... big thing. I don't think anybody has anything against any vehicle, tractor or other, or anything at all stuffed to the brim with useful electronics. (emphasis on useful) The problem is when that technology is proprietary, disfunctional on purpose and designed to be extortive. That farmers are sick and tired of that I can see clearly.

One big part of the problem also is that farmers are locked into their business harder than other people, more prone to corporate extractive and extortive business pratictices and they are likely not the type to have the free time to deal with these practices in other ways.

Setting up a non-profit and/or publicly shared business to offer hardware designs that counter these problems are a likely candidate for some use- and helpful businesses. I expect this to be the next big area where the FOSS concept catches on.

It's only that now, roughly 25 years late, even the dimest of dimwitts in the political sphere have noticed that proprietary software is shitty by design and expensive and thus plan to move to FOSS rather than continue spending trillions of Euros on software that experts have downloaded for free and in better quality from the intarwebs for decades now. One should never say never I guess.

It's only by coincidence that that software (mostly) happens to come out of the US. Which is totally beside the point of why FOSS is gaining traction anyway. FOSS from the US will certainly be part of that transition too.

If this AI craze plays out only half as intense as often predicted, the disruptions are going to be much bigger than just the current graduate job crisis.
Which, btw., is happening _all_ over the world right now(!). Yeah, let that sink in for a moment.

Going from bits/OP-code to OOP and Functional Programming easily happen on its own in a single individual lifetime and career if the hardware is there and available. Many people doing programming in the 80ies or eariler discovered some form of OOP on their own just by writing code. The first serious refactoring of the first seriour program usually leads to OOP all by itself. I clearly remember discovering fundamental principles like higher PLs, APIs, OOP, information hiding, state management, event / messaging systems and other fundamental principles on my very own before learning the academic terms of those things that others had discovered and named. I even came up with my version of Oauth/OIDC for only after something like two weeks to think: Wait a minute, I sure has hell can't be the only and/or first one to come up with the principle of the Ident/Auth/Auth triangle. And sure enough, Oauth and it's update OIDC is already standardized and documented. Test First or DBC are also things that come naturally once you've written a few non-trivial pieces of code that grow beyond the scope of what a single human brain can keep track of all at once at the same time.

Bottom line: No need for those traditions to survive, they come back naturally for any healthy brain capable of logic with a sufficient enough logic machine to tinker with at it's hands.

And let's be honest: For some of the historically grown mess in IT (just take a look at the keyboard in front of you) it would actually be a good thing for that to get lost and be reinvented.

... together for life to evolve and persist on earth. This is certainly a very large part of the answer to the Fermi paradox.

It's open source and there's no liability whatsoever, but that's nothing other than malware. Just not in a regular programming language, but with a specific instruction for a machine. With premeditated, intended malicious consequences.

In other words: It's malware, plain and simple. The flak the guy is getting is understandable.

IIRC this class of substances is won from venomous animals. If it's a toxin that enhances brain function that would be cool. Perhaps something with the effect of stimulants, but permanently.

However, I'm not taking these new drugs just yet.
I'd rather wait a little longer and see if the Ozempic crowd turns into a bunch of blind Zombies or a bunch of Superhumans.

Then I'll make my call.

... _very_ fundamental way.

[Disclaimer: Passionate multi-decade Senior Web Developer here]

And that is *drumroll*:

Always online, no standard default way for offline.

Seriously, this is the biggest downside (and perhaps eventually downfall) of the Web and ist it's protocols. It's the reason I initially thought "Who needs this crap?" back in the 90ies when the Web first appeared.

In this regard Fidenet and other BBS networks are technically superior(!!) to the modern Web.

Solid crypto-based Ident/Auth/Authed DNS and a set of document-centric offline capable Web protocols on top would be the right way to do this. Most security problems and this tracker garbage we have to deal with _every_ _single_ _day_ would vanish in an instant. As would quite a few other problems of the modern Web along with it.

The Web is awesome. It won for very good reasons. But it _that_ way the Web is epic shit by design. If the Web eventually fades away it will likely be because of that flaw.

Until then it's paying bills, so not many too hard feelings on my end. But the general IT expert in me sure wishes we had better protocols for solid offline capability.

... quite well: It's going to be chaos but in the end it's going to turn out good for everyone. We're just going to work less if the cheap bots do most of the work.

I did a diploma in performing arts in the the 90ies. The first half of my 20ies was dancing 5+ hours per weekday. I still benefit from that phase. As a teenager I was into climbing. I still have the shoulder muscles from that time, despite totally slacking on strength training. But no smoking, no drugs, no alcohol. And I have been dancing Argentine Tango for the last 18 years, 9 of which where an artsy minimalist lifestyle built around intensely dancing Tango 3+ times a week. My sleep schedule was as off as with my other thing, software development, but otherwise my health was awesome, physically and mentally. Intensely hugging hot ladies 3+ times a week for hours on end does wonders for a hetero-males well-being. I regularly get judged 10 years younger than I am.
Processed foods are organic as much as possible, I avoid junkfood 95% of the time and I've started cooking for myself 10 years ago. Huge impact.

I've since have taken Tango down a notch and picked up motorscooter/motorbike as means of travelling and getting around. Getting slightly overweight for the first time in my life. Not good, don't like it. I'm roughly 10 years too late in picking up a daily excercise/yoga, cardio and strength schedule, a thing I definitely need to get going this year. Started hiking with my sweetheart, we want to pick up the pace and intensity of that to stay healthy in old age.

I keep telling my 28 year old daughter that she dare never not stop her daily yoga practice. I hope she can do that.

It's this simple: Objectively the very best retirement plan is actively working on your health, strength, endurance and flexibility multiple times a week. Way more significant than being wealthy at old age.

I'd rather be top fit at 70 living off 700 Euros per month than overweight with two bipasses living off 2000.

Where is the shovelware? Where's the killer app?
Shovelware requires some form of userbase. That doesn't exist anymore if every software solution any normal person can think of is just one Google query and one URL away. The Web has won. Nobody will go through the trouble of even installing software these days in most cases.

... might just give the IC industry the kick in the butt it needs, just like with spacecraft and electric vehicles. He recently stated that the whole IC-Fab thing is done wrong these days and that he might just end up eating a hamburger and smoking a cigar right next to a microfab with higher cleanroom efficiency to prove his point once the first Terafab is up and running.

I'm no engineer, but the "copy-exactly" and "clearroom design" of the late 70ies sure has become long in the tooth and my intuition says Musk might actually be on to something (once again). It's going to be fun to watch how this Terafab thing plays out.

I happen to know Germanys most popular fantasy author Bernard Hennen a bit. He is mentally preparing for AI to take his job and has been for a few years. He says it's likely that he'll just be managing and steering the world and it's characters and that AI will do most of the writing and come up with new ideas that he then decides on.

That sounds very plausible and AFAICT as someone who GMs table-top RPGs and does quite a lot of writing as a naked ape this is basically where we are at right now already.

... Did they really phrase it that way? If so, that would be the most *sshole move I've seen by corporate douchebags in a long time. And if so I can't wait for the bots to replace those folks too.

Obviously AI is taking most of the whitecollar jobs. This isn't really news anymore IMHO.

I can't tell you how relieved I am right now that I took a breadless diploma in performing arts mostly just based on personal interest, with zero concrete career aspirations in mind. The arts helped me with every aspect of life, personal, private, public and job, even though it was completely breadless.

That my days making money by developing software are numbered is obvious to me too. I got incredibly lucky with my current gig but since have morphed into an entire team of software experts with me as the lead basically telling AI what to program. Never been this productive. It's only a matter of time that AI will take my current position too.