WinLychee

That's helpful context, thanks. Unfortunately I cannot edit my original comment, but good to know.

Different incentives. A publically traded corporation with thousands of workers trying to grow in perpetuity, has different goals than a community project. While the former has more resources, the latter is more mission driven.

What's even better is that net zero isn't doing anything for _already emitted carbon_, or the already accumulated heat energy. We can get to net zero and average temperature is still going to keep rising.

These vectors are lower-dimensional than traditional vectors though, aren't they? Vector embeddings are in the hundreds to low thousands range of dimensions (roughly between 128-1024), whereas TF-IDF has the same dimension as your vocabulary. It's also not just about being flat-out better, but about increasing the recall of queries, as you're grabbing content that doesn't contain the keywords directly, but is still relevant. You are also free to mix the two approaches together in one result set, which gives the best of both.

IMO there are many Americans who would work in IT/Tech if you paid them to do it, but the risk calculation doesn't currently make sense. If you're an adult making $25-35/hour in your current job, just meeting rent/utilities/obligations, it's hard to accept going back to school for several years to complete a Bachelor's degree, with zero guarantee of employment, but a definite guarantee of debt on the order of ~60K (taking a cheaper option). This is also true for those lower on the socioeconomic totem pole, whose parents are not going to pay for them to go to school. We've seen the result of making student loans widely available, there are many under-employed Americans in debt.

Numerically I agree with you, the debt load is worth the risk, if you're specifically going for software/IT, but the risk is not zero.

Perhaps more precisely: the defacto Apache-as-runtime + PHP model simplifies a ton of things. Namely your request state is created and destroyed all within the context of a single process, and you don't have to reason about shared state with other in-flight requests (unless you explicitly choose to go this route). It makes some bad programming patterns workable, because your state doesn't linger over a long-running period. Deploys are also super fast, you just have to swap the application code on disk and it'll get picked up on the next request (in-flight requests will keep processing with the old version IIRC). It's productive if not necessarily pretty. Also it has a type system now!

As a related thought, a lot of the modern serverless stuff feels like it's reinventing the ideas of Apache + PHP, or perhaps CGI?

PHP has some excellent ideas that other languages can't replicate, while at the same time having terrible ideas that other languages don't have to think about. Overall a huge fan of modern PHP, thanks for this writeup.

Yes, things are worked out pretty well, in the end it didn't take long to find _something_ as a dev, but I think early next year should be a good time to apply to "good" companies. In-network people are telling me things are frozen where they're at, and to wait for Q1 next year.

if you apply to roles within finance you'll have a better shot of landing something. Also, do a quick project using k3s and / or docker to get the basics, so it sounds like you know what you're doing. You can be creative with the truth.