sponsors is still open.

Our financials for 2026 are still a bit sketchy, we wouldn't mind 2-3 more sponsors to ensure the stability of the planning :).

Feel free to boost or send to your friends working for cybersecurity vendors, and thank you so much to the awesome sponsors who already signed up!!

🫣 🤝 🤗

Saturday, 28 March, there are many hackerspaces that participate to the "International Open Day".

Boost = ❤️

Visit one of the NL participating spaces :

AwesomeSpace, Hilversum
@bitlair Amersfoort
@hack42 Arnhem
@hackalot Eindhoven
@hermithive Nieuwegein
@hsdrenthe Coevorden
@HSN Nijmegen (nieuwe locatie!)
@maakplek Groningen
@nurdspace Wageningen
@pixelbar Rotterdam
@randomdata Utrecht
@revspace Leidschendam
Space Leiden, Leiden
@TDvenlo Venlo
@TechInc Amsterdam
@tkkrlab Enschede

See also https://hackerspaces.nl/open-dag/
https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/Open_Hackspace_Day_2026

#hackerspaces #makerspaces #DIY #linux #opensource #electronics #arduino