I think his own comment sums everything up quite nicely:

I don't have enough in-depth knowledge to know to what extent de-skilling is really happening

Anyone who thinks that programming is getting easier due to automation isn't a programmer.

Please upvote this a million times.

I stopped driving 2 years ago, voluntarily. My SUV cost me around $800 a month in replacement costs. Another $200 in maintenance. I was burning through $12,000 a year in gas. I spent an average of 1000 hours a year in the car, for work, for groceries, for fun. 999 of those hours were spent focused on the road. I hate talking on the phone while driving.

Consider my annual total: about $25,000 + 1000 hours of my time. For the "privilege" to sit in Chicago traffic.

I'm a consultant. I now use UberX every day. I also use public transportation when I'm not in a rush or when someone isn't paying me to swing by.

I spent about $5000 a year on UberX. $100 a week. While I am being driven around, I can respond to emails, make phone calls. I bill for that time. When a customer wants me to visit them, I pass the UberX fee on to them plus 50%. No one scoffs at it. Some customers will realize the cost of me visiting them is more expensive than just consulting over the phone.

I figure I'm $20,000 ahead in vehicle costs, plus I've literally gained another 600-700 hours of phone and email consulting time a year. Call it $40,000 ahead.

I don't take cabs, because they don't like to come to where my HQ is (ghetto neighborhood). UberX comes 24/7, within minutes.

My little sister had an emergency surgery a few months ago. I immediately hired an UberX driver, who took me from the office, to the hospital. He waited. We then took my sister to her apartment to get her cats and clothes, then he took us to the pharmacy. After, he drove us to our dad's house to drop her off, in the suburbs of Chicago. Then he drove me back to work. 3 hours, $90. I can't get a cab to wait even 10 minutes while I drop off a package at UPS. Forget about them taking credit cards.

UberX charges my Paypal account and they're off. If they're busy, they charge a surcharge. I can pick it or take public transportation.

I know why the Chicago Taxi authorities want Uber gone. But a guy like me is their best customer. Next year I'll budget $10,000 a year for UberX, and it will make my life so much more enjoyable and profitable.

Driving yourself around is dead. It's inefficient. Ridesharing is "libertarian" because it is truly freeing.

The link to the actual article "a unified release" is completely empty... nice to see all the comments from people who haven't even read the article yet.

> When we meet our initial goal of $1,000,000, we will launch a new version of Reading Rainbow on the single most-used digital platform: the web.

A million dollars for an "interactive" website? Clearly this man is a marketing genius.

...when the sales and marketing and pointy-haired businessmen try to manipulate you

You have entirely missed the point of the book. It is not about manipulation. It's about being genuine and being persuasive. They are different things.

I definitely agree that it is good to know when and how someone is trying to persuade you something, and it's a very valuable skill to increase your communication skills.

"as a geek type you'll likely never be able to pull it off anyway"

Resigning yourself to having bad communication is not helpful - it is possible to vastly improve your communication skills, you can do it and you should learn how.

"How To Win Friends and Influence People" By Dale Carnegie.

A classic, every programmer (and person) should read it.

Relax buddy.

There's plenty of time for you to get into a job and begin working for the next 40 years of your life.

Enjoy university. Travel during your holidays. Volunteer. Go to church. Go ice skating. Play with lego. Don't do drugs. Floss.

I'd rather say their creation proved that CSS needed to be fixed

Fixed that for you.

Some more brilliant standards by w3c:

Unlike other CSS properties, custom property names are case-sensitive.

Fantastic! Let's make some things case sensitive and some things not! Genius! If you're going to introduce something new (like, you know, VARIABLES), you might as well make it break all of your existing conventions.

Now even better, here's how you define a variable:

var-my-color: #06c;

And here's how you reference it:

color: var(my-color);

Oh that makes sense. You declare it as var-name but then when referencing it you refer to it as var(name)! Wow just like that other language... ooh um... oh yeah NONE OF THEM.

Honestly this is the reason why web development is utter hell. Confusing and stupid standards that no-one bothers to stick to.

And why the hell can't I do width: 50% - 10px? What century are we living in again?

I can't believe that $2,000,000 has already been pledged. I assume by "audiophiles".

Hey guys, 99% of mastering these days has been brickwalled. The recordings that you're buying and downloading before encoding, at the mastering stage has already had all "the nuances, the soft touches, and the ends on the echo" removed. You can't get that back. In fact, all this device will do is make these artifacts more obvious.

Getting a 30 gazillion kbps FLAC file is utterly pointless when the same data can be represented in a 320kbs mp3 file.

I can personally guarantee* (*worth nothing, not redeemable for anything) that sound studios will not start producing multiple mixes just for the audiophiles. It's just not going to happen. People do not care about this stuff and are happy with their iphones/androids, so the sound studios are not going to bother.

Totally agree on the GTAV multiplayer. It was horrible. I also thought the single-player was good, but there were some annoyances with the character switching. Like waking up drunk in your underwear as Trevor when switching to Trevor. Now I have to drive all the way to one of my properties to get some decent clothes. Also, I liked the idea of the mission planning and the ability for re-used henchmen to build up, but it was used so seldomly in the game that it didn't seem that important. (I think they'll probably try to sell big capers like that as DLC). I certainly won't be giving Rockstar any money for GTAV DLCs, but if they ever release another Red Dead Redemption, I'd buy that almost right away.

Awww, heck yeah. I just looked at my LotR2 box the other day and considered re-installing. (Also, whenever I'm feeling like playing in a game of the same mood, the original Mount & Blade is fantastic.)

I really liked the modern-day meta-story throughout all the previous AC's. I played all of the ones released for PS3. But I thought AC3 pretty much wrapped it up and I thought any attempt to keep it alive with another AC game would be just to trade on the Assassin's Creed brand. If AC4 was billed as just a "Pirate Game, from the maker's of Assassin's Creed" instead of an actual Assassin's Creed sequel, I would've probably bought it. But it seems like a desperate attempt to keep the franchise churning out money at the expense of ruining a neatly-wrapped story.

Reading about the recent massive costly battle in Eve Online got me to renew my subscription after a few years away from the game. If I couldn't re-activate my old characters, I would not have sunk back into it. At least I might get a little intimidation factor when someone clicks on my history to see I've been in the game for 7 years, even if I don't have the skills to back that up.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

But what am I playing the most recently? Tabletop games. Pandemic, Illuminati, Fortune & Glory, Lords of Waterdeep, etc. (Though I did buy Space Hulk on Steam after playing it tabletop)

Most of the recently-released PC games have left a sour taste. I loved Skyrim, but after 2 complete playthroughs (1 with all the official DLC expansions), and multiple half-playthrus I'm a little weary of it at 700+ hours. If Elder Scrolls Online was going to be like Skyrim, but with other human-playable characters in the same world, I'd pay all their silly little microtransactions and subscription fees. However, having played the Elder-ay Olls-Scray Online-ay beta, I can see that it's going to be a whopping turd. Not because of bugs or anything; It's just uninteresting cloned drivel. I'm seeing a lot of recommendations for some indie games in this thread and I'll probably be checking them out (Papers Please? FTL?).

I thought the new consoles would open up a lot of possibilities, and they may yet. However, I currently only have a single game for my PS4 (FIFA 14) and nothing else seems worth buying yet. Even FIFA 14 is barely worth it. I still think ProEvo's Master League is better than FIFA's, but I heard the gameplay on FIFA was going to be so much better. Meh. Plus, the leagues and licensing that EA can afford makes it a little better.