My running joke for the last couple years is "Nobody knows how to write software anymore" (even about a bug in my code). The problem is almost certainly complexity. Apps are like a house of cards, and we keep adding to the stack with new features, external dependencies, etc. My apps 30 years ago used one language, one library, one process, one thread and shipped on one platform. Now it uses Java, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, SQL and has a dozen linked libraries, talks to a couple servers, has dozens of threads, and runs on desktop, browser, tablet, phone and car console. It's a wonder anything works at all.
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jeffreportmill1
I am a former Apple and NeXT software engineer, working for my own developer tools and educational software and consulting company for 25 years. I love to hear from other software developers and technology enthusiasts, feel free to contact me.
Jeff Martin jeff@reportmill.com http://reportmill.com
I struggle with the same feeling - though maybe I’d say I don’t find honing my craft as rewarding anymore. For years it’s been the gradually creeping expansion of the world - the more I develop new skills, the more I find there are so many others that (seem to) have done it better and faster. Then all at once I find that chatbots seems to be better and faster. It has sapped my enthusiasm. I don’t know if it’s depression or anhedonia, but I probably need to spend more time figuring it out.
I suggest you keep arguing - but make every effort to concede opposing valid points. If you disagree, you're an idiot and little different than Hitler.
Smoking is not the best metaphor, because staying informed on the issues and events of society and community is essential to a well lived life. News in some form is more like food - and the author makes a good point that too many of us are suffering adverse health effects of consuming vast quantities of poor quality content, myself included.
Our society is under attack and changing rapidly in dangerous ways. Staying informed might not be the same as enlisting and heading overseas to fight the good fight, but we owe our current pax americana to those who did. So I stay informed so I can occasionally enter the fray in our contest of ideas. The worst of what is happening now is because too many people are under and ill-informed.
The CEO is worth 7B+. 1000 employees at 100k/yr would cost him 100M - less than his net worth fluctuates on any given day and only 20% of other costs savings they have identified.
Executives care little about the stakeholders: the employees, the customers, the community. It's their company, too. They only care about investors and themselves. People who "own" pay a lower tax rate than those that "work". Let's fix that and make things great again.
Excellent work on Tribal Trouble. I'm a huge Java fan and I had no idea this existed (usually you only hear about Minecraft and RuneScape). I wonder how much OpenGL/LWJGL code there is. It could maybe run in the browser with CheerpJ or TeaVM if that code could be ported to WebGL.
My labor of love is SnapCode: https://reportmill.com/SnapCode . It has a small interface (camera + vertex buffer) that can run on either desktop or in browser.
This would also be a great candidate for JDeploy (https://jdeploy.com), too, to provide a nice download package for multiple platforms.
Because of Trump, and just like Trump, this is a perfect storm. Unrestrained AI and crypto are causing a surge in demand at the same time Trump is spitefully and recklessly killing wind and solar installations and subsidies.
Trump-licans - the party of mean and stupid and self-destruction.
I totally agree with this! Oracle still spends time and money promoting Java client, and the browser is now the largest client platform. They could really revitalize Java client by backing CheerpJ.
I need to check out the tailscale solution, although CheerpJ also makes it trivial to plug in a proxy server, which I currently do in my app that supports cross origin.
I use CheerpJ to do new development that is spectacularly cross-platform, runs native on all the major platforms and everywhere else in the browser with a single code base. I don't think there are too many alternatives for that and I suspect Java + CheerpJ is one of the best.
And here's an entire Java IDE with CheerpJ that downloads less than 15mb:
It seems obvious that elon hasn't even showed up for work in years. His only real tesla-related effort has been to try to strong-arm an illegal 50B pay package. The board should be replaced for negligence and he should be fired for malfeasance and fraud. I'll bet the stock would jump 10%+ overnight.
The idea that he's the richest man in the world is a joke. Half his rapidly declining wealth is based on SpaceX, a "360B" company with no profit and < 12B in revenue that blows up and burns up its own products more often than not.
It seems obvious that he hasn't even showed up for work in years. His only real tesla-related effort has been to try to strong-arm an illegal 50B pay package. The board should be replaced for negligence and he should be fired for malfeasance and fraud.
The idea that he's the richest man in the world is a joke. Half his rapidly declining wealth is based on SpaceX, a "360B" company with no profit and < 12B in revenue that blows up and burns up its own products more often than not.
Nice post! Makes a good case for getting/keeping java in the classroom.
Be sure and check out SnapCode: https://reportmill.com/SnapCode . It also offers a lot of ‘paving the onramp’ features.
I'm a huge fan of JDeploy - deployment used to be my biggest headache. Now I just run 'jdeploy' in the command line, change the version in the UI app and hit the 'Publish' button.
SnapCode: https://www.jdeploy.com/~snapcodejava
That may be the wrong question, though that might help avoid the sunk cost fallacy ("It's better to burn out, than fade away!"). On the other hand, sticking with things has its benefits, with an eye towards a pivot. The right question may have more to do with speed than scale. Best to try and find partners in your endeavor. Then you can succeed or fail twice as fast, and try more things. And have more fun along the way.
I divested too, last May. I was really hoping there would be a "Fire Elon" movement to save the company and all the heroes that made it such a success. Nobody else in the world could get away with keeping their job while basically:
- Not showing up for work - Working several other jobs simultaneously - Rigging their pay through scandalous board manipulation (embezzlement) - Alienating the core set of customers - Threatening to move future innovations to competing companies
I love my two cars, and I'm sad for state of the company. They should fire Elon, then file suit to take back what he stole.
I don’t remember much about the work - it was just a quick and dirty app to help me debug PDF for my ReportMill work (10 years ago). I remember thinking there probably weren’t more than 100 people on the planet who would even care about it.
Great work! I'm sorry to be another jerk posting a link to something similar, but here is my solution, running in the browser (just drag and drop your PDF in):
Apple once bought an enterprise company called NeXT:
https://web.archive.org/web/20011017163151/http://www.apple....
This article paints a false image of EV life. We have owned a couple EVs for 6 years now and have only had to charge at charging station a few dozen times and never had to wait. I’m sure we spend dramatically less time refueling overall, since we refuel at home, overnight, once or twice a week.
Actually, we did have to wait once for charging in the middle of Oklahoma (at the time a bit of a charging desert). It was at a casino, and a fellow Tesla owner had shot the place up with an assault rifle. It took almost 2 hours for the crime scene techs to collect bullet casings and clear the chargers (no one was hurt - the shooter was on LSD and defending the rest of us from space aliens). Law enforcement offered the shooter a ride - so he didn’t even need the charge.
One thing that would improve them immensely is to make the algorithm much more aggressive if I manually hit the wiper button. When I hit that button it should be a strong hint that conditions are rainy.
Having a corporate job is usually a 'mediocre success'. If you strike out on your own with something that involves your passion and you earn a comparable income, you are a stellar success. Don't let a nepo baby tell you otherwise.
I'm building a Java IDE for education in the browser:
https://reportmill.com/SnapCode
I'm mostly doing it as a labor of love, though I have no real users so far. Not sure how to properly get the word out.
This new book explores the complete change we have made in how we raise our kids in the last 30 years:
The Anxious Generation: https://www.anxiousgeneration.com
It's really been one domino after another: Overprotection, helicoptering, immersive 3D games, 24 hour cartoon channels, internet, smartphones, social media. Our kids are no longer having the social interactions we evolved to need to properly train our brains. He calls it "the great rewiring".It's a good book - lots of data and research, good analysis and a good plan of action (starting with getting phones out of schools).
Stock buybacks are a great way for executives to further line their pockets inconspicuously and to allow shareholders to dodge corporate and dividend taxes. It does nothing for the health of the company.
There should be a cap on executive compensation - say 100 times the average employee salary. Barring that, there should be a millionaires and/or wealth tax, so that they at least pay the same tax rate as their secretary.
Misled? They were self dealing. The board returned 750M of stolen funds just to avoid prosecution. Friends and relatives of Elon, awarding themselves billions because they were guarding the vault and they could.
I’m an actual shareholder, and I was furious over the 50B compensation package.
Musk was already an investor with billions of dollars of incentive to do a good job. It was nothing short of fraud to pack the board with friends and relatives and push through a CEO pay package orders of magnitude greater than the already exorbitant US CEO pay. He is greedy, selfish and criminally insane.
I’m not even sure he works at Tesla anymore. Seems more preoccupied with Twitter and rockets and robots and drilling holes and how he didn’t get his share of the AI revolution. He’s a gambling addict - if you sent 1000 gamblers into a casino with 1000 dollars, a dozen would come out with 1 million. One of them would be name Elon. He’s a lucky psychopath, not a misunderstood genius.
And another 28% lied about it. I regularly ask people “Read any good books lately?”, half as a joke. Nine out ten people just stare at me blankly.