scioto

I’ve had two tract houses built, and I’ve found out that blueprints are mere suggestions on how to build the house. Sub-contractors do what they want. I even had a HVAC sub put chases in the middle of two closets to save money on ductwork; I was only able to get the super to move one since that was rework he had to pay for despite blueprints not being followed.

But Apple must enshittify all Apple products because it increases shareholder value. Else an activist shareholder will arise and accuse Ternus of dereliction of duty.

True, it’s short-term profits, but that’s all that matters. Nowadays.

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.

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.