jason0597

I work as an Equipment Reliability Engineer at a nuclear power station. The only programming we are allowed to use is Microsoft Excel Macros, nothing else. There’s a reason why VBA is still alive.

My apologies, I've been up for 18hrs today

Certainly not for money, he lives in a simple house and drives a simple car. Probably because he just likes his job

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No, I pay fastmail [1] to do it all for me. I am reading in the comments that a lot of people have success with self-hosting, and maybe I will look into it someday when I am not busy every hour of every day studying chemical engineering, but for now I am happy to pay £50/yr to have someone else deal with hosting, clean IP addresses, DNS/SPF/DKIM, or whatever else is necessary to make sure my emails land in people's inboxes.

[1] https://www.fastmail.com/

make recompiles source code files by detecting the last modified date on a file, hence it only recompiles source files as necessary. So if you have 10 source files with 5000 lines of C in them, and you only change one of them, it will not recompile everything, it will only recompile that source file which has changed.

Which makes me agree with the parent above, I don't see how exactly Ccache is supposed to be used. Maybe for a distributed source directory with many developers working on it?

Because it means less eyeballs on the front page, hence less ad revenue

I think that's an exaggeration of how it works in Europe, it is not the case that it "sucks so bad people end up buying private healthcare anyways"

The level of crime in Rotterdam is lower than in San Francisco though

This is exactly my experience with my differential equation lessons in my maths classes at Year 1 and Year 2 undergraduate chemical engineering. The way we were told to just follow the instructions and not have any critical thinking at all about what we were doing made me so unmotivated that I sort of gave up learning differential equations. I was lucky this was during lockdown, so I was assessed by online tests and was able to get through it, but my god was the teaching so so unengaging.

When AMD or NVIDIA sell GPUs to scalpers, and those scalpers resell the GPUs and keep the profit, there's outrage about it. Nobody ever says to "build more GPUs" to fix the problem.

When houses and new developments get snatched up by investors and landlords as buy-to-lets (or even by Blackrock and pension funds), there is little outrage and calls for restricting who can buy them. The same argument is rehashed over and over and over again. Just build more houses!

I feel that there is a disconnect between these two schools of thought. I personally believe that, while indeed more houses should be built, we should also have a serious discussion about whether houses should be sold en-masse to very wealthy investors

Same stuff can happen with Windows too with unexpected updates. Not sure about Mac though, I've never used one.

https://twitter.com/techemails/

Slightly off-topic, but wow. What an absolutely brilliant twitter account.

I am genuinely surprised that there is so much interest in the comments here and excitement about fusion energy powering the future. Yet I see surprisingly few numbers or physics being discussed. Kind of disappointed for a forum that is supposedly technically-minded and able to speak mathematics.

There was this great MIT paper [1] published a while back that's still to be rebuked, talking about the serious technical challenges. Furthermore, there's Maury Markowitz's blogs that have been around for more than a decade showcasing why economically future can never work competitively on the grid [2].

Fusion is great science, it may eventually return a net positive in energy, but it has so many problems that make it impossible to use commercially.

[1] http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trou...

[2] https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-wi...

As per the comment:

it is also nice knowing that I never have to worry about losing my device since all of my actual work is on a server I can login to using just about any other device including my phone.

People wanted cars because, for most of the US, they are the only practical transportation method.

And that's because government zoning at the time prioritised suburban single-family house zoning, which in turn created the car-dependent culture. It didn't have to be this way, Rotterdam isn't built this way for example.

I think you’re misdiagnosing the cause. Nearly everyone I know—my circle skews highly educated and well compensated—cares more about social issues than economic ones.

Of course they would. They are very well educated and very well compensated. Their needs are taken care of, economics isn't at the top of their political concerns list. However, they do not represent the majority of the US, they only represent a tiny minority.

https://www.legalreader.com/low-wage-jobs-are-the-new-americ...

No I don't think so. People still pay a pretty penny to watch live music, and the human and emotional interaction with an artist just can't be matched.

I think the fact that companies like Klarna are downsizing is good overall. Klarna literally offers nothing but interest free loans (3 instalments typically), and they tear out your eyeballs if you miss the payments with ridiculous interest rates. Their normal business model makes zero profit, and they solely depend on people missing payments so they can gouge them. Clearly not viable at all...

Lets be real, you need to be using JavaScript for the internet to be functional, even within Tor

That's incorrect, especially the last part. Dark services work very hard to design their websites to work without JS, due to these exact vulnerabilities. Nobody on the dark web trusts JS, at all.

There are lots of uranium reserves around the world that are in classically Western countries

Let's not forget the time where the 30% tax refund Apple misinformation spread like wildfire on the front page

It’s not entirely clear to me why working hard has become a Bad Thing in certain parts of the US

Because working hard is not a guarantee to a successful material life.

https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/2020-edelman-tr...

Success in life is mostly a function of starting conditions, i.e. where you're born and how rich your parents are. I know he mentions the US, but please let's not discount the billions of people around the globe who will never amount to anything no matter how hard they work. I was lucky enough to leave Greece soon after it was destroyed by the Economic Crisis, but not everyone was.

A lot of it comes down to luck too. Let's not idolise the people who got successful and keep repeating the same points over and over again of "work hard" and "networking", we've heard this before so many times. What about the people who worked hard and networked and still failed? I'd rather listen to them.

Finally, some people become great musicians, great inspirational mothers, absolutely incredible teachers, yet they get paid pennies. If I had to name successful people I've met in my life I would certainly put at the top my teachers in school who slogged through so much BS to deliver the best teaching to the children. People with lots of money are very down my list.

Wait until you see what hardware the OpenBSD developers use... are you going to claim that they aren't professionals?

https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20120425065148

https://www.undeadly.org/features/2012/r2k12/P1020598.JPG

Where's the visa? :)

If you make less than $112k abroad, you don't have to pay US income tax (as long as you declare it to the IRS)

https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/fore...

"And I don't think that a job makes a person special, why would it? It's just a job. I work on a hot market, someone else does not - that doesn't make any of us special people."

Well, a job takes up roughly 1/3 of our working lives (minus 2/3 for sleep (8hrs) and "leisure" (8hrs)), so I would say that it defines us very much, and it's a lot more than "just a job". A "job" is stacking shelves at Tesco or driving lorries for Amazon. Tech is a career (and a lifestyle, given how much it seeps into one's personal life e.g. watching Defcon before bed, I doubt lorry drives watch Lorrycon talks before bed...)

As for your other point, fair enough, point taken.

You have to move to some awfully expensive part of the country and interact with some extremely thin skinned people all day, and spend hours upon hours examining minute details of systems supporting systems supporting systems that you never even knew existed.

Sounds a lot like engineering to be honest. Lots of travelling to facilities in the middle of nowhere, people that never click together, examining systems with no documentation that you never knew existed in the first place, etc.

Which means that this is not a good explanation for the salary disparity between engineering and tech, as both fields deal with similar problems, yet one is paid substantially more.

Many of us would like to move

I for one wouldn't. I would never ever ever trade my walkable cities for the monstrosities that are car-centric North American cities.

but things like health insurance can easily cost $1000+ a month if you want full coverage

Yeah but if you multiple that by 12, you get something like $12k, or $15k for argument's sake. That $15k does not explain the disparity between a €55k/yr salary and a $150k/yr salary, so clearly there is another force that is at play here.