[DaBackpack]

When I was in college I'd occasionally go 60~72 hours without sleep. My friends and I did hackathons every few months. It was fun to spend that much time with my friends, but in retrospect, hackathons are just... shitty.

Yeah, you don't HAVE to stay up for the entire weekend, you're "allowed" to sleep, but the culture (at least at the time) is that "sleep is for the weak", and if you take a break from your hackathon project, you clearly don't have enough passion to be a software engineer in Silicon Valley. Because yeah, multimillion-dollar corporations were there, and they were WATCHING. The whole conceit was that "hackathons are good for students because they can show off to recruiters!", but in reality, "hackathons are good for corporations because they get free labor, and they get a whole weekend for free advertising!" These places barely fed you... if you count "PB&J sandwiches without peanut butter" as a meal, I guess.

The time I fully embraced socialism is around the time I realized that hackathons only exist to exploit kids.

p.s. I have reason to expect that this may have inflicted permanent neurological damage to my brain, don't fucking do it. Fuck Big Tech. You're worth more than that.