patrick.net

richwicks says

Think people would want a box that basically is a web server on their desk? I can build that.

Then the next management shakeup, the new guy will say an out of box cloud solution is better.

Between 1997 to 2010, there wasn't anything better than the Microsoft architecture and DNA. The problem with that, you really really REALLY had to know your shit.
Whether it was a Windows Form solution or ASP.net solution. The MVC killed it. The MS developers missed the whole point of the Microsoft MVC framework. It was to showcase what you could do with a custom generic http handler, which that was all MVC really was. It removed the page lifecycle and separated the model from the view. I used Generic Handlers to go way beyond that that most people didn't even try. And if you had other MVC apps, you can call those controllers from anywhere. People got too Nazi with the whole MVC thing. It over complicated things to the point, that the upper management was ready to give kids fooling around with open source nonsense a whack at the enterprise. After that software development started being a democracy, and the enterprise lost all respect for a well capable developer's skills and prowess. In their minds anything you could do, Kubernetes and Panda could do better. Only they never got past the hello world sample.

richwicks says

Think people would want a box that basically is a web server on their desk?

Tell me the benefits I would experience by having a web server on my desk. Explain it by what problem it solves for ME.

Tenpoundbass says

richwicks says

Think people would want a box that basically is a web server on their desk? I can build that.

Then the next management shakeup, the new guy will say an out of box cloud solution is better.

Between 1997 to 2010, there wasn't anything better than the Microsoft architecture and DNA. The problem with that, you really really REALLY had to know your shit.
Whether it was a Windows Form solution or ASP.net solution. The MVC killed it. The MS developers missed the whole point of the Microsoft MVC framework. It was to showcase what you could do with a custom generic http handler, which that was all MVC really was. It removed the page lifecycle and separated the model from the view. I used Generic Handlers to go way beyond that that most people didn't even try. And if you had other MVC apps, you can call those controllers from anywhere. People got too Nazi wit...

Frankly, that all went over my head.

My thinking is that because of censorship, people will be forced to move decentralization. Another thing is that with an internet connection, you really don't need a phone or a television or any of that other nonsense. You just need a data connection, and through that, you can get anything.

I really don't like HTTP either. The protocols built around it are SO COMPLICATED that nobody can be certain that a browser is secure. There's all these OLD OLD tools for Unix that are forgotten but were awesome. Ever use "ytalk"? It's a cross between an instant messenger and a phone call. As you type, the character shows up immediately on the other side, and I know you're thinking "what good is that"? Well, when you use it, you can talk over one another without stomping on what the other person is saying, and you can complete thoughts before they complete them. This may sound frustrating and annoying at first, but it's actually more intimate than a phone call in expressing ideas, and quicker than using an Instant Messenger, since frequently you don't have to entirely complete a thought.

GNL says

richwicks says

Think people would want a box that basically is a web server on their desk?

Tell me the benefits I would experience by having a web server on my desk.

Privacy for one, ease of setup for two.

Instead of having a page on Facebook for your family to talk, you just have your box, and you talk about anything you like, with no possibility of even being monitored or censored. It doesn't have to be entirely public either, you can set it up so ONLY your family can use it, so you can openly discuss Mom's heart condition, or that Uncle Frank has gotten senile - private stuff you don't want to air outside of the family.

There's no reason to limit the box to just one purpose either. You can have multiple groups - say a group for work, and another group for your private business venture with 10 friends, your train hobby, and charity group you work with.

The idea is that its both impossible to censor, and can be public or private within a group, but any data you create or post, belongs to you, and cannot be removed by the government, or facebook, or the social justice nutcase whining that you've offended them.

mell says

Depends on the business. If it's too complex you can't outsource, it will burn you.

I've worked at companies in a lot of different industries, all sizes. Outsourcing or heavy reliance on contractors always leads to lower quality, and creation of massive tech debt. If you need shit on the wall to launch an idea, maybe. But as soon as you've got any traction, get some real engineers in there.

richwicks says

GNL says

richwicks says

Think people would want a box that basically is a web server on their desk?

Tell me the benefits I would experience by having a web server on my desk.

Privacy for one, ease of setup for two.

Instead of having a page on Facebook for your family to talk, you just have your box, and you talk about anything you like, with no possibility of even being monitored or censored. It doesn't have to be entirely public either, you can set it up so ONLY your family can use it, so you can openly discuss Mom's heart condition, or that Uncle Frank has gotten senile - private stuff you don't want to air outside of the family.

There's no reason to limit the box to just one purpose either. You can have multiple groups - say a group for work, and another group ...

So, you're selling a 100% privacy solution? Well, as long as the other person on the other end is not recording your conversation or communicating with you while unknow persons are present?

Shaman says

Yes, because of AI.

Ahh, that was good for laugh. Thanks, needed that.

Tenpoundbass says

I will after a certain point, there's no point in solving problems for business owners. That are forced or willingly, hire people who will sabotage, the effectiveness of my efforts, through their gross negligence, due to wokism. Everything is cyclic, these idiots just have to cycle through.

There are still good companies out there. Interviewing with a family run, Midwest lumber SAAS company this week. You look at their site, all you see is focus on customer service, not one line about inclusiveness, or any of that bullshit. Pretty for that reason alone, they are my front-runner. I don't think I can take another woke company, and thank God, seems like I won't have to.

NuttBoxer says

Midwest lumber SAAS company this week

I would LOVE to know more about what this SAAS does for it's industry.

GNL says

So, you're selling a 100% privacy solution? Well, as long as the other person on the other end is not recording your conversation or communicating with you while unknow persons are present?

I'm developing a 100% privacy solution.

Yes, of course, anything can be recorded, ANYTHING. Say you want to record a film that from Netflix, you just run the application in a virtual machine, and record the screen. It's that easy. DRM be damned. You cannot stop it. Even with end to end encryption to your television, you can just take the decoded image driving the display to output its data to machine that just records the image being produced. You cannot stop it. That's a complicated way to do it, but you can do it. Blu-ray was "cracked" initially by some person that setup a script to advance the video one frame at a time, and screen shot the image each frame. They then pulled the audio (I don't know how, could have been done through analog) and then used a program to encode all the images into film again. It took a lot of memory storage, but they literally cracked it in a DAY - just to prove they could do it, and there was ENORMOUS amounts of work put into to make Blu-ray impossible to record. The FIRST day Blu-ray went on sale, the FIRST film was cracked a day later.

The real goal is that the people who have access to it can privately communicate. I fully realize the danger of this, however there is direct political censorship by our government. I can't think of another solution around that, despite the dangers.

You know what the dark web is? It's just non indexed web sites. I run "a node" on the "Dark Web", only I can access it. I don't put anything illegal on it, but I recognize that people could with my solution. Ever heard of Peter Scully? Don't go too far into that really horrific case, and it's horrible. But that's ALREADY done with conventional tools today. Every technology is misused and that's unfortunate. I do wish we lived in a better world.

I do support some level of censorship, but our own fucking intelligence run things like Epstein's island. Who owns that island now? Probably Mossad.

I have foreboding about what I'm working on, but if we don't have a 1st amendment, and the ability to communicate, we're going to all end up slaves. I do not want to further enable evil, but when my own fucking government does it, do I have a choice? I can see the benefits of having USEnet resurrected - I miss that. I used to be able to TRIVIALLY talk to people all over the planet, can't easily do that now, not AS easily anyhow. I mean heck, you'd be on some innocent USEnet group and make friends with somebody in Italy or Russia, just have a chat. Kind of want to bring back the 1990's internet, not all these centrally controlled shit sites.

Why can't we talk to an Iranian, or Russian on Facebook, or Twitter, without going through hoops? Can you see we're being geographically and politically isolated? If we could just talk, we could end a lot of these stupid conflicts. Russia is losing the propaganda war, and BADLY, but Americans have no clue what is going on, because we can't talk about it. If people could just TALK, we could prevent a lot of these conflicts. That was one of the goals of making this communication system.

I still think if we could just talk, we could prevent our governments from going to war. War needs public support. If we could just talk, there wouldn't public support. How many Americans IF THEY KNEW that the US overthrew Ukraine, would be posting Ukrainian flags as signs of support? They have no clue that they don't know this is precisely what the US government wanted, a conflict, that could have EASILY been avoided.

rickwicks,

I love this idea and I assume there would be a market for it. At the very LEAST, criminals would pay big $$ for it, no? How much would it cost to make these "boxes"?

Also, I assume it could do everything a VPN could do?

I assume government and high value CEOs have something like this, it's just not being
marketed to the general population?

GNL says

rickwicks,

I love this idea and I assume there would be a market for it. At the very LEAST, criminals would pay big $$ for it, no? How much would it cost to make these "boxes"?

Also, I assume it could do everything a VPN could do?

Like $100. You can run it on a raspberry pi. The pi itself, it's around $75 for full setup, with 128 GB SD Card, which can easily be replaced to upgrade it.

The PI has a lot of stuff you don't need as well. You wouldn't need HDMI output, you don't need wifi, but that stuff might be free now, there may be no additional cost to include the hardware to do it. I think the LEAST the bill of materials would be, would be under $50.

This is the case I use for my set of raspberry pis:

https://flirc.tv/collections/case

The one on the upper left, I have many of. It's a really neat design, in that the entire case becomes the heat sink for the board. I've done my best to over-heat it, it's impossible. The case will get warm with heavy loads, but just warm, not so hot you can't handle it, and I stressed the hell out of it. I was using FFMPEG to transcode video, trying to crash it, trying to overheat it, for a WEEK. It broke 50C in the summer in a hot office.

So this box, can be setup so you can stream video to your television through multiple applications. You can directly connect with a phone or a computer, you can log into it, run what's called "X2GO" which is a remote desktop solution and use it as a computer. I'm adding email capabilities with it (again email, isn't "standard" email - you can only email between these boxes, but your phone or computer can connect to it, but it's not part of the standard email system).

Linux contains all the old tools of Unix. Ytalk is really cool, and I can show it to you if you like. People who first use it are annoyed by it, but once they get the hang of it, it's much nicer than SMS/IM and it's different than a phone call. It's very useful for communication of ideas. This concept is TOTALLY dead, but it does also have significant overhead in bandwidth, but that can be reduced, you can make so every WORD is transmitted, but every time you send a packet, that's at least 64 bytes (I think? Whatever the minimum size of an Ethernet frame with and IP / UDP or TCP header is). You wouldn't want to use this on a phone on 5g. Limiting ytalk to a word to be transmitted instead of a character, that would cut down bandwidth to about 1/5th - average word size is around 5 characters.

GNL says

I assume government and high value CEOs have something like this, it's just marketed to the general population?

My thinking is general population. It's a personal server. You control who has access to it.

Maybe you have a knitting group, or you just have a hobby of I dunno, cars or something. You can just have this little private group where you talk, among your friends and peers, maybe your friends are in another country? Maybe it's a group of people discussing geopolitics. Who knows? The machines can be linked together, so every machine has a copy of the group.

The idea is it simply can't be censored. The feds would have to show up to your home, and physically take the box and EVEN THEN, the box can have every file encrypted, every time you turn it on, it requires a password to gain access to the files. Turn it off, and the only way it's accessible is if you enter the password.

There's lots you can do with it.

richwicks says

There's lots you can do with it.

What would it take to set it up between you and I? Like, what are the steps?

If you mix software dev with some other discipline, physics for instance, it's hard for overseas peeps to take yer jeb!

It'll be a while before AI can do it as well.

I'm always looking for side work / biz ownership as well but so far short and long term real estate is the best I've come up with.

I can't clone myself yet.

mell says

similar to the AF model.

Yams and belt fed M134!

Tenpoundbass says

Kubernetes and Panda

Kub and spark!

GNL says

richwicks says

There's lots you can do with it.

What would it take to set it up between you and I? Like, what are the steps?

I have to get off my asshole, and do complete proof of concept - meaning I need to create all the software for it, to operate seamlessly and effortlessly.

These last 2 years have been hard on me, in that all my naivety is gone now. I'm in Silly Con Valley, and I'm tremendously disappointed in the corporations and people I worked for and with. I'm just recovering from burnout. I've gone from thinking that people were just "going along to get along", to realizing that the people I work with and respected, are actually fucking stupid. That's not to say I'm super smart, these people outclass me in technical ability and proficiency, but they literally believe that the "unvaccinated pose a threat to the vaccinated" - I used to believe that they were just going along to get along, but no, they actually believe this bullshit. They're stupid. Brilliant people I know, are fucking retarded. They have no cognitive thinking outside of work. This realization has been devastating to me, because I've been making the wrong assumptions about people for 3 decades. But at least I know how Nazi Germany and Communist Russia came into being. Fully understand that now, always wondered, and it's terrifying it's so simple.

I can build what I described, I can show you barely functional proofs of concept, but it's not seamless, it's not "drop it down and it works". Everything I've described is possible, but it's all hacks right now. I start out with hacks, then I move up to a solution. Hacks prove it's possible, solutions are solutions.

richwicks says

I can build what I described, I can show you barely functional proofs of concept, but it's not seamless, it's not "drop it down and it works". Everything I've described is possible, but it's all hacks right now. I start out with hacks, then I move up to a solution. Hacks prove it's possible, solutions are solutions.

If you can do what you say you can do, I'm sure you have a product that will sell.

GNL says

richwicks says

I can build what I described, I can show you barely functional proofs of concept, but it's not seamless, it's not "drop it down and it works". Everything I've described is possible, but it's all hacks right now. I start out with hacks, then I move up to a solution. Hacks prove it's possible, solutions are solutions.

If you can do what you say you can do, I'm sure you have a product that will sell.

I can make a system in about a month, without encryption, which is ESSENTIAL, and on limited systems.

Encryption is tremendously difficult. There are so many pitfalls where when you do something that you expect to make it secure, actually weakens it. I need to understand ECC better, but doing what I described in the clear is pretty straight forward. I'll try to pound it out in the next 30 days and I'll design in such a way as to do encryption later.

I need to prove it can be done first. Encryption is just another layer on top of it.

I literally have a billion dollar idea, IF I can find a storage solution which is more or less permanent. There's "5d optical storage" - if that's ever coming out, I can exploit that. Not everybody will want it, but a lot of people will.

richwicks says

I literally have a billion dollar idea

I agree. It certainly seems worth it to work your ass of for 30 days. :)

GNL says

richwicks says

I literally have a billion dollar idea

I agree.

No, I mean another idea.

The problem is that I don't know if I can patent it or protect it in any way.

The key is permanent data storage. Give me that, and I have something that literally 10% of the population would give me $100 for in profit. It's easy to do as well.

It's one of those things that if I told you what it was, you'd be like "shit! Why didn't I think of that??" It's that easy.

Here's a FREE idea - creating family groups to do cooking. Get a bunch of families together to cook not just for themselves, but several people. I don't know if that can be monetized, I don't know if it would be socially acceptable, but it's kind of like carpooling for dinner.

GNL says

I would LOVE to know more about what this SAAS does for it's industry.

Everything from sales, to inventory, to accounting.

richwicks says

Here's a FREE idea - creating family groups to do cooking. Get a bunch of families together to cook not just for themselves, but several people. I don't know if that can be monetized, I don't know if it would be socially acceptable, but it's kind of like carpooling for dinner.

I've seen a version of this before. There were a few companies that offered kitchen space and all the ingredients to make as much food as you wanted. It was some kind of assembly line and you could make a weeks worth of food in an hour or so.

richwicks says

It's one of those things that if I told you what it was, you'd be like "shit! Why didn't I think of that??" It's that easy.

Come on man, easy? Get your ass on it. What are you waiting for? $$?

NuttBoxer says

GNL says

I would LOVE to know more about what this SAAS does for it's industry.

Everything from sales, to inventory, to accounting.

For their own in-house use or for the industry?

GNL says

richwicks says

It's one of those things that if I told you what it was, you'd be like "shit! Why didn't I think of that??" It's that easy.

Come on man, easy? Get your ass on it. What are you waiting for? $$?

Again, I need permanent storage capacity. Also, I don't know if I can protect it via patent or copyright. You need that.

I can lie about a solution, CLAIM that what I produce is permanent, and by the time people find out it isn't, be dead, but I don't want to be a piece of shit. I don't want to be a Sam Bankman Fried or Bernie Madoff. If I ever make this, I want to actually make it.

If you can find a storage solution that will last for at LEAST 1000 years, I'll make you rich. I can't market worth shit, but I know this would sell well. It's not a DVD or CDR. Flash possibly, but it's basically a dead storage solution, and limited in storage capacity, too limited. Need at least 1 GB of storage. NAND flash won't work, of course an HDD won't work (lifespan is around 10 years). I just need something that is permanent. Doesn't have to be read write, write once read many - WORM. Has to last for LONG TIME. You actually don't need to delete files when you get to a certain point, a 350 TB disk, you'll never have to delete a file as long as you're doing differences of files, copying files all the time could fill it up..

5D optical storage is a possible solution. That has like 350 TB of storage, and it's expected to last for 1000's of years. IF that ever comes out, I have a really good product for it. IF it comes out. Any idea how much 350 TB is? Every film, and television show, I've seen in my lifetime will fit on it. Even if it degrades over time, I can implement error correction for it, if 1 out of 10 bits fails on it, I can reconstruct the data. 1GB/hr is high enough quality to show on a film screen. It's so fucked up where we are. Every single book you've ever read, every word you've heard, or spoken (reduced to text) will fit on an $11 SD card, but that only lasts for 10 years. I have a library of books that's so vast, I can't read it all before I'm dead. Just have to remember to copy it at some point before the storage mechanism fails. The Library of Alexandria has nothing on me.

I'm in awe of where we are, and nobody realizes what kind of just incredible power they all have. I can literally do nuclear bomb simulation on toys now. It's fucking nuts. Just a few decades ago, it was ILLEGAL to export Playstation 2 boxes to certain nations, because they could be put together in a Beowulf system to be a super computer, to do nuclear simulations. That shit runs on my phone now. The highest of high tech in, say, 1985, you have in your pocket. Cray? That's a pathetic $50 phone you buy at 7/11 on a pre-paid phone plan. People have no idea the ridiculous amount of power everybody has, and they have no clue how to access it.

These are strange times.

just_passing_through says

Kub and spark!

Yeah I don't know why I can't get excited about those new fangled products.
I think because it's all so convoluted, at least in the MS Dev RAD, you develop, compile and deploy, without having to sign a bunch of other EUA.

GNL says

For their own in-house use or for the industry?

Industry. SAAS stands for "software as a service".

NuttBoxer says

GNL says

For their own in-house use or for the industry?

Industry. SAAS stands for "software as a service".

Yes, that was a silly question. My company is also an SAAS. The SAAS space(?) is where I think developers can shine if they look for an industry that could use one. In my case, I believe I am decentralizing my industry by making it so independent 1-person businesses can compete on a much more even playing field. We NEED decentralization.

GNL says

Yes, that was a silly question. My company is also an SAAS. The SAAS space(?) is where I think developers can shine if they look for an industry that could use one. In my case, I believe I am decentralizing my industry by making it so independent 1-person businesses can compete on a much more even playing field. We NEED decentralization.

The sad part is by time you pay to have all of that developed, then the technology and the servers they run on, will be out of date and on the verge of being retired. Or the company that host your apps, will move on past the versions your software requires.

The reality is most businesses could and probably should still be running on NT 4.0 on IIS 4, built on ASP classic, but definitely not Cold Fusion.

Most companies I know are always many, many major versions behind when it comes to their SW and infrastructure. I would expect SAAS companies to actually be ahead of the game in most cases.

Tenpoundbass says

The sad part is by time you pay to have all of that developed, then the technology and the servers they run on, will be out of date and on the verge of being retired. Or the company that host your apps, will move on past the versions your software requires.

The reality is most businesses could and probably should still be running on NT 4.0 on IIS 4, built on ASP classic, but definitely not Cold Fusion

Find a company, scare the shit out of them and then hold out your hand with a solution. Make big $$.

The reality is as long as people are being bullshited and baffled by Hype Tech abound. Then I don't want to write software in that reality, as people really don't know what they want, as they don't understand what is doable and what is just hyped up bullshit and smoke and mirrors.

I see where people need an information suite of tools and easy to access contextual menus at easy reach. But in every organization there is no shortage of assholes that then question why my app doesn't look like all of the other information limited clunky applications. It must look and behave like all of the other websites, regardless how ineffective those sites are at serving their needs. If the crap worked like it was supposed to, then the Obamacare rollout would have been a smashing success, and the Salesforce implementation of the programs I wrote would have taken only taken three months rather than going on the third year.

I can't just make them a windows from app it has to be XAML but then they wonder why the requirements they require that don't fit in any contextual hit point isn't working.

We need to get back to the point where the business owners ask capable developers to write software, the developer gathers requirements from the actual users in the business that understands and owns those process. New hires are expected to be smart enough to understand the Windows menu layout standards, and all menu and contextual menus are where they are supposed to be. Without dumbing down the applications to the point the software is more of a baby sitter for idiots than an Enterprise management solution.

No I'm not writing this software for AWS, and no I'm not writing automated tests for it either. As those tests merely confirm that all of the crud calls to the database is working and that the model is complete. By time I pushed the program to production, I know for a fact my model is solid. The only errors I was called about were end user errors. Calls saying they can't find a product, that wasn't even in the system yet, or they were searching the wrong item or customer number. Or they tried to insert values that were of the wrong type. And they are too lazy to read the message, that they are trying to put the first name in a zipcode text box.

It just wore me down!

richwicks says

Here's a FREE idea - creating family groups to do cooking. Get a bunch of families together to cook not just for themselves, but several people. I don't know if that can be monetized, I don't know if it would be socially acceptable, but it's kind of like carpooling for dinner.

I've seen a version of this before. There were a few companies that offered kitchen space and all the ingredients to make as much food as you wanted. It was some kind of assembly line and you could make a weeks worth of food in an hour or so.

Both ideas had potentials, and businesses experimented with them in the late 90's and early 00's. Then inductive cooktop (with both temperature and time control) came along, making cooking a meal on the stove top as trivial as operating a microwave. Now with inductive cooktop, dishwasher and washer+dryer, 67% of a wife (cooking and cleaning) is obsolete.

In the 80's I dated a Cuban girl, her mom had Cuban food delivered for dinner every night by a Homecook that had several customers.
She was a Realtor, and the Dad was a Mazda mechanic at a dealership. But demanded dinner when he got home, so they paid for those aluminum containers with the paper lids of food delivered every day.

richwicks says

Blu-ray was "cracked" initially by some person that setup a script to advance the video one frame at a time, and screen shot the image each frame. They then pulled the audio (I don't know how, could have been done through analog) and then used a program to encode all the images into film again.

The typical way of cracking this type of protection is to go after software solutions since they are easier to debug and understand. Reverse engineer how something like PowerDVD communicates with the drive, what keys it uses, etc, then do the same and save the decrypted stream off. Zero loss in quality. Sure, they'll blacklist the keys, but new ones have to be put into updated versions of that same software package, so it's just a matter of going after them again.

As long as you have access to the method and the keys, they can only delay you through obfuscation.

Source: Used to be a bit of a reverse engineer myself. Found it was the best way to learn how things really worked, especially when documentation was garbage or non-existent.

Tenpoundbass says

Development and the Software Design Life Cycle has been so dumbed down over the last 10 to 15 years. New raw fresh talent has been replaced with frameworks and CRM end users.

This describes my 30 years of experience. I loved writing clever programs as a teenager. The code I wrote in the 1990s for startups was mostly my code with relatively minor amounts of library and framework use. Years later it was mostly crappy javascript (ugggh) calls into frameworks for stuff that was running on the cloud. There was absolutely no joy in that type of "software development."

GNL says

I'm also interested in understanding why more developers don't start their own companies.

If a developer starts their own company, then they are busy being a CEO and not a software developer. So, I'll answer a slightly different question: Why don't more developers join small startups or create a startup with a good idea and hand the management off to someone else as they continue to work on the software.

The problem I see with startups is that it's boom or bust. Through survivorship bias, we tend to only see the rags-to-riches situations. But the reality is that you might work long hours for several years and get paid poorly; then the company goes bust and you have worthless stock options and the "technology" you developed is sent to the dustbin.

Joining an established company gives you a pretty solid floor (higher and more reliably salary than a startup), a high expected financial return, and a possibility of huge riches. Maybe not $100 MM of stock options like in a startup, but several million in accumulated stock and benefits over a decade. It's a tradeoff: Do you want a high chance of enough to retire comfortably (established company) or a very small chance of hitting the jackpot (startup)?

My own situation is exactly as I describe above: 7 startups in 10 years. The two mid-1990s IPOs I went through both fizzled when the market turned and the stock options were worth maybe $50k total at their height (after working for 5 years making $30k/year less than market value). Other startups devolved into doing contract work for other companies to keep the money coming in; or they just went out of business. But in 2002 I joined Apple. It was a fantastic time to join the company, as the second wave of Steve Jobs was gathering momentum. Those original stock options and stock grants had startup-like gains, but even skilled developers who joined only 10 years ago have been making steady $400k/year when you combine salary and stock grants. Why trade that in on a lottery ticket?