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Comment Re:Robotics? (Score 3, Insightful) 111

TIOBE basically searches a bunch of search engines and other things for "$LANGUAGE programming", applies some magical fudge factor and calls that a result.

It's absolute nonsense. It's highly manipulable if you can convince people to use the " programming" wording. It's going to be highly affected by the appearance and disappearance of documentation websites. It will of course still pick up ancient archives of stuff that nobody is actually using today.

I have an extreme skepticism of that VB is anywhere near the top 10. The original VB died long, long ago. VB.NET wasn't backwards compatible in the slightest and I don't think it ever had much adoption, because what's even the point? You might as well use C# instead. In fact long ago I had a VB project I considered transitioning to VB.NET and quickly decided it wasn't worth it, and went with C#. That was somewhere in the early 2000s, and I don't think it's gotten any more appealing since.

Comment Still nonsense (Score 2) 111

TIOBE is still nonsense of the highest order, not sure why anyone bothers using it.

It's some search engine counts based voodoo. Maybe not the most terrible metric possible, but I have no idea why it's the one always being discussed when there's better things one could measure at this point. Like say, GitHub.

If we want to know what's currently most popular, what we should want is measuring the actual usage. That might be projects, or commits, depending.

Comment Re: A "Citizen Scientists" model may work elsewher (Score 1) 13

Sure, it could be done. We could all volunteer to maintain roads and bridges too. Grab those shovels comrades!

If only we had some way to collectively pay for professionals to perform services for the common wealth. Not everyone would want to pay of course, so we'd need to have some sort of rules and penalties for those who try to avoid paying their fair share. I've got it: we can send them to Mar-A-Lago!

Comment Re:The bottle was leaking for years (Score 1) 128

Unless their parents own the company, anyone in hiring has been on both sides. And within the past 10 years (at least), job seekers have had to pack their resumes with keywords in order to get through HR. Yes, people should ideally take the time to tailor their resume to the position to which they're applying, but it's a lot less effort (and usually pays off) to just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks so you can get at least a phone interview.

Also, in the time it takes to customize a resume, the position might be closed, and nobody wants to spend hours mentally reviewing their past experience to highlight parallels with the position they're applying to, especially when there's no guarantee they'll even get to submit that resume, let alone that anyone important will look at it. There's risk involved. If there's a job I really want, I'll tailor my resume. If it's a job that would be lucky to have me.... not so much.

Also, (and I can't believe I'm arguing in favor of Java devs here) if a Java dev is applying, it's likely because they're willing to do the work, not because they don't understand the difference. Many devs avoid JS because they *do* understand it, not because they don't. "I'm willing to pay you a half-million dollars to stab yourself in the eye, but it says here you've never stabbed yourself in the eye before. What makes you think you can do this job?! Idiot!"

Also worth noting that Java and JS are not mutually exclusive, and many Java projects include JS these days, so unless JS is absent from their resume, being a Java dev is probably a point in favor. Plus you mentioned C#, which is basically "Microsoft Java."

Finally, it's ironic because any dev who's been working longer than, say, 5 years has experience in technologies, frameworks, or even just parts of an API a language that are obsolete today. Everyone has had to transition to new technologies and methods, even if they stay in the same role at the same company using the same tools. Being able to pivot isn't the exception; it's the rule.

Point being, a keyword mismatch is an HR-level problem. IMO, nobody doing hiring should toss a good resume just because the experience doesn't match the requirements.

In theory, I agree that a polished resume is a good sign, and I try to present myself well on paper... but as a counterpoint, my good friend of over 30 years never put his resume in anything but plaintext format, uses keyword salad at the end, and he's also one of the best devs I know, and has always had more work than he has time for. I would be interested to learn how well a polished resume correlates with workplace success though, because I might be wasting my time.

Comment Makes sense (Score 1) 10

I never understood Mozilla's foray into AI.

There's just nothing about Mozilla that suggests to me they are experts on the subject matter and have much to contribute in the area. I could be wrong, but Mozilla is so tightly associated to the web that it just was a hard sell to me that their AI efforts were going to go anywhere from the start.

Comment Re:What about sex? (Score 1) 57

Yeah, I just saw a movie yesterday where there was some (very mild) tits and nudity and serious theme of sleeping with other people and I was like... how long ago was it that I saw a tit in a movie ? It seems nudity was in every movie (even unrelated ones) a couple decades ago, and now it's all "hide sexual thoughts and body parts or the evangelicals will become incensed..."

For info, the movie was Le semeur and it's okay but not great.

Comment Re: same same. (Score 1) 221

Weird, I've had the opposite experience: stable as fuck. The machine I'm typing this on was 1st installed with Kubuntu in... 2003 I think. It's gone through every non-LTS upgrade. I've changed the system HD several times, cloning it to bigger ones, then cloning it to SSD. I've also changed the machine thrice: from a powerful tower, I've split it to a headless server and a laptop which got updated once more. There were a few hitches (KDE4 to 5 was a pain in the ass for 2 years, Kmail was a bug ridden piece of shit) but never had to reinstall from scratch. I even went Kubuntu -> Neon and then back to Kubuntu for a few years with command line magic.

Comment Re:What's the bit depth? (Score 5, Informative) 25

I wrote the software for the 2 camera testers (one for integration of the CCDs, one for production) but... I don't remember ! I finished the soft 2 years ago. Anyway, it's B&W and probably 16 bits, but I'm not sure, I'd have to dig in the specs I have somewhere. The filter changer is some kind of crazy robot contraption because the filters are 2 meters in diameter, fragile as fuck and so expensive there's no duplicate. The camera CCD took years to assemble from individual CCDs.

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