scioto

Back in the later 70s a Chicago three-letter AM radio station used to speed up songs so they could stuff in more commercials. And the DJ would do the parent’s talking when there’s no lyrics, even to the point of talking through the entire Love Unlimited Orchestra’s Love’s Theme instrumental.

I still prefer my pre-2016 Intel Mac since I can do more things that I want to do on it than my newer M4.

As John Scalzi once said, "The failure mode of clever is asshole." [1]

That has prevented me from posting what I thought was a clever or cheeky response in case it didn't come across the way I wanted.

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[1] https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/16/the-failure-state-of-...

My output as a software engineer is now zero (I'm even letting my JetBrains personal subscription lapse). True, I am now reaping the rewards of having been a software engineer, but all that is past effort. My LoC since I retired is zero.

-100%. With this looming Shiny Toy plus other sub-optimizations at my last place of work, I decided to retire. Didn't want to deal with it.

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.

Edit: spelling

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.

(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.

My $0.02 with 708 comments ahead of me.

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.

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.

Move to Texas, specifically the ERCOT grid. Texans love power suckers like bitcoin miners, so AI should fit right in.

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.

What he should have done was to create a foundation for supplying forks, making him and his roommate the officers of the foundation. They could have then solicited funds, including matching from other organizations. From those funds, they could have paid themselves handsome salaries for managing the foundation. Then with the mere pittance left over, they would then purchase forks. I'm sure that there would be other tax breaks in there somewhere to totally live a lavish lifestyle.

Tiny data point to support: when the PS5 first came out and for what I perceived a long time afterward it was hard has heck to get one, so I lost interest and put together another Windows gaming machine.

Never came back on my radar.

Well, if it "just works," then it wasn't that hard to do anyway. No raise for you.

More like in a year you'll need to subscribe to the 14.99€/month tier to get it to work at all.

I also remember working with punch cards as a non-CS engineering major doing FORTRAN. Then in the middle of the course I discovered the timeshare terminals for another mainframe that had a link to the IBM 360 on which we submitted our jobs. All you had to do was create card images in the text files, including your computer money cards (worth their weight in gold) starting at column 7, etc., and then submit the job without having to wait in line at the card reader.

It was wonderful! No carrying around a card deck held together with multiple rubber bands. Of course Someone Official found out we were doing this, so for our last lab I had to punch cards out again.

Other tricks included submitting jobs to the 360 at the other campus, which took less money from your account, but was a little slower.

This is natural progression. The apex predator takes over and over-grazes the land, so to speak, to the point where it no longer supports the apex, so eventually the apex predator dies off, and the other species that are left can flourish.

When iOS introduced the long press, that pretty much did it for me: I couldn't tell what user interface element did what when I pressed on it, so I tried tapping everything. And now we have to long-press on things to make them do other things. I can't spend time tapping then long-pressing on elements to do what I think or hope the app can do.

Oh yeah. Just a little bit of snark-slash-commentary since humans are being treated as profit centers. My FP of 20+ years also retired after selling his practice, as per the article. I do think it's sad (no, I'm not depressed!) that the race to the bottom, with a dash of enshittification, now encompasses health care, which we all need.

I've already outlived my ancestors, and the world's a pretty dismal place, or at least the US is, so why not let an otherwise preventable disease take me 20 years earlier?

And that is why I don't have any "smart" devices in my house.

Except for my Internet-connected bathroom scale. It's been giving me the side-eye for a while now.

I only use Windows for games.

And that's why I don't leave reviews on Amazon, or pretty much any site these days. I have purchased (okay, indefinitely rented) too much media on Amazon, eBooks, videos, etc., and I don't want to lose them because of a non-five-star review.

Be glad you don't live in Texas, where using your turn signal is tantamount to issuing a challenge, and is seen as aggressive behavior: "Oh, you want that right lane? No, it's MINE!"

Or worse, people don't see turn signals enough to know what they mean, and just adds to the confusion.

In the early days of computers it was a struggle. A struggle to get time on a machine, whether it be by punched card, paper tape, standing in line to submit your job, getting on a timeshare terminal, or connecting to the mainframe via 300-baud modem. The modem speaker spoke of the struggle when connecting.

You then got ahold of a $3K Apple ][ computer with 32K of memory and integer basic, and the only way to get performance was 6502 assembly programming. A struggle.

Then PCs came along, where nobody ever needed more than 640K memory, so it was a struggle to partition your work to fit it all in, but at least you didn't have to do assembler anymore since there was FORTRAN or Pascal.

And then the barriers lowered even further with GUIs and more memory, but you still had to worry about true multitasking not really being implemented correctly, and your poorly-written program could still hog the cycles. A slightly lower struggle.

And now there is more memory than you know what to do with, unless you are a rocket or climate scientist. And you infrequently have to worry about performance. Code efficiency? Bah!

It's all about the struggle.

In the Navy you usually don't put geniuses at the helm of a ship. They're told what to do, and you judge their experience by how straight the wake is behind the ship (angular momentum).

The closest thing I can think of is spaghetti squash (do a web search and look at photos), which when you cut it in half, you create "spaghetti" by scraping out the insides with a fork. A viable pasta alternative if you're trying to reduce carbs.