Climb in your time machine and go back 30 years or so and look up General Magic. They had ambitions of developing an ecosystem where their device could be a self-directing agent on the owner's behalf - scouring the network (wasn't really The Internet quite yet) and find things, like concert tickets and restaurant reservations, and book them for you.

It was way too early for such ambitious ideas.

(Don't comment that I don't know what I'm talking about. I was there - collaborating with Marc Porat - in the early days).

As I said in a prior post, I lost multiple services in Idaho.

Given that the outage was claimed to be in Eastern US, why did I suffer multiple service outages in Idaho?

Oh, and by the way - one of the services I lost was Amazon shopping :-)

Regional my ass...

Crypto "money" is just another form of promise. While I agree it might be useful in a global financial crash, I'm skeptical. For it to have "worth", a huge amount of expensive global infrastructure has to keep humming along. If fiat currency fails, I fear for the reliability and availability of the Internet - and all that essential stuff reachable by way of it.

But more to the point, you seem to be disregarding precious metals. Have you noticed what has been going on recently with gold and silver? And no "Internet" or other "infrastructure" is needed to barter with coins or bars. But - to be fair - you do need to be "face to face". But as I said - if the communications infrastructure poofs, that's where you stand in any case.

What the hell? You go to bed at 4AM? Allergic to all-nighters? How about all-weekers? Sometimes that's what it takes to push through. Of course it's unsustainable, but employers notice and appreciate dedication to get through the tough patch without sacrificing the employer's business for the sake of sleep :-P

In my career (retired now, btw), my longest sustained software development crunch was 5 months. Many all-nighters, more 7-day weeks than I could keep track of. The biggest overall, however, was a one-year dash to slap together a large system (more system design/integration than software development) that was sold way beyond what the product could do. To my pride, the product is still sailing along swimmingly, 3 years after my departure.

And with the all-nighters, you sometimes get to finally go home with a huge sense of pride in a job well done.

has been living under a rock. I've been retired 3 years and I was trying to alert my former employer that this was coming before my last day. Got no audience at all, they had bigger things on their minds. I wonder what they're doing now.

I found Proxmox to be a good replacement for vSphere, though maybe not as polished. But TONS of features nonetheless.

I'm not so sure it's ChatGPT. I think ChatGPT is much more competent at punctuation than this "author".

And I keep expecting "Workers of the world unite" in his postings.

Allow me to introduce you to my little friend. He's called "the period". He excels in breaking long run-on text into digestible units known as "sentences."

This cartoon: https://www.savagechickens.com...

perfectly sums up the future of work after AI takes over all the entry level jobs.

;or, Dodge in Hell (Neal Stephenson)

In other words, you want to be Neo.

Try reading up on Weimar Republic pre-WWII. They tried this experiment. And they are not the only real world example.

For a satirical take on hyperinflation, I recommend Douglas Adams' novel "Restaurant at the End of the Universe", in which near the end, the occupants of a crashed spaceship try to function in an undeveloped "natural" environment. They end up adopting leaves as legal tender. They stuffed their suits with them until they bulged. Then they brilliantly figured out how to solve the fact that a single pack of peanuts cost several forests. Solution? Burn the forests!

I could go on....

Yes, maybe. BUT - you won't have to pay for their medical coverage, give them vacations or parental leave, or help fund their retirement.

If it's worth saying, it's worth saying twice!

OK I'll join in. My first PC was the original IBM PC with 8088 processor, 64K of RAM and a pair of 360KB floppy disks. I think that was 1985 or 1986.

My first hard drive was a 5.25" 20MB drive in an external SCSI enclosure for my Macintosh Plus.

Fast forward and today I'm on a 64 GB RAM Windows PC, booting from a 500 GB SSD with main storage being a 4TB NVMe SSD, and another 1TB NVMe. In my garage I have an old HP server with a 6TB spinning rust array (RAID 5 I think, but maybe RAID 6 - not sure).

My biggest problem is that I packrat too much data - because, why not?