Abso-fucking-lutely!

The JS ecosystem (and frankly the python ecosystem too) is made of lunatics who think I have nothing better to do than patch my system every 3 month because they decided that it was more pretty to swap the order to parameters somewhere.

The number of NPM packages that are deployed widely and that just break at an upgrade is staggering. And because fucking JS, you don't get a proper error message at the upgrade recompilation. You need to rely on having a test that catches the difference. What a fucking nightmare of an ecosystem.

I am currently the maintainer of a small project but we can't break production. We did our major upgrades in summer 2024. So we used the most up to date release, v22, that came out 3 month before. This was 18 month ago, and its EoL is in about a year. Who has the ability to commit the engineering time to upgrade every single one of your services every 3 years?

These are not minor changes, these are going to be different majors. So I do expect some feature break. The last update which was also within 3 years caused a forced upgrade of database driver and abstraction layer to a new major. And they decided to rewrite their entire fucking API.

I do not understand web people. How do they not go insane because of the horrible engineering decisions they keep on making in that field? You know what, the shitty Perl webservice I wrote in 2010, it still fucking works! And no one has touched it since.

It's a question of cost really.
A 1TB NVME SSD is about $150.
A 1TB SATA SSD is about $100.
A 1TB HDD is about $40.

If you are mostly interesting in storage and not performance. HDD are hard to beat.

I was employed at IBM from 1990 to 1991. One thing IBM did was provision their PCs with huge amounts of RAM for the times. I'd use a RAM drive to run things. Their standard PC was a 16 MHz 80386 with 16M of RAM. Yes, the 80486 had just been released, but even IBM struggled to keep up. I had an 80286 clone PC with 1M of RAM, fairly standard for the mid 1980s. They had some old 80286 PCs (genuine IBM brand PCs of course) they'd supplied with 12M, which they kept in use as network bridges. One big difference between the clone and the genuine IBM was that the clone could skip the memory test. Another was that the clones tended to run a few MHz faster, 12 MHz for mine, 6, 8, or 10 MHz for these genuine IBM beasts. Upon powering up, it took that genuine IBM 80286 PC's BIOS 10 minutes to run its memory test, 64K at a time in real mode, then again in protected mode, and you couldn't skip it. To this day, those hold the record for the longest boot times I have ever seen in a PC. Had hard drives that had to be manually parked, and one day the idiot among my coworkers moved all the machines around for no good reason (he wanted all the servers physically near him because he thought that gave him more control and power), but forgot to park the hard drives of those 286s, thus ruining them.

In 1993 I used these VAX workstations that took 20 minutes to boot. They were intended to stay on 24/7. The day that thunderstorms knocked out the power for an hour, twice, 30 minutes apart, I didn't get much done.

Someone didn't see the "/s" ! :)

The stat is based on the past. But the new models they are real good. You'll see in 6-18 month all jobs are gonna be done by AI.
Chat GPT 5.x was terrible but now we've got Chat GPT 5.x+1 and now it's reall good!

Do you even prompt bro? /s

DYI anything is usually an order of magnitude cheaper than a professional production.

Most movies these days seem to spend as much money promoting the movie than they spent producing the movie. Here promotion was free to him. So that's a factor 2 right there.

DIY amateur does not mean it's bad. In video games, we've seen that story unfold a hundred times in the last 20 years.

$2 per conversation is INSANE.
I hope these are the most insightful, life changing conversation.

Cause I used the chat bot of a subscription service yesterday and it's so bad I decided to call and wait 2 hours on the phone instead.

> I too would love to get paid to do my hobby.

Feel free to petition your government to create similar programs.

I don't know where you live. But in the US, it is a constitutional right!

yes. Heroku has become very expensive. I migrated a few of our services to a native EC2 box for 75% cost reduction within the last year.

I still only have a handful there for a services there where it is a bit harder to migrate because we did our setup stupidly. (We put the heroku domain name in client installations that are harder to upgrade.) But we'll bite the bullet and migrate out this year I would assume.

I teach at $stateuniversity. We have been expecting this for years. For us the number of 18 years old has peaked in 2023 I think. And the enrollment prediction of freshman in the state are within 2% of the prediction we made in 2019 purely based on population.

Ironically, we are getting more students. What is happening is that when the total number of student regionally decreases, we did not lose student. But hyper local small universities lost students to us. We admitted the same fraction of students give or take, but a higher fraction of student came to us rather than a tiny school so our yield went up. Also some local universities had to shut programs down and the students who would have gone there are going to us instead.

The dynamics is interesting.

Now I am not saying that other factors aren't part of the equation. But if you ANOVA it, I bet it's 95% an effect of number of 18 year olds.

And if you look at the actual code, it is really a case of I vibe codes the right calls to matplot lib.

And frankly, I haven't written a piece of matplotlib in 3 years either.

You must have been lucky.

I remember fighting quite a bit with ndiswrapper to make wifi cards work right around 2005

A lot of these optimus system that were hybrid intel/nvidia gpu that switch back and forth had tons of driver support issues around 2010.

Though for the last 15 years, support has been really good for me.

BBB is fairly popular in Europe.

It is also seemingly integrated in Canvas (a Learning Management System used in many schools and university in the US)

Well, it probably hasn't hurt valve yet. But it probably will impact it eventually.

It is not hard to see that there is a good chance the computing landscape will have more ARM based system in the future. Mac laptops are ARM based, and MS produced surface with ARM for a long time now. The nintendo switch and switch 2 are ARM systems.

It seems reasonable for Valve/SteamOS to see a shift to ARMin gaming as a long term threat/opportunity.

Obviously you need software, like a mouse driver.
But, shouldn't all these features essentially be buttons. Shouldn't the OS be providing standardized interface to this?

I left windows for linux such a long time ago that news like this confuse me...