At age 62, I'm wondering which mythical decade did not alienate software developers?

There was a brief ray of hope in the late 90s, with the startup gold-rush idea that we would all be millionaires soon. Then the I realized the founders had 4000x my equity those companies...

Developers used to be freer to choose their tools, organize their routines, decide the result of their work, acquire transferable knowledge, and had access to their tools without any link to any organization (though that one has been steadily improving instead of post-peak).

There is more to alienation than equity.

My 40 years of alienation was not about equity, I was pointing out that the optimistic "We are all going to be rich" vibe of the 90s was wishful thinking due to the massive inequality in the tech world.

Few teams other than green-field start-ups have flexibility regarding tools or technology. My first job was COBOL, 'nuff said about that. Even at start-ups the leads / architects choose most of the technology, and many of my ideas were shot down, such as using C++ in the late 90s, and using Scala in 2010.

People seem to think agile has increased alienation, when in fact the pre-agile world was also terrible. What matters is the quality of the team, not the methodology.

One comedy that did a good job of depicting programmers with no sense of hope circa 1999 was Office Space.

A friend of mine spent some time living in homeless shelters. Even having one room mate was a problem at times, as many of the people there have mental issues (my friend included).

We need tiers of low cost housing. Some people could make a communal space work, they would need to be able to vote to kick people out. People who are difficult to deal with need their own place, maybe a less dystopian form of mental institute. More like a dorm with mental services and security.

This is part of the advantage of SROs: every person has their own space, with a locking door.

> maybe a less dystopian form of mental institute. More like a dorm with mental services and security.

That already exists. It's underfunded.

Captain Kirk did that a few times in Star Trek, but with less fanfare.

Young Padawan, C++ was once a cool language, and I had to battle at multiple companies before I was finally able to make the career switch from C.

The conventional wisdom was "Where will we get C++ programmers?", "We don't have experience with C++", "C++ is too bleeding edge", and so on. The same excuses people give today to not use Rust, or your favorite hyped language.

If we follow the logic of OP, we will almost never develop new languages, because there are already multiple established languages good enough for any task at hand.

With Trump, assume there will be massive kickbacks and corruption, most likely nothing useful will happen.

My meditation teacher says what works for him is cannabis.

That is what traditional US foreign aid was all about. We give money to allies, they buy our military hardware or farm products. Trump of course has shit all over the system, so who knows what we are going to do now.

We also give out tons of subsidies and tax breaks to lure foreign investment to the US.

I'm 62, I've been a mid-tier engineer all my life, working with tons of H1Bs starting in the '90s. My current employer is 90% Indian contractors now. None of us are working on "The world's hardest problems", we are building bog standard micro services.

Pranayama is 2000+ years old, and has many warnings that you can fuck yourself up if you do it wrong.

There are 2500+ years of prior art on "breath work", but group think here is to dismiss it as woo.

The abstract does clearly mention HVB as being similar to hyperventilation, so presumably it is similar to "bellows breathing" from yoga / pranayama. They also name-check Holotropic breath work, which I have not studied, but has been a hot topic for several years now.

As best as I can interpret, "cyclic breathing without pausing" means no pausing after full inhale or exhale.

By contrast, "box breathing" would have typically equal durations of in-breath and out-breath, with equal duration of pauses. This style of breathing would be done typically to calm the mind, with slow, long breaths.

Breath can also be asymmetrical (typically exhales longer than inhales, said to be calming). I find this style to be awkward, I guess the inhale has to be more forceful to move the same amount of air as will be exhaled.

To be sure, when a topic is posted that people have some interest and experience with, then we will tell you about our experiences. Sorry if that harshes your mellow...

I don't know why you're interpreting my post like it's written in an accusatory or aggressive way. Seriously, multiple people have done this in response to me and I don't know why. I never speculated on the validity of any of this, or said that it was all woo or fake. Please, kindly leave your "groupthink" and "harshes your mellow" at the door.

All I said is that understanding this topic for someone with no personal experience of what's being described is difficult, especially since there are multiple groups (yes, some of them more focused on unprovable 'woo' than others) who take an interest in this. In those descriptions, telling apart reality from magic is hard when speaking to someone new - but that's not saying that the underlying topic is magical at all.

This compounds the fact that I have no frame of reference to understand what most people here are describing. I wish I had a better reference, but this is genuinely the best I can do as someone with no experiences like these.

Thanks for the extended description of what "breathwork" entails, the disambiguation was very helpful.