This is mostly just civil slander lawsuits ramping up. People are getting way to comfortable stepping on other peoples rights and slandering in what is basically a public forum.

... on the rise. Who would've thunk?

Do we really have to reinvent the wheel every damn time?! It used to be that you just got Voight-Kampff tested, and the administrator of the test would sign your PGP key. WTF was wrong with that?!

Love it. That Prof has every right to roast his students.

My first reaction is that if one company is selling at half the price, that company will go bankrupt at twice the speed since every transaction was already a money-loser. Customers are absolutely the worst thing for these "businesses."

But is revenue really significant? I can see how neither reducing the price to $0 or increasing their price to 10x what it was, might not really have much of a different impact on the bottom line, compared to all the debt.

Somehow the links got borked. Likely during the copy-over from my orignial sub.

Here's the fix:

Heise article.

Video.

CorPower Website.

Make IBM Great Again: go back to .. leasing computers?!

Nobody remembers or cares that a B-2's toilet cost $23k, so the Pentagon is updating to a newer, better form of government waste that kids today will better understand.

I doubt these purported robotaxis are capable of dealing with I-4 in the daily 3PM toad strangler.

Which is the bigger problem IMHO.

The Duesseldorf Media Harbour is special in the way that the folks there didn't just chat about exotic technologies but actually used them for mission critical stuff to very significant competitive advantages. For instance: The core of Trivagos money making machine is a sophisticated use-case of an event-sourcing Kafka setup. The Invision Callcenter Software folks right next door build their products in Elixir, an exotic modern PL with a hard emphasis on concurrency running on Erlang foundations.

Regular meetups at Sipgate just around the corner covered super clean and stable real-world n-dimensional scalability of real-time systems, the type of which you'd expect from a pioneer VOIP provider built entirely on FOSS, agile principles and running with less than 200 employees but will never see in any generic German KMU (small to medium sized business) because they simply wouldn't get it. They don't just talk big words with zero substance on agility, but actually practice it. Likewise a Dart & Flutter Application crew at Vodaphone headquarters or a small but competent crew from Solingen doing full-scale billing at Peek & Cloppenburg with a custom Scala application.

Botton line: 90%+ of people at those meetups and giving talks and presentations we're completely beyond the usual mediocre bloated and badly managed C#/Java stuff. The exemplary efficiency of the folks I met throughout the years was staggering and a real regular breath of fresh air starkly contrasting the garbage I had to regularly deal with when salvaging yet another shoddy setup cobbled together by some agency and a few badly paid WP plugin jockeys. I'd argue the quality density in that small area is even higher than SV average with considerable network and attraction effects.

Malware is any software that runs on your computer but is intended to serve the interests of someone else.

Calling it malware isn't so much inaccurate as it's unspecific. Not all malware is adware, but 100% of adware is malware.

Free speech includes lying.

Pretty much. I live in the Duesseldorf area which has/had it's own little NRW tech-hub mini silicon-valley thing going on. 5 years ago there were multiple really good meetups happening each quarter. An active Google Developer Group, regular well attended Web Development Meetups, a DevOps Network doing the same and even some regular exotic stuff like the pure functional algebrahic development folks meeting up and discussing Scala, Haskell, Elixir and other avant-garde topics.

Companies were eager to pitch in and offer space and catering and I was out and about regularly, enjoying the food and free drinks and getting a hefty dose of nerding off with fellow devs and IT experts.

That all has since completely dried up.

Two years ago I sent out 50+ precisely targeted resumes and had a reaction quota of less than 10%, 5 actual interviews, 3 of them meh to sh1t, two interesting, one of which turned out to be a shady shoddy joint. I joined my current gig which is OK but has me earning 20k less than such a job should reasonably score. My colleagues are leaving left and right and I'm off the team end of September. The last 6 months my coding was basically 95% AI-driven. My last girlfriend has a limited contract and will be out of a job in September too. She bought a garden two years ago and is preparing to go all in on independent homesteading and growing her own veggies out in the easter German boondocks. Demographic decline is starting to show more and more clearly too all around.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do about all this.

I'm somewhat "lucky" in the sense that I live a flexible and minimalist lifestyle and that I'm technically an artist with a performing arts diploma, which is nice and fun but not really worth any significant monetary value. Inflation is palpable, even for a guy like me with some cash to spare and the excessive heatwaves and droughts aren't helping.

A friend of mine has launched multiple businesses throughout the years and is struggling once again after finally gaining some traction a few years back. His liquidity is down to zero and he's just scraping by with the German IRS breathing down his neck. We're going to scout out some derelict houses in southern Europe and see if there's anything meaningful to do and gain there. We're both quickly moving in to a semi-prepper mode. If anything meaningful shall happen on the job market for me, I likely will have to downshift my salary once again and pick some IT janitor / helpdesk type position.

Bottom line: There's a bigger shake-up moving in and I suspect there won't be any well-paying software-dev job for me on the other end of it. The bots are here and they're taking over. It's probably just that simple. That's the Age of Cyberpunk for ya, I guess.