AMerrit

Really like seeing this sorted by compute, really puts into perspective who has the most compute and where.

I grew up near an abandoned WWII era airfield. I have fond memories of first learning to drive by going out and blasting along the runway, had to avoid a few spots where trees had grown up through cracks in the tarmac, but it didn't matter if I stalled out the truck and I could get it up to a good speed.

Yep, I worked at a small company that got bought by a bigger one. We had a solid if aging product to support which was one of the big players for the niche. Once there was a leadership change, 2/3 of the devs got put on building a replacement software. Then in a couple of years our subgroup got spun off and sold to PE and the v2 project was shelved for another brand new design to align with the new ownership. I left just before the spin-off, but witnessed how the original software slowly rotted away and all of the marketshare dominance we had for that area slipped away.

Devs love new tech and the product people love something new to put their stamp on, but chasing that high can be ruinous.

A nice read. I've been playing around with my own chess program and trying to implement a lot of chess variants like Double Chess and 7 Queen's Chess.

I've done similar at my job where management wants us to use all of our tokens before they expire. I usually set it to documentation tasks and other minor tasks just to eat up tokens.

Yeah it's def going for an XP clone feel. Although it's not 1:1, I assume to skirt copyright.

Yes, this is story immediately came to mind to me. It also shows that the idea of poor people in the global south doing this for money isn't quite the entire story either. Most of the people exposed seem to be young Dutch people trying to make a quick buck attacking Canada.

There are still good niche and well moderated subreddits, but the big ones are pretty annoying. Lots of most extreme version of headline/summary to get the clicks. Tonnes of bot comments, especially with the rise of LLM. Repetitive joke responses.

Coursera used to be good, and I've found the occasional good course on Udemy, but neither are particularly great right now in my opinion. Well curated learning materials are such a unicorn.

I worked for a small company acquired by IBM in 2011. We had a good 5-6 year run where our product sales went up (largely because so many IBM people were selling it) and we were largely left alone. Once things slowed down a bit the IBM rot set in quick though. These days I think all that's left is a skeleton crew maintaining the obligatory long term contracts around the main product, every other part of the original company has been picked clean.

Some of the things in this are a bit much, but I think some of this comes from the cult of the 10x developer. I feel like I'm a 10x developer on some very specific things, and a 0.5x developer when it comes to others, but that I'm mostly an average 1x dev. I think a lot of devs are like this, they get really good at some specific stuff, but feel lost as soon as they start looking at some new project on a totally different stack or in a different area. Like when I first migrated to using git from svn I definitely had a productivity drop from screwing stuff up, but I eventually adjusted. Most devs I know went through something similar, shot themselves in the foot a few times and then acclimatized to the new tool, not many instantly switched without a productivity drop.

I agree with this take somewhat. I used to work with a guy who would talk about his great Sunday afternoon spent coding, or take a week off to write a book about being a more efficient developer. A fine enough co-worker and very dedicated to his job, but when he burnt out he burnt out hard.

Lots of developers have various degrees of that "revenge of the nerds" syndrome, but many (including myself) get over it somewhat as you get through a few waves of cool new tech fads, crunch times, and boring projects that have to get done and it just becomes a job to do.

I've been working in an office environment for over a decade now, and every time I start at a new office figuring out the scanners/printers is always a hassle. This really isn't a Gen Z thing as much of a scanners/printers suck thing.

I didn't do Starcraft, but remember "Footies" maps in WC3 which sounds exactly the same as "Commandos". It was insanely popular, but never lived on like DOTA did. It is sort of funny to think of it as a sort of evolutionary dead end, or maybe it lives on somewhere else?

Wow, that comment and the archive.org link he posted seal it for me. I played fy_iceworld a bunch at my local lan cafe a lot 2002-2003 but never thought that it could be something escaped from the internet cafes of Taiwan made by a 15 year old.