in that boat and know several others like me and I've been programming from childhood and have never stopped. I'm up to date with the latest and worked in pretty tight industries but when you're not even getting a call back after unemployment is dry and you're broke and rent keeps hitting and you've got a child and it's all just coming down hard, man. ah well, maybe we can organize groups jumping off bridges on social media until either we get work or there aren't enough of us left to go around
I've returned to FreeBSD after many years, and I just built 14.0 to get CUDA working. CUDA doesn't need this to run AFAIK. This is about the kernel providing a module that allows a direct rendering interface. CUDA doesn't render to the screen. IIRC, DRI/drm are kernel drivers for graphics that map the GPU video memory window into your process so you don't have to copy data or send it though a pipe or some such nonsense. it was a video optimization from the early days of Linux graphics when copying
this is very, very true. I found out long ago that I have a favorable reaction of calm clarity and default to logic instead of freezing or overreacting, and I also found out that without training I have no idea what I'm supposed to do. I would much rather be hyperventilating and shaking but have a clear training-based plan of action than to calmly realize I'm useless at the moment. I still do my best, but I think people overvalue clear thinking in the moment.
I had the same questions when I was about your age and found a lot of intersting answers in the Linux source code. of course it was a lot simpler back then. what really got me going was the osdev community (much smaller back then) and Intels system architecture documentation. iirc part 3a or 3b was where the good stuff is. it tells you a lot less about how things are and a lot more about how things could be. you also get to learn plenty of fun things in OSDEV too like how 32bit processors did 36bit addressing with PAE or how 64bit processors did 52bit addressing to squeeze money out of people. how computers start in 16bit mode and you have to learn systems level assembly code gymnastics to make it to long mode, why there's an 8bit mode around, and more. if you liked learning about loading binaries, you'll love how many surprises still exist. like 64bit mode still including memory segmentation but forcing it to flat mapping for lonh mode
I've heard of situations where founders issue a large pool of shares owned by the corporation itself and bill hours to the company, receiving a fair payout of their target share price in dollars as one share, and each founder can put in as much work as they have time to invest. I don't recommend this, but it's something I saw a couple guys do when they both had fluctuating free time to commit.
commit these things and stand by them. I've ended a meeting with "I wrote that because of how obvious it is that composing a more detailed comment is not worthwhile and you've negated the point of that by having this meeting. if you really don't understand, have one of the juniors explain" but you better make sure you're right and so right that even the most contrived counterpoint won't hold water or start drafting new resumes
As a person who used to have total recall, count yourself blessed. Aside from ruining intimate, family, professional, and casual relationships by trivially quoting and correcting hypocrisy verbatim, and having an encyclopedia of cringe that keeps me from sleeping in peace and being a wreck when I get to address a crowd or do anything else that can make me the center of attention, I have to say that the most intense way in which you have a sense of loss and mortality comes from the realization that you are losing your gift and your mind is always filling in the memory gaps and you have a lifetime of knowing that you will find the perfect answer to the question of how you remember the past and instead of the answers you seek being unknown to you, you have invented a particular piece of history that never happened. It hurts and you have to be careful not to make a mistake and writing down important things is something that I started doing in my 40s. For all of my education, I remembered everything and never relied on notes. I finished a bachelor's degree and I never had a notebook. Just a calender. Fun fact: calendars are like an table of contents that point me to information. Another fun fact: I don't make a clear distinction between me and other people speaking, and have an easy time extracting and storing meaning from conversation or lecture or videos with info.