The only projects you listed were all busy work. You moved things to Docker, great. You have a librechat environment and grafana dashboards, great. But none of that is actually having built anything.

Cisco is known for having low-quality programmers in house. When they want something serious done, they often use contractors (or wait until another company does it and then buy that company). A profitable approach has been to figure out what CISCO wants, then build it and wait for them to buy you.

Apple has become average, mediocre even, but calling it slop is too harsh. They aren't that bad. I don't even think it's accurate to call them bad.

Basically I agree with you.

Calling it "slop" is too harsh. It's an era of mediocrity, or an era of "coasting on past achievements." They've been better in the past, but Apple will get the hardware fixed, and return to their expected trajectory. Apple still supports really good engineers, especially in hardware.

The company that seems to be entering the slop era is Google. They've turned directly towards the revenue as the only metric that matters which means content slop is coming. Google search is barely usable: if it weren't the default search engine in my browser toolbar, I probably wouldn't use it at all (in fact, I'm going to change my UI right now to test that hypothesis). Worse, they don't recognize and support engineering excellence inside the company: they've been taking over by the management class.

So Apple will cruise for a while but Google shows signs of rot.

It had a ton of potential, but it wasn't easily programmable. Wish they had given me more access.

Different people. Some people like it, some people don't.

I understand all the words in your comment, I'm just not sure there's a complete thought behind it.

You should adjust your intuition so you're not racist.

Altman also has no clue how to maximize his personal power. He's doing better than John McAfee, but he's barely holding things together. No time/ability for dominating things, he can barely even hold on to his power at OpenAI.

I like my RAM, but I'll sell it to him...for the right price.

When they rewrote Xcode in 2014, it was obvious that the slop was coming and would eventually spread to the entire company. The Xcode rewrite was obviously not done by people who used the tool, it was a UI designer rewrite. Prettier, less useful.

Learning how to prompt an AI is much easier to learn on the job.

I do. It's largely un-indexed and undiscoverable.

The old internet was great. It required literacy to use. People who used it had a certain level of logic.

Since video internet came along, you don't even have to be literate to use it. People are more interested in what's popular than in what's true/logical. The quality of everything dropped a notch. I wouldn't mind, if I could filter it out. But websites like yours are essentially unfindable now.

I don't know about that, but the 8 track and VHS definitely deserved to die.

Gopher still exists today. Apparently it's growing.