One of the biggest reasons I left a company was because the CTO and his toady, both coming from company X, made a unilateral decision to switch to X's proprietary and expensive framework above senior developers' objections because, in his words, if people leave the company, we can always go back to company X to support the application written in X's proprietary framework. Um, yup. Never mind that framework was totally inappropriate for the application, or that the UI looked like a refugee from 2000. Oh, and never mind that the biggest customer had nothing but trouble in another application written in said expensive proprietary framework.
That mindset plus a dash of RTO equaled me out the door.
The company I worked for, a not-for-profit, didn't want to hire juniors because after training them in modern software development techniques, etc., that they didn't get in their undergrad, they'd leave after about three or four years since they were no longer junior, and the for-profit sector paid better. Admittedly it wasn't sexy or used bleeding edge techstacks. From what I've heard, that's still the case there.
Instead they went after burnt-out for-profit veterans who wanted a better life balance and good benefits who'd already made their numbers and needed medical.
> after training them in modern software development techniques, etc., that they didn't get in their undergrad, they'd leave after about three or four years since they were no longer junior
Isn't 3-4 years kind of a standard length of employment time in software engineering?
> burnt-out for-profit veterans who wanted a better life balance and good benefits
(commenting late in the game, so the point may have been made already)
I personally believe that "AI" is mostly marketing for the current shiny LLM thing that will end up finding some sort of actual useful niche (or two) once the dust has settled. But for now, it's more of a solution being carpet-bombed for problems, most of them inappropriate IMHO (e.g, replacing HR).
For now there'll be collateral damage as carbon-based lifeforms are displaced, with an inevitable shortage of pesky humans to do cleanup once the limitations of "AI" are realized. Any the humans will probably be contract/gig at half their previous rates to do the cleanup.
I currently use Windows, 10 to be exact, to play games, and in a VM to run an income tax fat app (since the online version is so much more expensive). My game machine cannot upgrade to 11. A mobo upgrade won't be that expensive for the game machine, but instead I'll covert it to a Linux box and run the few games that work on Linux.
I believe my Windows days are over as of, say, October 14 this year.
FYI "the few games that work" is most of them these days, including newer games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring and older ridiculous towers of cards like my heavily modded Skyrim setup. I think it's mostly things that use invasive anti-cheat software that struggle. I use a mix of Steam and Heroic Games Launcher and haven't run into anything I've been playing recently that doesn't work except my PSVR2 to PC adapter in Steam, which I haven't taken any time to troubleshoot.
I love that you've got something like, "upgrade to Linux" in your calendar :)
However, I recommend at least testing it on your hardware before that date. Put Ventoy on a USB drive and play with some live distros. Just to make sure everything works the way you expect.
You never know, you may have that one piece of hardware that doesn't work :shrug:
If you make your Windows 11 USB with Rufus you can disable the TPM 2.0 and other hardware requirement checks. You totally should try a Linux install first though!
I had a somewhat repugnant second-level boss whose philosophy was to give people a little more work than they thought they could do to get the best performance out of them, and I believe he was right since, at least for me, I worked harder to make the earlier deadline and/or did more than I thought I could. He must have known Parkinson's.
That only went so far, since piling yet more work onto someone who made an earlier deadline may get them to the point where they don't perform.
Which is why I appreciated a not-for-profit company where they'd actually ask me if I needed more time, since quality was of utmost importance. At that point at that company I knew the codebase, so I'd consistently over-estimate and deliver early, since there was still a chance of hidden impacts/requirements.
It'd be nice if something similar were available to traverse, say, directories of writings in Markdown, Word, LibreOffice, etc., and output a single text file so I have all my writings in one place. Plus allow plug-ins to extract from more exotic file types not originally included.
I still have the Infocom game Leather Goddesses of Phobos, complete with scratch and sniff card, and the 3-D (blue-red) glasses for the enclosed comic book. If you don't have VR or first-person, it was the next best thing: they told you when to scratch and sniff.
Favourite part of this game: the untangling cream and the bonus joke about the rabbit.
Most hated part of this game: HOP, CLAP, KWEEPA.
Also funny how I recall this stuff vividly more than 3 decades later!
My first experience of IF was the tape-based Classic Adventure on the Amstrad CPC. My family bought the CPC late 1985, I bought Amstrad Action in December 1985 and saw the advert for it and new I wanted it more than all the other games that were reviewed with their flashy graphics and beeps and what-have-you.
There were a couple of standard "invisible inks." [0] I assume Invisiclues used one of them--most likely baking soda given they didn't use heat to reveal. No idea how stable either of those were as inks.
I think that Invisiclues is good idea, and that UHS format can be used as a computer file with a similar use. There are FOSS implementations of UHS such as OpenUHS and FreeUHS. Maybe someone will be able to rewrite the Invisiclues in UHS format. (I also wrote a UHS writer program in uxn. And, I had written UHS parser in PostScript; if you have printer with invisible ink (or scratch-off layer) then maybe it will be possible to use this PostScript code to make a program that will print out with invisible ink, too.)
I've never been great at working my way all the way through games. I think I may have completed that one--mostly because I could get hints from the author :-)
I know it will go over your head but the scheme in Texas that bitcoin miners take advantage is not isolated to bitcoin and is used in other industries there as well. From a electric market perspective it makes sense, ignoring the functionality of bitcoin mining. Having industrials that can dynamically adjust their use is very helpful for electric generation.
>I know it will go over your head but the scheme in Texas that bitcoin miners take advantage is not isolated to bitcoin and is used in other industries there as well.
Where did OP say that? They said _power suckers_, as in plural and used bitcoin mining as one example. It’s strange you started your comment with an unnecessary personal attack and assumption OP is an idiot when you didn't seem to understand their comment. I dont understand why you had to take it so personal. Unless you're part of ERCOT or a energy supplier, I guess, but even that's not a good reason.
My point is that power suckers serve as part of a healthy energy grid because they are able to somewhat time their use which helps for overall grid health. I am not sure how well that would play into a data center, so I think the original comparison to AI is weak but nonetheless from the OP bitcoin perspective it is.
Your comment didn't upset me. But it seems my comment upset you? Please don't project anything. It's just strange to take a random comment so personal. And I understand your point, but I dont care about that part.
This reminds me of John Scalzi's early SF book, Old Man's War. One of the MC's motivations throughout the book was the love of his wife. Apart from the pew-pew aspects, it's one of those stories that can hit you in the feels in the appropriate places. Won't say any more since it'd give away too much.
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