by spacebuffer ·
I am a mid level software engineer, currently I am working in SWE but I am worried I'll be out of a job in a few years. I am honing my skills without AI in case the prediction that hiring will pick back up in a few years but I need a plan B.
I am looking to learn a trade job/skill so I can sustain myself in the future. everyone is talking about plumbing but that sounds daunting and I don't know where to start.
Is there something that I can do from home alongside my job to elevate my skills IRL for free or for cheap?
PG has posted about improving social networks using something like an "intellectual CAPTCHA" many times [1][2][3][4] - "Make users pass a test on basic concepts like the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions before they can tweet."
I felt the same way. So I built one using a mix of simple math, logic, and Twitter/X Community Noted posts. Try sample questions here - https://mentwire.com/sample - without signing up.
- Invite-only (temporarily open to HN users).
- Onboarding test + one daily question before accessing feed, post or reply.
- Posts authors are anonymous until upvoted or downvoted, forcing evaluation of content on merit.
- Face ID (on-device only) to post/reply, pangram checks for AI text.
Sourcing good questions turned out to be much harder than I thought. If you have suggestions to scale this, I would love to hear. Eventually, could be gated across disciplines/topics to get a competence × interest graph instead of the pure interest graph of today's social networks.
[1] https://x.com/paulg/status/1235949761359904768 [2] https://x.com/paulg/status/1576517990182359040 [3] https://x.com/paulg/status/1514979883948126209 [4] https://x.com/paulg/status/1505842647319126016