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Comment Re:Robotics? (Score 3, Insightful) 96

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) 96

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:Make them pay (Score 1) 108

Sorry, you were talking about prices today and "still using" nuclear. Your comment re: subsidies suggests you are talking about Hinkley Point, which is not yet generating power and no subsidies for said power generation are being paid.

Existing nuclear is probably the cheapest energy in your grid. The "good news" at least for you is that almost all of it is scheduled for decommissioning by the end of the decade, so you will be able to see just how "expensive" it was when your rates go up as a result.

Comment Re:NIMBY-ism created this (Score 2) 108

the only electricity plants getting approval in the next few years, will be coal/gas-driven ones.

Darth Cheeto is not going to permit any coal plants--not because of anything related to him, but because no one has any plants to permit. Anything currently being discussed is a pencil exercise at best (and will almost certainly never come to fruition).

I work for a company that provides equipment for fossil power plants. There is a shit ton of gas coming in the next five years but no coal at all. New coal power is dead in the US.

Comment Re:The economy is struggling (Score 1) 238

Wrong. Virtually no government agency's staffing levels have kept pace with population growth. Total federal government employees per capita now is half of what it was in the 60's 70's and 80's.

I wonder if there is anything that has been going on for the last half century or so that could explain why employees could be more efficient and you might have less of them for the same task, even in the face of having more customers. Some sort of revolution, maybe of the computer sort?

On second thought, nah, that wouldn't make any sense.

Comment Re:Ship's sailed on that one (Score 2) 90

It was definitely a big problem because if some of the kids have them, the ones that don't are excluded.

This was a huge issue for my oldest in middle school. She was in a very small minority that did not have a phone. It was made worse by the fact that we don't have a landline, so if friends wanted to call her, they were calling either my wife or my phone (and the kids calling were not a huge fan of that, so they didn't call much). In addition to the social aspects, it caused a few issues with extracurriculars where one of us wasn't present and things like pickup times were fuzzy rather than fixed.

We stuck to our guns and didn't let her have a phone until 14 but I'd be a liar if I said it didn't have negative aspects in addition to positive ones. Our youngest might end up with a phone closer to 12 as a result, though that remains to be seen.

Comment Re: My answer (Score 2) 113

Either way it doesn't sound like there are enough details to know exactly what they mean.

"Know?" Maybe not. "Infer?" Absolutely. 10AM-6PM is in the range that normal office workers are at their desks, so it stands to reason they are asking their office workers to be in a warehouse instead of at their desks. It's not exactly a giant leap to conclude such.

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