Thanks for explaining why you made Rust--! I figured it was just whimsical play, and I find it delightful. I'm especially delighted to hear that it wasn't even hard to disable the borrow checker.
I hope you will answer the question here from @dataflow about whether, without the borrow checker, compiler optimizations will emit incorrect code. Did you have to make further modifications to disable those optimizations?
Funny that you mention this. The inspiration for submitting this question was my frustration with teaching while in grad school. Each of my four semesters so far, I've taught or assistant-taught a class. Each time, it consumed my mind, to the point where I found it difficult to think about anything else. My subconscious creativity was all spent on things like: how do I get the students to see X, how do I convince the prof not to obscure X, what would be a good homework assignment, how can I set up the homework so I can grade it super-efficiently.
I thought I'd get a lot more out of grad school if I financed it by working at a job that requires no thought or creativity. Ideally, my subconscious creative churning could continue while working at the job, and stay focused on my research. (Doing good teaching in grad school goes completely unrewarded.)
And then I thought, well, why bother with grad school at all, if what I want to do is learn interesting stuff and do research? If I had a subsistence-level job that didn't suck out my brains, I could pretty much spend every waking moment either letting the subconscious creative process run, or actually building stuff, researching stuff, and writing papers.
It seems strange that there have (so far) been so few ideas that leverage the high productivity that ought to be possible with technology and the highly interconnected economy. (So far, day-trading is the only one like that.)
How could one be very productive for only a few hours a week--enough to genuinely earn US$24,000 a year?
Is it Timothy Ferris or nothing? Has anyone gotten his "Four-Hour Work Week" to work?
Some friends of mine long ago have done this. I don't know what the money is like these days (does anyone here know?), but I expect it's bad. The advantage is: you actually get to work on your laptop or notebook or whatever you like most of the time. Mostly what a security guard does is let truckers sign in when they make deliveries. Between deliveries, all you need to do is be there.
I did it for a bit in college. Graveyard shift, lone person in an office building. Basically my job was to lower the fire insurance premium by having someone in the building all night. 2-3 times a night I'd walk through the building and make sure it was all still there, the rest of the time I read, did homework, etc.
Interesting that you don't need a lot of winning bets to make a living. What about losing bets, though? Isn't this a pretty high-risk way to make a living? Also, doesn't it require a fair amount of capital to get started?
Using this idea you only bet when your batteries are charged, you have two hours guarenteed before your next crisis, you know the market is moving (almost every day something is moving), you feel good, you got enough sleep, you've already been to the bathroom, your favorite Starbucks/McDonald's/$WIFI-HOTSPOT is open, etc. Make sure you're ready to bet, watch the market, bet, go eat lunch.
I've been playing with this very idea. I've had to mentally hold one position over night. I don't like holding a position. I want to be in and out in two hours.
Gambling on the stock market is risky. I think lots of people, maybe most of the people that gamble this way, want to be rich. Well, I don't. As the OP asked the question, I only want to make enough to comfortably get by so I can spend the rest of my time living and learning.
I've heard people say almost exactly the same things about horse races and craps, but in reality both of those are -EV. As far as my understanding of economics goes, day trading is 0EV at best, -EV when transaction costs are considered. I'd rather gamble when it's +EV--and then, gamble a small amount a large number of times to ride out the variance.
Doing nothing seems so counterintuitive a solution that people almost never seem to consider it. Lately, I've been seeing this in college. "What, the students are making mistakes and asking questions? I'd better lecture more and write longer explanations in the assignments."
I imagine that a politician who ran on a platform of, "I'm going to do nothing: these kinds of pains are how an economy gets back into adjustment," would have a hard time getting votes. But, I've never been to Japan, and indeed, in the U.S., such a platform would not make you an instant laughingstock.
An excerpt, describing the fragmentation of managers' time:
Folklore: The Manager is a reflective, systematic planner. The evidence on this issue is overwhelming, but not a shred of it supports this statement.
Fact: Study after study has shows that managers work at an unrelenting pace, that their activities are characterized by brevity, variety, and discontinuity, and that they are strongly oriented to actions and dislike reflective activities.
Consider this evidence:
- Half the activities engaged in by the five chief executives of my study lasted less than nine minutes, and only 10% exceeded one hour.
- A study of 56 U.S. foremen found that they averaged 583 activities per eight-hour shift, an average of 1 every 48 seconds.
I hope you will answer the question here from @dataflow about whether, without the borrow checker, compiler optimizations will emit incorrect code. Did you have to make further modifications to disable those optimizations?