Program computers? The day a computer is better at programming computers is the day humans will no longer need to build or program computers, leaving us with nothing to do at all because everything will be 100% automated.

CPU+FPGA in $800 gaming rig sounds completely new to me.

I call bs or they have a very low bar to meet "to specifications". Code that works to spec is great when it works and horrible when it doesn't work. Most people design systems that cannot be easily debugged or fail in unexpected ways. But yes, they work great when they work. It's shipped, no longer my problem, right?

The day my job is computerized is the day computers are smarter than humans. Maybe people need jobs that don't involve a script. Like you said, making the repetitive part of their jobs replaced with better tools to do the repetition for them.

There is no evolutionary pressure to live long, only to live long enough to reproduce. There is also evolutionary pressure for bad cells to self-destruct. Between these two things, there is a bias to dying early. At least this is how I think about it.

While I don't have first hand experience, I have a lot of theory and abstract knowledge. Nearly every new-fangled thing that's out there is just a minor flavor of what has been solved back in the 1970s. Even though I do not have any real world practice in many of these things, I have had highly regarded consultants come in and I've corrected them on design entirely from theory. Of course I learn a lot more from them, but having a strong foundation in theory and understanding the problem domain is very important.

My posted child for applying my theory was when I helped debug a "threading" issue in a program someone wrote in go. I was given a high level explanation of what the application was attempting to do, and how it was attempting to do it. The problem that was occuring only happened with GCC-go. Coupled with my Wikipedia knowledge of how go works internally and a quick google on GCC-go, I was able to figure out the issue in about 5 minutes and gave a recommended alternative which worked.

Armed with nothing but theory, I was able to figure out a thread scaling issue in a language that I knew virtually nothing about, that used a custom threading model, and the issue was specific to the compiler it was using. The issue turned out to be how GCC-go scheduled threads and handled blocking, which go should technically not have any blocking.

Just because they hired someone at a lower rate doesn't mean they're not still trying to find a more qualified person at a higher rate. Good programmers are still in short supply, but sometimes you need to make do. The ratio of good vs not-so-good programmers is so bad that the not-so-good set the average.

It takes us years to find good programmers. Yes, we could increase the advertised salary, but that just increases the noise from the number of baddies with credentials who want easy money. We find we're better off starting with a decent wage, finding a person we like, then letting their salary quickly increase via raises.

Just remember, the Universe are roughly 0 total energy in it. The entire Universe is literally made of nothing.

I've had the pleasure of working with some pretty good programmers from other companies and they have the same problem ours does. You can offer 2x the median house hold income as a starting wage and still not fill a position. There is a big lack of decent programmers. Yes, we get flooded with applications because we're offering a good wage, but it seems like most people aren't that good.

There is a lack of good programmers. Good for me. Without a decent selection of programmers, they just dote upon me, raises.

Information cannot move through space faster than c, but space itself is not limited to this. This is why we can already see galaxies moving away from us much faster than c and we'll never interact with them again.

They said this new material is transparent and flexible. You try bending your silicon CPU and let me know how it goes. The article also mentions that it's cheaper, doesn't need toxic chemicals and doesn't create toxic chemicals.

In some areas, $60k/year is homeless.

Your overly strict definition of "free" is impossible in this Universe. Obviously a practical usage of the word is more useful than an impossible ideal version. Us normal people use the practical version.

Follow best practices, two factor auth, only white listed executables can run, all non-system programs run in separate VMs/jails, minimum permissions, systems that store sensitive data do not have direct internet access are partitioned into a separate network with a firewall that only allows ports that are absolutely required, any program that can access the internet cannot also access sensitive data, etc etc.

You purchase crappy SSDs or are purposefully unaligning your partitions and formatting with 64KB blocks and writing programs that write to your FS without using a buffer and doing

foreach(byte b in array)
file.write(b)