That is a bit overkill and lacking in energy efficiency and sustainability, though. A more environmentally conscious solution would be for western nations to bring back some French innovations from the centuries ago such as the bidet followed by the trebuchet.
1. Read this great "Surviving A Layoff" essay [1] and build a plan for yourself.
2. Take the time to level up on one or two foundational skills whose barriers to entry are combinations of tenacity and intelligence, or tech stacks that are very close to a foundational skill. Something like "Fart App Framework" is not a foundational skill because it becomes obsolete in a very short amount of time. Things like mathematics, statistics, hard sciences, cryptography, security, etc. will carry you through the rest of your career and create a moat.
3. Network, network, network.
4. Remind yourself that nothing lasts forever, that you're not in control of everything, that feelings of safety/security are merely feelings, and that the root of all suffering is attachment. If something's making you feel anxious or vulnerable, ask yourself why until you get to the bottom of it.
5. If you're consistently having negative thoughts, frame this experience in terms of gaining something (resilience, experience, wisdom) rather than losing something.
The real problem with previous efforts for finding extraterrestrial life wasn't the technology, it was the lack of competition plus the open ended and uncertain goal. A seed rounds of $50M should be given out to two groups of competing researchers: One group tries to find evidence of extraterrestrial life, and the other group tries to find evidence of the abominable snowman in the Tibetan mountain ranges. The first group to make a discovery takes home the remaining $100M and settles the SETI vs. Yeti debate once and for all.
>Over the past year, we’ve meticulously scraped all Worldcat records. At first, we hit a lucky break. Worldcat was just rolling out their complete website redesign (in Aug 2022). This included a substantial overhaul of their backend systems, introducing many security flaws. We immediately seized the opportunity, and were able scrape hundreds of millions (!) of records in mere days.
>After that, security flaws were slowly fixed one by one, until the final one we found was patched about a month ago. By that time we had pretty much all records, and were only going for slightly higher quality records.
OCLC carelessly fiddlefarted around with their moat and lost it. Poof!
Awesome! Where did the "split_ifs" tactic come from though? Mathlib? In your opinion does it make sense to do program verification without using Mathlib, or would you recommend just using it pretty much all the time?
What ever happened to the effort [1] to rename Coq in order to make it less offensive? There were a number of excellent proposals [2] that seemed to die on the vine.