DFXLuna

I think people are overreacting.

A lot of larger tech companies started hiring like mad during the past two years because the economy was over juiced. I work at an enterprise and was chatting with my boss about it and she mentioned that there was this idea that companies that weren't hiring were going to fall behind the those that were.

This is those companies undoing all of that panic hiring.

Have you tried KoboldAI? It can run, among other more mundane things, some pretty large ERP models. Its been making me lose sleep this week. :D

Agreed. It's hard not to get overly excited after playing around with some of these models and seeing what they can do, though.

This is something I'm interested in as well. It feels like last year, I saw every tech company fighting tooth and nail to scrape up every last engineer. We even had trouble making modest pickups at my own megacorp because candidates were getting multiple offers during our accelerated interview process.

This seems weird though because I have no doubt that every financial analyst at each of these companies saw the incoming downturn a mile away. If it was just a few of the companies making recent questionable decisions (Twitter, meta) it would make more sense to me, but the list of companies laying people off keeps growing.

Surprisingly, the margin isn't as insane as you would think. Linus Tech Tips actually did a video comparing a homebrew Mac Pro killer vs the Mac Pro and they came out surprisingly close. Ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_IHSRPVqwQ

Once you factor in the cost of stuff like support and hardware validation it becomes pretty much a moot point. That's without even considering that you would need to hire a supply chain expert(s) to acquire large quantities of parts if you needed anything more than a few machines. At my work, we have whole departments full of people dedicated to making sure we have the right mix of hardware at the right time to fulfill customer needs.

There are definitely some configurations that really don't make sense (the lowest end config comes to mind) but, at the same time, if you run a business with a team of people training on Macs, the amount of money it would cost in training and lost productivity to switch over to Windows for possibly lower prices makes even less sense.

I'm a custom PC and linux guy myself but this seemed like a good time to remind everyone that there's more to computers than just the cost of making a single machine.

I work in the workstation division of one of the companies listed in the article and the market for workstations is not going anywhere for a long time.

It's not that workstations died, it's that they look different and solve a different problem. Anyone can build a computer with off the shelf parts that has the absolute maximum specs that any vendor can produce. Anytime a new workstation makes the news (see Apple's latest workstation), the "PC Master race" gang is quick to point out that they can build the same system without the Apple/HP/Dell/Lenovo tax. What they somehow always forget about is that, if I'm an ITDM and I need 100 or even 1000 systems and they need to be configured, validated and ready to deploy from day one, custom built computers aren't feasible in any sense of the word. The value add from workstation companies is a mix of scale, availability, validity and uniformity.

Didn't the FBI and the Mueller report pretty thoroughly lay out the massive scope of Russian social media influence on the 2016 election and beyond? I thought this was a decided issue but maybe I'm wrong.

This seems like a good time to plug running a storage server on your local network. You can pick up old workstations off eBay for 100$. Stick a couple of drives in it, load it up with data to preserve and then put encrypted backups in the cloud. Back blaze B2 is something like .001$ per gigabyte.

It's a fun experiment with clear, practical use.

It's weird to see someone calling roads free when I give the government 25% of my paycheck every month to pay for things like roads.

We can't even pass a tax in my town to give necessary funds for road repairs beyond the most basic. I wonder how something like that would fair.

The idea is pretty simple: concise languages ( like python, smalltalk etc.) work well when you can get away with being concise. Verbose languages ( like the C family ) work well when you can't. It only takes a couple of tries writing a project that favors verbosity in a concise language before this becomes apparent.

This article is pretty interesting. However, if you read closely you'll see that they fail to justify their implication that digital media access is causing young people to feel more lonely. It's speculation that appeals to readers "common sense".

I've been considering setting up pihole on my home server for a while but I've always been worried that it would break a website for a non-technical family member while I wasn't there to fix it. How has your experience with website breakage been?

Also, how has your experience with wire guard been? I've been using my vpn's default client on all my individual devices out of convenience but after looking at the wire guard website I can see the appeal.

Agreed. I bet there's quite a bit of money out there waiting for whomever starts making paid, tracking-free alternatives to popular free apps.

It's always fun to read stuff from the backblaze guys. The stuff they do is just neat.

Looks like SERN is moving ahead of schedule.

Be safe.

El Psy Congroo

I'm going to blow the lid off this one and share a very "out there" opinion.

Read both. Soft skills books won't help you navigate the insane economy of web technologies and current framework books won't help you develop your fundamental, transferrable skills.

Any time someone tells you a choice is 'one or the other" they're probably lying and the correct answer is 'a little bit of both".

"Don't worry, we can't force you add a backdoor into your software. We'd rather talk to your CEO instead."

The best way to choose a language is always to look at what problem you're trying to solve and what kinds of problems the languages you're looking at aimed toward.

If you're not familiar with programming already, python has a very low cost of entry and a massive following.

If you're familiar with programming and looking to get into functional stuff, Haskell will give you a pretty good start.

Could someone with more electronics experience than me explain the difference between the what the author made and a an off the shelf amp?

These kinds of blog posts are always awful. "These cash-grab books about teaching kids to program are bad so teaching your kids to program is bad." Throw in some anecdotal evidence about how the author is doing it right and then show off to the internet.

It's not like there isn't a better underlying point that could have been discussed (forcing STEM on kids) but the author didn't.