... is close to a miracle. Their core product is basically a commercial OIDC service - something a group of smart highschoolers could probably set up - correctly(!) - in a week - which they at least twice managed to set up so broken that they got hacked and leaked critical OIDC data. How Okta even still is a publicly traded company is beyond me.
I basically agree with what you're saying but I would describe this as an industrialization of IT and Software (Development). With that the "Artisan" aspect of software development goes by the wayside. Bluntly put: In these times it's too costly for society to keep highly skilled experts around when run-off-the-mill software and cargo-cult programming by some clueless clerk will do the trick " good enough " and, most importantly, way quicker/cheaper than that expensive guy who's always caught up in other requirements or keeps blabbering about that our software is too wet and needs to be dry or whatever that means.
It's a bit like with books: The first modern book was the gutenberg bible that hat skilled painters filling in the colors and adding leaf-gold. Today it's digital presses pushing out infinite amounts of printed paper half of which will quickly be pulped again before anyone reads the text on it.
We are not needed and just about nobody can judge whether software quality is good or not nor do they really care. Is it colorful and can I click on it? That's the main thing, all else really doesn't matter. And if you think about it, this makes total sense: Why would I want some expensive obnoxious expert making noise when I'm perfectly happy with that cheap templated software that the expert calls a bloated piece of utterly unmaintainable sh*t.
... and their goofy acronyms.
... is either off his meds or took to many.
This is one of those - admittedly quite rare - slashdot posts that stick out like a sore thumb and look like someone accidentally pushed some obscure peronsal sub-sub-redit post into the slashdot mainfeed.
Seriously man, this blurb is a bummer.
That may be the reason they train a certain skill better. And that _may_ be the skill that opinion leaders _think_ makes them better humans.
Given, I still like dead tree books. They do force me to stay on topic, have no distraction built in and they don't need electricity and electronics to function. The latter being a very distinct advantage. I still spend money on dead tree copies of writings I consider to be of potential long-term value. All nice, fine and dandy.
But I also have roughly 500 books as free (beer & speech) PDFs and a few DRM-free epubs on my Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+. Also nice, almost as easy to read on my OLED Tablet and waaaay more easy to carry around. Along with Gigabytes of Music and Audiobooks and Videos and whatnot. That's the huge advantage of electronics.
While I would admit that long-form reading on a single topic or story likely could have positive effects on development of the brain and certain cognitive abilities I do wonder how relevant this study will be when any cheap-ass discounter smartphone is way smarter than the average human.
Just sayin'.
Always the same message, "we gonna die!!!!!111!!".
Says absolutely nobody. That modern civilisation is at stake? Yeah, there is a measurable chance that our times might perish due to stupidity and ignorance on the eco-front. We *are* in trouble, that's a given. How much trouble is still mostly up to us. Though I wouldn't count on that being the case for much longer now.
When the Web came about - I'm old enough to clearly remember the time before the web with Fidonet and Mailbox networks - I didn't really believe it would take off. Mostly because in Germany where I live using the phone would cost 20 pennies for 8 minutes back in the day in West Germany.
Like quite a few experts I completely underestimated how important colorful pictures to click on were for the vast majority of regular people. I only really got into the Web when it already had gotten critical mass, roughly around 1999.
The Web - or at least its technology - has clearly won as a platform. Human readable (more or less), cross-platform and open standards + open source. Nice. All the good stuff.
However the Webs shortcomings are still the exact same as they were 30 years ago, some related to the internet in general:
unfitting structure of DNS (needs a redo), no independant SPOT registry with hard crypto authenticity (that would actually be a rare truely useful usecase for blockchain), always online/no true offline capability, encryption and signage only as a flaky afterthought and not a hardwired fundamental feature/requirement, non-deterministic / non-existant control of visuals, and a few other details that are a huge PITA and likely the cause for 80%+ of webtraffic today.
I've been doing professional web development for 24 years now and can attest that there are fundamental things that really could use a complete overhaul.
We need:
- independant DNS with crypto auth/auth and a signed registry (waaay overdue
- async and offline and perhaps hard standardized versioning built in as a main feature (OMG sooo needed)
- large cross-platform standard library of fonts & icons (it's not that we don't have them these days and client storage space really isn't an issue anymore)
- cleanup and polishing of language and culture/country zones (that is already pretty good I admit, but it could use a little polishing)
HTML & CSS need a complete cleanup
- absolute sizes (and nothing else!
- no magic numbers (h1 - h6
- sane hard document structure requirements with hard errors and no further relay for broken documents (here a versioning standard would come in handy)
- client side turing logic / visual manipulation built in (this is a tricky one because it will be abused but perhaps some basic DOM manipulation for limited interaction would make sense)
That's just from the top of my head. The Web has aged and it has aged pretty well, but the amount of hacks we have to do to make stuff happen and fix the broken things is quite astonishing.
By and large Google is just a better Altavista. If their math experts can't keep up with the spammers or if Google management decides it has to do my thinking for me and does a shitty job at it I'll just move on to another search engine. I'm sure there are folks gladly ready to take over if Google drops the ball.
But a Web redo as laid out above would fundamentally fix the things that always were broken. And that would be a huge improvement and likely have some aspects of search engines become superfluos. Tough for Google and their 'little' ad business, but overall a good thing.
2 cents from an senior webdev.
For basically all of my life (53 y.o. "Gen X"
For all of my life I've been living in an age of abundance just as anyone else in the first world meaning that the most efficient way of leveraging that wealth for me was to look for opportunities to coast along and "ride the waves" whilst at the same time keeping a low profile, "flying under the radar" and staying stoic, nimble and adjustable with my needs. This basically goes for everything in my life, relationships and family ties included. I have a daughter (grown up by now) and I also found that I could best serve her if I maintained that type of mindset with mounds of free time to be there for her when she needs me.
The upside of living a "minimalist" lifestyle is that you can tell your boss to go and eff himself and you don't die if times are rough. I live in a small one-room apartment, my ICE vehicle is a larger scooter (second hand) and my wealth is in 300+ books (most of which could be second hand), a selection of electronic devices and last gen XBox(es) (second hand), a few high quality cooking utensils, the clothes and shoes I like to wear, some freediving, kitesurfing and paragliding gear, a longboard scateboard (second hand) and two bicycles, one of which is a full suspension electric one with the other being a 12-year old take-me-home street-legal hardtail MTB. This isn't really all that minimalist IMHO although most people I meet would consider it that because they have 5-10x the stuff I own. And I still have too much(!).
What I'm getting at is that I've been basically living a Cyberpunk / Diginomad lifestyle for most of my life and anything else always felt like one huge drag to me. I'm a time billionaire and it feels awesome. And I've found that if you use some measure of smarts in leveraging the overall wealth of our times you can live like a king and really not need anything more than some baselevel UBI.
Bottom line:
If we as a society do this robot and AI thing and new productivity gain thing correctly, I see no reason why we can't all live that way whilst enabling the global eco-turnaround without to much pain and hassle. Some UBI will likely be a part of that, but who cares if all the gadgets we need are by and large built and repaired by bots for pennies worth of electricity and recycled raw materials and bots grown and harvest our food. My days of obscene IT expert salaries are likely soon over, if not right now already, but I don't care too much. Sooo much social dancing, yoga, workouts, kitesurfing, paragliding, longboarding, scooter-traveling, bike-packing and boardgaming to do.
Epic changes are ahead but I really think we shouldn't be too scared of them aside from AI eliminating humanity perhaps.
The "windmills kill birds" thing always was a l00ny argument by l00ny crackpots collecting silly soundbites to argue against windmills that "spoil the landscape" and other retarded nonsense objections they came up with.
It's blatantly obvious to anyone with two or more brainchells that the eco-balance of fossil fuels is about as abysmal as it gets, even accounting only for directly related bird deaths.
Every oil spill killing hundreds of thousands of birds and the staggering masses of plastic waste killing wildlife are a direct result of fossil resource usage. As is climate change, that also kills birds just like other wildlife.
The occasional eagle, seagull or starling that gets smacked by a windmill fin doesn't even register in comparison.
Citigroup apparently has 240 000 employees. So 20k isn't all that spectacular in comparsion.
This is not a surprise for anyone paying attention. The party is over, the digital frontier is gone, everything is mapped out and the jobs remaining usually are about cleaning up old legacy messes or bringing the clueless up to speed and doing damage control. AI will only get better from here on out and even the toolkits and frameworks have become so efficient that is often easier to build entire setups from scratch using the new stuff rather than messing around with 20 year old software that has become unmanageable.
I just am in talks with a small team that is building 40+ international webshops for a large fashion Corp. Its less than 10 people doing that and the entire gig looks to me like it could be finished in 18 months or so.
We aren't needed anymore.
By and large this is a good thing even if it means we're out of cushy jobs with obscene salaries.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that Apple's brand management team knows more about that subject than you.
I'm not so sure about that. If they did, they wouldn't piss off opinion leaders with stupid fussy rules for eco-system development or shoddy lock-in keymapping. And they also wouldn't show Ads for Apple music as the first thing someone who buys a 3800 Euro premium grade laptop sees when they boot it up.
Apple has better brand management than most other tech companies, but that doesn't stop them from doing the occasional bizarre and brain dead f*ck up every once in a while. QED.
This is n00b-style overzealous brand management. Probably a new guy in marketing or something. Stuff like this is tricky if it isn't a logo or trademark and if it's so close to natural language. It doesn't sound to me like Apple is going to make too much of a big deal if someone doesn't comply 100%. If I call my app a "VR App" and Apple is making millions of dollars of my sales they probably don't care too much about my wording.
We are Geeks! We are old school! We want puuurrrrrple!
THE PURPLE SHALL RETURN!
It's kinda cute the way they went overboard with purple and ditched all subtlety while doing so. The desktop screenshots are an all-out throwback to 1999 and the Enlightenment Desktop. LOL! Very nice. Old school and a bit tacky, but I like it.
... with the FOSS crowd a decade or so back. If was the time when software giants all were total dickheads about proprietary audio formats and "the best format" was an academic discussing among nerds. Not using Ogg was considered massively uncool. I converted my CDs to Ogg quite a bit when "ripping" was a thing.
These days I don't really care if it's mp3 or Ogg or even FLAC. Looking into this l00ny vinyl fad that has been popping up in recent years made me aware of how unbelievably shoddy analog record technology was/is in comparison with even the cheapest of digital audio setups today.
Ogg is still at the top of audio formats for me, but with mp3 I'm more compatible with players and generic software, so I tend to use mp3 more when ripping. It's a little easier on the cpu and it's not that I can year any difference anyway.
Real Programmers don't eat quiche. They eat Twinkies and Szechwan food.
