u/ExtremeDullard

I lost my toes 8 years ago to a congenital condition that's been destroying my extremities since I was a teenager. They went first because the disease seems to be trailing behind in my hands.

The occasional pain, CRPS and skin problems in my fingers have been manageable so far. But today is the worst ever: 3 of my fingers on my left hand are so painful I can't use my hand at all. They're hot, swollen, my skin and the underside of my fingernails are self-destructing and I bleed randomly every 10 minutes.

It's the same story all over again, but this time with my fingers. And it's just the beginning: I know how long I'll be fighting this getting worse and worse until I start popping insane amounts of painkillers and getting hooked again in a few years. But this time, there's no way out: amputation was an option for my toes, but it isn't for my fingers.

I'm facing years of this shit again and I know I'm already out of options. Not that it's news to me, I knew it was coming, but now it's here and that really feels rough.

Sorry I just needed to vent... It's midnight, my wife is asleep and I'm all alone with my thoughts at the moment.

For 20 years, I lived barefoot 24/7. I also used to hike barefoot on the roughest terrains. I loved it and I don't need convincing on the benefits.

Then 8 years ago, I lost all my toes and I quit going barefoot everywhere because hitting my nubs is about 10 times as painful as stubbing a toe. It impacted my balance substantially too.

Since then, I regained my balance and I learned how to avoid painful situations. I'm always barefoot inside, including at work. I had my old pairs of barefoot safety shoes modified - that I almost never needed before, and I regularly use them to hike in the forest. But I can't really use them on tarmac because they're not made to withstand the abrasion. Also that's not truly being barefoot, and I miss feeling the ground bad.

So I decided to go barefoot again outside wherever possible. The streets and the parks are clean and free of debris where I live, so it's very safe.

My problem is this: when I had toes and I stepped on a pebble with the ball of my foot that was large enough to be painful, my foot would "squirm" to shift the pressure away from the pebble, so-to-speak. As in, I would instinctively put pressure on my toes and heel to relieve the front fat pad.

Now of course, I can't do that anymore: if my forefoot steps on a pebble, I'm committed: that pebble is gonna dig into my skin until I take the next step, or I'm gonna lift off my foot entirely, and if my other foot happens to land on a pebble at that spot too, then I'm gonna have a really unhappy time.

Is anybody in a similar situation by any chance? What do you do to deal with offending objects on the ground that you can't really do anything about once you step on em?

Hello everybody!

I'm a veteran Unix / Linux engineer (think terminally addicted to the console kind of veteran) and I consider myself a very experienced developer.

I know next to nothing about AI though. The only thing I did with it is play with Claude Code for a couple of hours to get it to spit out boilerplate.

But AI is coming for my job, so I need to adapt. I'm only a few years from retirement, but I have enough time left on the job that I'm not going to be able to continue what I do the way I do now before I retire.

I have nothing against AI itself - although I'm completely uninterested in it. But I do have a beef with most of the AI players offering cloud-based solutions for a variety of reasons. So the only way I'm going to code with AI is locally.

My employer being a great place to work - and my CEO being interested in freeing the company from the slowly tightening customer lock-in of Microsoft and OpenAI before it's too late - I managed to convince my management to let me blow a few thousand euros on an AI-ready machine. And the machine arrived today.

My plan is this: install Linux on it, install a local LLM (preferably open-source, although I don't believe that's even a thing in the strict sense of the word), install coding agent(s), then slowly start to integrate it in my work routine: first use it as a dumb coding assistant to spew out a few lines of code here and there to save typing time, then evermore complex constructs, until it craps out or the machine / model can't keep up. Then I'll know how much it can do for me, what I can trust it with and how much time it does or doesn't save me. In other words, my plan is to approach it the exact reverse of vibe coding 🙂

My problem is this: while I can code comfortably in the Linux kernel and do pretty much anything I want on a Linux machine, I know absolutely nothing about AI. And I do mean nothing at all!

Is there a guide out there for old farts like me with a solid but traditional background in computing trying to setup AI locally the way I want?

I'm giving myself 3 months to set all that stuff up and evaluate it properly. After which, I've already indicated to my employer that I will seek a new position away from computers altogether, if AI proves disappointing, or if it works but I'm just not interested in working like that.

Thank you for any pointer you can give me!