I’m currently working in medtech, I don’t want to dox myself because the company is quite niche but it involves using machine learning to diagnose a particular disease much earlier when it’s more treatable. I’m managed by an experienced senior engineer who’s probably forgotten more about about the profession than I know and the workload is reasonable and well compensated. Yeah it’s a startup so you temper your expectations in terms of long-term job security but there’s definitely good companies out there, don’t get me wrong there’s a lot about the industry and the broader socioeconomic context it exists in that’s awful but there’s a lot of good opportunities too. I could bitch about the ecosystem for hours but at the end of the day I’m a bit of a drama queen, I’m well paid for interesting work and you can’t say fairer than that.

There’s certainly much more than adtech, you could actually exclude business to consumer industries entirely if you wanted and make an excellent living in the business to business sector where there’s lots of interesting problems to solve. If you’re thinking of training as a software engineer or similar and entering the industry I’d still very much recommend it if it’s something you enjoy and are good at. Give frontend a wide berth if you’re worried about framework churn too, the vast majority of my work is backend where the churn isn’t as bad and there’s always plenty of work for you if you’re decent at SQL and a couple of common languages used for that purpose.

We’re not all patent-shagging tech bros, if you want proof of this you can look at how most of the industry runs on freely shared code that’s written in enormous volumes for no other reason making the lives of programmers easier and therefore improving their productivity. If this almost anarchistic process stopped even for a month the whole thing would fall over and never get up again!

I’ll back you on that, Mac OS X Tiger was the prettiest OS Apple ever made in my opinion although Leopard was fantastic as well. The iPod in general and early iOS was gorgeous as well.

There’s nothing wrong with speculation as long as everyone knows that’s what going on.

Take the work of Julian Jaynes for example; it’s fringe, it’s speculative, but he’s asking questions that nobody else asked before and that in itself is worthwhile because it can pave the way for better questions which are falsifiable.

I lived in rural Wales for a while so I know this feeling. Growing up in England I thought I knew about rain before but on the Cambrian Coast it rains sideways.

Can confirm, I write Scala at my current workplace and spend my days over the moon about the fact I’m not writing Java.

Yeah the guitar amp and vintage HiFi markets keep a few types (mostly power triodes and pentodes but also preamp valves and even a couple of rectifiers) in production, largely in the former Eastern Bloc. There’s a few people on YouTube making their own too.

I’m so far from an expert it’s not even funny but I’m a hobbyist for old valve (tube on the other side of the Atlantic) electronics. You need an industrial base to make semiconductors but if you can do flamework with glass and build a good enough pump that opens the door to amplifiers, radio, telecommunications, and even crude computers which in turn opens the door to a lot of creature comforts and social improvement that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

Vintage audio is the best, I’m planning on building a Mullard 5-10 hifi valve amp from the 1950s in the relatively near future as my second valve project (a micro-power valve AM radio transmitter is my current work in progress). The parts are spendy especially the transformers but valve/tube stuff is just so cool and the fact you can just build a 70 year old design using datasheets of the same vintage and have it work just as well now is so refreshing to my programmer brain that’s used to stuff going out of date when you blink. Also I’m a magpie for glass and glowing things.

The downside is of course that the voltages involved tend to be rather unpleasant, the 5-10 design calls for 250 volts off the top of my head and some amps use 500+. Also they’re unspeakably inefficient by modern standards, it’s essentially a statement of ‘I’m putting rule of cool over sensible cost-sensitive engineering and you’re going to love it’ which I’m very here for.

An older tradition is to use the birthstone of the person you’re proposing too which is really endearing in my opinion.

Microsoft literally used to make it part of their OEM agreement that manufacturers couldn’t bundle their machines with anything but Windows, you’ve paid for it in the form of reduced competition in the OS market.

The other half of this scam is the piss-poor public transport in a lot of countries, here in the UK if you’re not a Londoner the government could not care any less about carrots only sticks to get people out of cars.

I’d buy a nice house somewhere a bit wild and in the middle of nowhere on the south coast of either England or Wales, something old with character and a big garden with a good pub nearby. I’d also buy a classic wooden sailing yacht and put enough funds aside to maintain her as well as kitting her out for serious passage-making. When I’d done that I’d figure out how much money I need to make work optional for the rest of my life and how much would keep my family comfortable in an emergency, as well as a small ‘shit hits the fan’ fund kept in something you don’t need electricity to access like gold just in case. I’d then donate the rest to charity, the bulk to enviromentalist lobby groups and charities directly helping people (the RNLI comes to mind for example) but also to a few niche causes like keeping the ailing pirate radio ship Ross Revenge afloat and starting a breeding programme to save the highly endangered otterhound. I’d also like to have a few documentaries made, and I’d drop a few content creators I like some donations too.

Honestly all I really want to do is go sailing and not have to deal with the rat race, I don’t want to live an oligarch’s lifestyle and I definitely don’t want the sort of attention and arseache that money would bring you. That money would be far more effectively used for good in the hands of others so I’d end up donating the majority of it, I suspect on the order of 80% of it at least.

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Yeah it’s such a shameless cash grab, I know corporations mug us off every day but it’s disrespectful when they’re so desperate about it.

Yeah IP lawyers ruining my music collection is why I started keeping my music offline for the first time in over a decade.

I do wish NSFW was more granular. A lot of the things I’d like on my feed wouldn’t necessarily be what you’d want to have open in the office but I also don’t want it to be full of porn. Not anti-porn or anything I just don’t want it in my feed 24/7.

For me my country is things like the institution of the local pub, liberal use of gallows humour, and deeply despising the idea that cities and fields ought to be organised on regular grids rather than things like Parliament or the monarchy. I love my country in the sense of the former, I think I’ll live out my days frustrated and pessimistic about the latter.

Here’s an opinion that’s actually unpopular rather than simply controversial: domestic flights in the UK other than to Northern Ireland (which isn’t on the same island so fair enough) should be forbidden on the grounds their contribution to climate change cannot be justified.

Instead we should renationalise the railways by letting the franchises expire without renewing them and expand their capacity as far as we can. Instead of pissing around with HS2 we fuck the NIMBYs over with an Act of Parliament which they can’t swat away or delay and extend it all the way up to Scotland.

What I think ChatGPT is great for in programming is ‘I know what I want to do but can’t quite remember the syntax for how to do it’. In those scenarios it’s so much faster than wading through the endless blogspam and SEO guff that search engines deal in now, and it’s got much less of a superiority complex than some of the denizens of SO too.

Neither are scams but the UK is fond of permanently doing temporary things. Income tax in the UK was first imposed as a temporary measure to fund the Napoleonic Wars but after Waterloo it was never repealed since it brought in so much. Same sort of deal for the 70 mph national speed limit, it was a temporary measure in the 1960s apparently in response to someone caning it down the motorway in an AC Cobra and as we know, there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.