... is up to us. I so hope the transition away from fossil fuels and bad eco-balances continues to gain momentum, because humanity is decades to late in making that happen. I also hope that we can make the turnaround and establish feasible damage-control as not to lose the progress of human civilization of the last few centuries.
I'm 54 and once again looking to a new gig. My experience makes it easy(er) to get into conversations that aren't totally pointless and those conversations are interesting, but I also find that a lot of people who do the hiring are often at a company for a longer period of time and are often looking for Yay-sayers and do so by posting more or less random job descriptions. Sort of like "We've got total chaos here and we need you to put up with this BS and secure my position for as cheap as possible." They too fear for their jobs and rightfully so. Major shifts incoming. No news here.
This is ageism in so far as I simply can not be bullshitted anymore like some 25 year old and smell a bad project or a business model about to go belly-up from 10 miles away. I can't help it. Which makes be often times brutally honest in conversations. The result being that many don't get back to me or even give me notice of the fact. Quite a large amount of people I think fear that I could replace their job with a small shell script or something and they might even be right.
I've grown a thick skin throughout the last 24 years and also haven't had any larger illusions about industrial IT, Cloud-stuff or AI and am preparing to make a switch to a specialist user-end job where I am responsive to people needing help and handholding and otherwise just automate all the work that I can. My strong suspicion is that my skills as a dev will actually help me in that.
Ageism or not, the truth of the matter is that Peak Digital, the industrialization of IT and now AI are upending IT positions left, right and center anyway, regardless of age, so getting away from the IDE and doulbing down on learning people skills and becoming a prolific high-end user of specialized ready-made systems is most likely the way forward anyway.
Old/Senior or not, nobody needs me or anybody else to program yet another OIDC service or DBAL or CMS. They _do_ however need people who help them make sense of it all. And until AI has humaniod bots that look and talk like a young in-shape Emily Blunt do exactly that I might as well move into those jobs.
... when lawmakers are at the IT skill-level of a 1st-grader.
The non-sense that get's put out by lawmakers has nothing to do with the usefulness and the quite very good design of the EU GDPR and everything to do with the abysmal lack of culture concerning IT and the dealing and with and usage of digital devices and the protocols, services and applications that come with them.
Until learning the very basics of handling an end-user device becomes mandatory for children, like learning to read and to write, this non-sense will continue.
That using MS 395 for authority-work is a blatant violation of the EU GDPR anyone with two braincells recognizes instantly. The people are just to ignorant, dumb and/or lazy to actually follow the rulings.
... have ginormous deserts, some of which actually have the raw materials for solar panels and batteries right in the ground. Elon Musk himself made a pretty compelling case on how solar can fix just about all of you're energy problems. May I from across the pond suggest that you get to it?
Depending on my mode and mood I can envision quite an amount of detail. Add to that my creativity that has ideas queueing up around the block each day and you understand why I'm not just an IT expert but also have a diploma in performing arts and once upon a time even considered studying fashion design.
I'm one of those (apparently rather) rare cases that are good at coding but also quite good at visual design. I can appreciate good design and with my verbal precision trained by software development I can be very specific and articulate about what I like and don't like about specific designs. A trait that even at times has designers ask me about feedback to their work.
It's actually quite awesome to have both those talents/skillets which I should probably appreciate and be thankful for a little more often.
That been said good design and a sense for aesthetics can actually be learned and many programmers actually have a decent foundation to do exactly that even though their default style might be cringe when untrained. By and large it's a skill like any other and there are tons of methods and sources to learn from. For anyone who might care.
... and f*ck itself. I think we unanimously agree on that one.
This is blasphemy.
Blasphemy?
... is that it's a protocol designed and built by someone who knew what he was doing (Linus Torwalds) resulting in the fact that migrating your upstream Git Repo away from a commercial service like Github takes something like 20 seconds, if you're having a slow day.
Git is one of those things that bring the genius of well planned and built software to full display.
By and large this is a significant wealth gain for society in general. However, if you've derived your sense of meaning by building 3D assets by hand or drawing images in a computer program you're only going to be doing that for fun if at all in two years out. That's the thing we have to prepare for.
Given that especially the digital creative industry has been optimized in leaps and bounds in the last two decades, this is no real surprise. Modern tooling and now AI once again enable teams of less than 10 to build world-class videogames. Freely available software tools, algorithms and AI generate textures and assets on the fly, a cheap smartphone and an app is all that is needed for mocap and generating ready-to-run assets these days. Ginormous texture libraries come free with unreal engine 5 and once-upon-a-time super-tricky hand-made coding stunts like LOD and other workarounds are automated and build into even the cheapest of 3D and game pipelines by now.
All you need to do pro-level digital publishing is some knowlege and skill that you can get off youtube and free documentation available on the web and some mid-range cheap-ass laptop, an internet connection and some dedication. There are husband and wife teams building premium titles and making millions whilst EA burns hundreds of millions and produces trash. At the same time there is a whole industry of portable consoles pushing the price/performance envelope and exploring niche markets without any big players like Sony or MS even in the mix.
This trend of consolidation and automation is only going to intensify. Given what is happening with generative AI and ML as we speak I expect 90%+ of jobs in the digital creative industry to be gone in 12-18 months. And that includes videogames and other real-time 3D applications.
Sorry, that's total nonsense.
The post-Brexit economic decline of the UK is _completely_ tied to Brexit. For the UK the death of inner-EU trade, the lack of workers from poorer countries in the EU, the disappearance of EU agriculture subventions, the transition of large portions of trade to Frankfurt and the vanishing of access to all the trade agreements the EU has are a massive portion of the Brexit backlash. Wokeness and whatnot is nothing but a minor annoyance, if any factor at all.
The big picture truth is that if Thatcher hadn't started the fad of perpetually bashing the EU for no good reason other that kicks, fun and distraction the Brits could've remained as a strong partner, demand that everybody else on the the continent play ball and could've helped build a stable Fortress Europe (TM) faster.
But sadly they botched it, epic-style. Sorry to say so, but that's the cold hard truth.
The UK has been in an economic nose-dive ever since Brexit. The irony is, even the allegedly bad things for which they left the EU got even worse after leaving and would've been much better hadn't they fallen for populist bullsh*t and left.
You'd somehow expect that they some time in the future could recover and regroup, but right now it's just one bad thing after another. I expect the decline of UK GDP to continue for the foreseeable time. It's a shame and despite being a pro-EU "continental Europeanist" I see no point in gloating. It's just one giant epic sh*t-show. And by and large Thatcher is to blame and her totally mismanaged transition away from heavy industry and her perpetual british EU bickering that sadly became a go-to british fad to explain all their problems and prevent them from actually solving them.
I've been coding for 37 years and just last evening interviewed almost 3 hours for a job that would be the first IT-related job where I won't be installing or using an IDE.
Prepare for incoming is what I say. The world and world of IT is going to look quite different real soon.
... the payment protocol is an open standard, cryptographically safe (obviously) and the default mode is prepaid and fair proportional "time spent" billing and payout.
The crucial problem though is basically a global provider- independent protocol based transaction bank. That's what this boils down to. I've always wondered why Google didn't do something like that a loooong time ago. Don't they have billions of users on android and cheap portable devices?
You need something like that to really make micropayments work in a feasible manner for everyone.
Quote from some other guy here on slashdot sums it up perfectly:
- new database
- stores records forever
- no purging of old records, obsolete records
- guaranteed to grow in size forever
- can't edit records
- sequential processing with complex calculations so it's not Order(1) or O(n) or even O(n^x) but a complex polynomial that grows by yet another O(n^y) each time another entry is added
- guaranteed to always get slower over time -- it's the nature of cumulative calculations to verify the data each and every time it's accessed
This new database is available immediately. It currently underperforms
- SQlite
- MysQL
- MariaDB
- Oracle
- MSSQL
- NOSQL
- a flat text file
- an SOS written with a stick on a deserted desert island to attract air rescue
Welcome to Blockchain, the database worse in every respect except one -- authentication.
So if you believe that the only way to do authentication properly is to accept all the above,
then it's a good thing you're not a security researcher.
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion
