my review of neal stephenson's snow crash

Every once in a while there comes a story that is so real that it is difficult to distinguish between the story and reality, and it continues to be so for a hundred years . With technology, a hundred years is covered in ten years, and in this , Snow Crash stands up to the challenge. Written whenever,  it remains real wherever you go today, with criminal corporations, suburban enclaves, runaway inflation , immersive 3d worlds with their own currency and cultures, large governmental organizations building software , large scale exodus and refugees & media preachers, ancient religions ..
Snow Crash continues to remain entertaining, with the stories and characters that are part tongue-in-cheek and part all too real, and themes that are never out of style - swords- cars-bikes-teen rebellion - badassery-adventure-chases -gangs ...
Neal Stephenson's objective rendering of characters' behavior/responses  to situations  provides a very useful juxtaposition to the readers' typical emotional one, and gives a matter-of-fact tone to future-shock-y situations that the reader would otherwise not know how to process

The only real fun is in building things that can make it to the real world and help you learn the underlying in the process. It has to work at both ends - you have to get better at the underlying _AND_ the work should serve people better than previous versions.  Else there's no compounding.
Java doesn't allow this. Hence it's time to transcend Java

I ran 42 km in may 2019. That's close to a marathon. Only 200m less ..
To all of you asking why didn't you do a marathon, it took me 19 days.
I took a lot of breaks, like going home, going to office, sleeping etc in between.

interstitial

"Find your passion. I was very, very lucky to find it when I was seven or eight years old... You're lucky in life when you find it. And you can't guarantee you'll find it in your first job out. But I always tell college students that come out (to Omaha), 'Take the job you would take if you were independently wealthy. You're going to do well at it.'"

- Warren Buffett

What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?

Let’s suppose, I do this often in vocational guidance of students, they come to me and say, well, "we’re getting out of college and we have the faintest idea what we want to do". So I always ask the question, "what would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?"

Well, it’s so amazing as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say well, we’d like to be painters, we’d like to be poets, we’d like to be writers, but as everybody knows you can’t earn any money that way. Or another person says well, I’d like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses. I said you want to teach in a riding school? Let’s go through with it. What do you want to do? When we finally got down to something, which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, you do that and forget the money, because, if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing, which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way. And after all, if you do really like what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what it is, you can eventually turn it – you could eventually become a master of it. It’s the only way to become a master of something, to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don’t worry too much. That’s everybody is – somebody is interested in everything, anything you can be interested in, you will find others will. But it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like, in order to go on spending things you don’t like, doing things you don’t like and to teach our children to follow in the same track. See what we are doing, is we’re bringing up children and educating to live the same sort of lifes we are living. In order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing, so it’s all retch and no vomit. It never gets there. And so, therefore, it’s so important to consider this question: What do I desire?

- Alan Watts

How Jay-Z created his billion dollar empire   (Forbes via MattLevine via Bloomberg)