@usr--2ndry I mostly needed them to fill out some forms and produce some documents (that are well within their purveyor). All as a part of my actual task.

@donkulator I've heard that bullshit too.
What good ia it to have people around to "socialize" if you want nothing to do with their preferences and personality?
RTOs or in-office work without obvious need for physical presence are just cover for real state/sexual harassment scams.

Don't take "you can't criticize subject A" for "someone mocked me because I said very dumb shit about A".

For example: "why can't we criticize JavaScript and HTML and python and stuff? Those are just for lazy people, real programmers use only assembly".
That is not "criticizing higher level languages", that is just being dumb.

@Lensflare should be right in the whole world, but depending on where the company is, developers are considered "computer kids" and all "computer stuff" falls on them.
Including machinery like the A/C and microwave oven.
When I was a wee lad, I was asked to travel 300Km to install an app in the client's systems. Our company's app was a *website*. They were asking me to install a website. Because it was their company's policy to have their vendors install every system purchased.
Never underestimate the amateurism of company managers, especially regarding departments they are proud to know nothing about.

If I was an impostor I would be a bloody poor one. I can't fit through a single bloody vent nor have killed a single bloody person.
There is some legitimate talented devs among us.

For EV batteries, there are alternatives like capacitors. Those can be made out of carbon (no need for mining rare resources and easy to dispose of). However, capacitors can't really power a car for long. Imagine if you had to recharge them every hour or so.
Capacitors can be recharged in miliseconds. One would just have to drive over a powered lane with the proper connectors, maybe even without stopping.
Like an automated toll booth, but every 50Km or so.
That sounds like *a lot* of infrastructure to build, and it is. But there are precedents for projects this big, like transcontinental power lines, country spanning data service... and roads.
But it will only ever be built of there is enough demand.

It's like when we were about to run out of IPv4 addresses, and had to change to IPv6. We would never get to the point when IPv6 even becomes necessary if it wasn't for the great internet expansion that ran on IPv4 in the turn of the century.

So, yeah. Disposable* batteries for now.

I'm sure some recruiter at a space company asks for 5+ years of experience in space travel & willingness to commute to mars.

@vane 80 hours per month over 10 months is 800 hours total. Spread over 40 weeks it is 20 hours per week, or four hours per day on 5 days a week.
It is a total of 200 4-hour working days. Assuming that the pay would not be scaled down in proportion, that would be the best deal ever offered to mortals.
If it was commonplace to have this type of work schedule, humanity would be in a whole other level.

Are you the one foretold in the Book of JM Keynes?

@cho-uc daily standup meetings would not be my preference, either. It kind of assumes that if let unchecked, people will just goof off until the last day of the allotted time for their assigned task.
Checkups once or twice a week and 4-to-12 "ask me anything" office hours (spread over a week) for the managers, tech leads and senior team members should suffice, when everybody trusts each other.

The problem here is that the entire team is used to micromanagement. They expect to get punished for proactivity. When someone said something like "I think we should do X", they would hear from their asshole previous boss "then do X, but I also want Y and Z done in the same time period, no extra time to do X!". Every. Fucking. Day. Sometimes more than once per day.

Thus this daily theatre, just until everybody is ok with saying their mind and offering their insights. Then we space things up.
That is my plan. But I will try to make the transition as fast as possible.

@scor I assumed you meant "ripe", but time do is an inexorable noose tightening slowly around humanity's collective neck, so... accidentally viable typo?

@tosensei that might become a business! You pay a subscription to your non-whatsapp app that is essentially a "API Change Insurance", to retain devs that will update it as soon as the zuckers try to mess things up.
As long as muggle users get to send and receive messages to the tech literate, we get to escape the app.

how have you figured out Boeing's super secret performance metrics?!?

There is also some pervasive addiction to black box algorithms.
Not every problem needs a GenAlg or a neural network or a branch-and-bound solver, but those are soooo easy to use that you will find those even when performance should be a larger concern.
Then there is plain old laziness, hurriedness and ignorance, where people make a brute force algorithm just because it is simple to understand.
I've once saw a kid compute a warehouse layout plan using 6 nested "for each" loops, at least half of all iterations were unnecessary. Probably many more.
Yet since he only had like 1h to write it, and I took longer than that just to explain to him that "algorithm" is not just another word for "code".
(we later used some nice greedy+dynamic method that sped things up 3700%)

Thus I would blame the industry, not devs, for the rush quick-to-develop-but-inefficient-in-production software.
When energy becomes expensive again this trend will revert.

@NeatNerdPrime thanks. I naturally haven't said any of that out loud, and I am very proud I kept my poker face. But I was surely thinking it.

@shovethisrant we'll never know for sure, but you are very probably right.

@kiki yes, ma'am

software was itself invented as "configuration" for machines. That is what "program" means in latin: "laid out in a table" (like in a schedule)
TBH, we are all just making sequences of assembly instructions, anyway. Just like writing is just configuring chosen words in an arbitrary sequence.

@exerceo AH might mean "assholes", but in this case it is "aspiring-Hs", H being a famous austrian-german name.

@fullstackcircus in 10 years of inflation half a mil will be the price for a mid-sized orange

Dude, chill. If you are fireproof, that is a great opportunity for malicious compliance.
Stupid managers won't fire you because then they will have to explain why they hired and/or kept you for so long. They would rather waste company money on nearly useless headcount than to admit that their little kingdom is larger than it should be.
You WFH? if you do, you can make some app to trigger your scripts with a click from you phone and go do some exercise and look for other jobs - the company will even pay you for it! It's like being in prison, you can make the most of a bad situation.
If you are in an office that gets tricky, but you can spend your days learning new skills and working on some opensource project - something that is so big the company can never claim ownership of it, an Apache project mayhaps. Do not work on a personal project! They can steal it from you!
But above all, don't worry! Stay sleazy! If you're bad enough, you will get fired eventually!

Some researchers in Chile run an experiment to discover an amount that would cover unexpected expenses, including healthcare, for any members of a sufficiently large population.
They found 1500 USD of savings would cover most misfortunes, while 2500 would cover even the outliers.
That is how much I have stored, per covered person, as my personal insurance.
Now, third party insurers are in the business of making money off you.
They might be service providers or they might be quasi-scams.
Service providers should be hired when you are not sure you can perform the service yourself - medical insurance, for example. If you are not sure you can pay for your ailments, nor trust the public healthcare, then maybe it is a good idea.
Now, house insurance is useless for an apartment, and if you can afford a whole new car then auto insurance (but not accident insurance) is just a scam.
Got it? If you can afford to replace it, you do not need insurance. And you can't replace your health.

Fifteen years ago laptops were mostly for college kids and weirdoes, most people had stationary desktop computers with big ass screens and looots of peripherals.
Then when smartphones became capable of doing most of what 75% of users were ever gonna use a computer for (digital photos, social media, email, videos, light gaming), desktops became "that spreadsheet and old-timey docs machine".
See: "The Office", the series.
At the same time, the corporate world moved from cubicles and other assigned seat configurations to large open floors where people are often not expected to sit at the same place, and also to take their equipment with them when moving.
By the time series like "Sucession" or "Billions" hit, desktop computers are for back-office nerds, the rich AH are always on the move, move, move!
And if you are using a laptop on a coffee table while plotting to overthrow someone, you want it to be very light, compact, and you might ask "what are peripherals? some streaming series?"

You also forgot "Fish", a word that describes things or situations that are somewhat F'd

"I work in IT"
Guaranteed to make lots of people ask you to help them with their printer or microwave or to hack an ex's insta or something

@Demolishun eeeeeww, she must be at least fifteen years younger than me. Really hope this interpretation of yours is wrong.

I've heard that common test-argument, "suppose that a robot has arms and legs and eyes and all the required hardware. Drop it in a kitchen and ask it to make a cup of coffee. If it figures it out, it has AGI"
But, bitch, humans can't do that. Get a western teenager and drop them in a traditional Indian kitchen, ask them to cook... anything. They might eat something raw if they find the right jar, but they are unlikely to figure out the tandoor.

So, I agree. LLMs are not the pinnacle of evolution, they are the next corporate tax tool our children will be bored with.
Maybe someday we will achieve an education system effective enough to train any toddler human into a true General Intelligence, requiring only a couple decades of training.

@lorentz admitedly my wallet is not made of glass nor has a single battery. But it is very time sensitive, since the cards in there have an average time-before-next-expiration of, like, 6 months maximum. A mission critical ID card might take *weeks* to replace. And has absolutely no password protection. If you live in a pickpocket-friendly place (EU comes to mind), having physical financial, legal and professional media with you at all times just makes for an even harder to replace and less safe SPOF

The house of Windows just burned through USD 1 fucking billion, with a B. Just in seed capital + opportunity costs.
It costs Microsoft about USD 0.80 for each and every single suggestion that Copilot makes.
And you pay 10 USD. Per month. For unlimited so-so code suggestions.

The cherry on top, Microsoft failed to convince 90% of the tech industry to pay for it.

Thus, they started the "let's fuck up the product to cut costs" operation. AKA "pulling an Uber".

@SidTheITGuy Indian MPs make less than GBP 25/h. You're on the very high end. Nice!

Have you considered moving to an English-speaking, but poor country?
Except for India (a software engineer can make, like, USD 2.25/h and they are as plentiful as rice). But have you considered Nigeria or Barbados? Plenty of places that you will hardly be making less money. You won't be rich, but at least you get to be poor on the beach.

Have you heard about "AI hardware"? I'm betting the name will be "smartware", but for sure it will be something just as stupid.
Anyway, I guess that might be the next bubble. I should start buying domains with stupid names around the concept, and squatting on those to resell to some stupid investors

@daniel-wu several of the in-house tech teams have gone already. Can't log in to check, but according to social media there were other teams in this last cull, too.