ZaoLahma

Could have called it a wee wii though.

I really think we need to make a (large) difference between platforms focused on user interaction and discussion (Discord, Reddit, old school forums, ...) and platforms where the person behind the user is the focus and placed in front of the entire world to be judged (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, ...).

The former is not focused on you as a person and you are judged by the discussion that you participate in, while the latter is focused on you as a person and you are judged by how interesting you are or can appear to be.

My peers are disappearing from the latter category (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, ...)

I don't think I know the user name of any of my friends on Reddit even, or who are active there, which is exactly the point - nobody cares about the connection to the real life person.

I, Millennial, am seeing a huge decline in social media usage among my peers. It's reached the point where I didn't even bother to install any of the apps when I got a new phone last year, other than Facebook Messenger which we still use for planning activities.

The vast majority of my friends and "friends" on social media haven't posted anything for years. I think my last contribution was back in 2017.

I thought social media in general is boomer / gen X town nowadays.

I absolutely agree with you. 100%.

The problem is how we can make this transition from a large population to a smaller one with as little suffering as possible.

As I said, here we are expected to work into our 70s on average already, which just will not be possible. At some point there won't be enough resources to care for those who can't produce. We need a substantial increase in productivity per individual for society to keep working while the population numbers are decreasing, and that doesn't seem to be happening.

I'm not blind to this very, almost blindingly, obvious problem. I've posted comments on the subject before, where I've strongly supported the idea of a decreased population.

I just don't see a way to decrease the population levels in a way that doesn't lead to a collapse of our way of life.

As cynical as this will sound, breeding is contributing to society in the sense that you provide productivity to it. Ensuring your retirement, in essence.

In many (western inspired) parts of the world, the retirement scheme depends on productivity being increased for every generation. This because every generation that retires is larger than the previous generation that retired. The population growth drives the need for an increase in productivity.

You can increase the productivity by either increase the size of the working population, or make the working population more productive per individual. Up until recently we actually did both. That's why our elderly now can enjoy VERY comfortable retirements compared to two generations ago.

For us, those who are now working, it doesn't look great. We're not having children and it's getting hard to squeeze more productivity out of us.

Here according to the latest projections, I'm not supposed to retire until I'm 69. And this is with today's data. I fully expect it to increase further. Those that were born in 2015 or later are expected to work until they are 71, according to today's data.

The problem is that I don't think that on average we can work until we hit 70. My father's generation was quite broken right about around 65 when they retired.

Ah yes, the ongoing conundrum of trying to maintain a clearly very unsustainable quality of life while also increasing the population numbers to ensure the productivity needed to sustain the large and quickly aging parts of the population.

Fun times ahead.

> It's about kicking the brakes until culture catches up and absorbs impacts, not stopping

Which impacts are you referring to?

Growing up in the 90s, it was bizarre to witness the downfall of Sega. Here the Mega Drive (Genesis) was almost as successful as the SNES. Everyone either had a Mega Drive or played it regularly with friends. It was a very popular piece of hardware.

Then the generation after everyone had a Playstation, and I knew of only one kid who ended up with the Saturn. It's so strange considering that the Saturn was released several months ahead of the Playstation here.

I dont't know if it was due to the Saturn being seen as the inferior option at the time, pricing, availability or some other factor, but the Playstation absolutely killed it. After that Sega was gone.

There was a bug in an embedded system I worked on that several engineers, software as well as hardware, spent months troubleshooting.

I eventually got called in and fixed it with a while loop and one function call inside of that loop. 4 lines in total, counting the brackets.

A very trivial change if you didn’t know why it was there, what impact it had on the system or how much it would have continued to cost in engineering hours if I hadn’t figured out what went wrong, why it went wrong and how to fix it.

I’ve spent a good chunk of my 15 years as a software developer as a pure “bug killer” and then you don’t really get to write that many lines of code, but the impact per line is big.

Huh I see.

That makes me happy even though I'll still choose to pay, since I guess it will make it harder for the legal streaming providers to suddenly downgrade the experience.

It's sad that we need piracy to drive innovation and keep quality expectations up.

> The success of p2p file sharing platforms rested on the fact that people like piracy and free stuff, it didn't compete on service quality. Which became evident when most content became cheap and people switched.

Nah, it was absolutely about service quality. Absodefinitelutely.

Back in the day it was either buying things on physical media and adjusting your living situation accordingly (having meters of shelves just to store it and media player(s) set up to play the media), OR sail the seas and have "your" entire media library stored away on a media server in the closet, easily accessible from the media center PC connected to your TV. Netflix before Netflix was a thing, essentially.

Now, finally, they caught on and do provide a similar (in some ways higher) level of service as the "homebrew Netflix" solution from "þe aulde" days, and people are prepared to pay for it. I gladly pay the price for the different streaming services because of the convenience of having everything easily accessible in a format that doesn't take up all the space at my home. If that disappears though, I'll grumpily re-build the server in the closet and expand the sails again.

Here, "somewhere in Europe", you can order groceries online and get them delivered to your door for cheap. This kind of service really took off during COVID and then stuck. I guess people found it convenient.

We usually still go to the store, but use this service when we have a large amount of shopping to do as it just is... convenient. Instead of driving to and running around in the store looking for all the stuff we need and then carry it out to the car and into the home, we just gather around the iPad in the comfort of our living room and order what we want. The day after it shows up at the door. It's fantastic.

> I strongly disagree with: "Simple, obvious code is easier to write, easier to get to work .."

I get your point, as well as the author's point.

Complex code is difficult to write, and unless you really pay attention, likely to be wrong.

Simple code is easier to write, easier to verify and more likely to be correct, but it's very hard to learn how to express your solution to a complex problem in simple terms.

> We need to take a good look at our ridiculous unsustainable life-styles, and make some hard decisions about whether we need a stupid over-sized pickup truck and a new phone, or if we need an actual future for us all.

That's one aspect of it, but it won't really help much if you need to feed and provide an acceptably comfortable life to 8+ billion humans, with a strong indication of that number increasing even further.

As the population increases we will be forced to turn even more healthy nature into agricultural biological deserts, while at the same time losing existing farmland to climate change.

People don't want to touch the subject, but if we want a comfortable future then we need to put a stop to the population growth.

> Aside: I don't understand the obsession people have with throwing out LOC.

Agreed. A better metric is how much of it you need to interact with on a daily basis in order to perform any meaningful work.

If the code is sane, you'd only ever need to interact with and understand a fraction (a subset of the public APIs) of the entire codebase. You could have millions of lines of code and be productive when knowing only a couple of hundred of those.

If the code is insane, the risk is that you'd need to interact with most of it when introducing any non-trivial functionality. Worst case scenario there isn't any clear rules of what is public and supposed to be used, and what is private and isn't supposed to be used, and people have used "whatever from where ever" to solve their problems.

The second one is always bad, but also significantly worse the more lines of code there are. Perhaps those who throw LOCs around also implicitly tell us that they are dealing with the second variety of code.

The freedom to decide one day to just leave.

In my mid 20s I maintained a not-too-extreme minimalistic life style where I could pack literally everything I owned into my car. I could decide to just leave and lose at most some months' worth of rather cheap rent.

I never actually did use the opportunity, but it gave me a lot of comfort knowing that I wasn't stuck somewhere, that I could at any moment just leave.

This is just the thing - there needs to be a very clear reason for you to partake in FOSS, something that you want to gain from it that has a bigger value to you than the cost of allowing your time and effort to be used by others for free, and money can not be it.

Well shit.

Let's hope they at least allow you to wait for a flush to pipe so you won't have to carry over the user's transaction.

For extra amusement, make it so that you have responsibility without authority.

I.e. you know what is broken and roughly how to fix it and in everyone's view it absolutely is your responsibility to "git'erdone", but you can't since you either don't have access or resources to do what needs doing and you won't get the access or the resources due to office politics or some other equally unfixable issue.

That's a fun little stress-biscuit to eat.

> It allows programmers to be lazy, take short cuts and not think about good software architecture.

I think it has little to do with laziness, and more to do with the taboo of reinventing wheels. If there's a very generic and very broad solution to your very specific and very narrow problem, you're encouraged to use (or invent!) the very generic and very broad solution.

This leads to everything being abstracted to the point where most of your application does absolutely nothing. Just look at the call stack of a modern java web application. The depth of the layers of abstractions that you need to navigate to reach anything that performs any real work is vertigo inducing and nauseating.

It far from ideal and I agree that economics is behind it, but I strongly oppose the wording that it "allows" programmers to be lazy.

This really highly depends on the people that you work with.

At a previous employment (a 100% WFH position) I had most of my colleagues in India, roughly 4 time zones away from my own so we almost never met in person, and we'd have personal chit chat sessions while working.

Then I've worked with people who weren't present even when you were sitting right next to them. They'd come into the office, say "morning", put on their noise cancelling head phones and be gone for the rest of the day (modern open space office life in a nut shell).

In a large enough company, the experience will be exactly the same even if you do go to the office. It might take weeks or months before you have a reason to reach out and finally realize that you haven't seen someone around for quite a while. And "large enough" is surprisingly small.

For close colleagues leaving, WFH makes absolutely no difference though. Those you keep track of regardless.

Oh, but that comes as a needs-to-be-fixed to the pull request from the 6y SE, so no worries at all.

Software engineer straight out of uni:

# Get force of gravity as below to be used later

F = G * m1 * m2 / r*2

Software engineer 5 years after uni:

    gravitational_force = ( 
      PhysicsContextConstructorFactory.createByRelativisticEnum(SystemConfig.getRelativisticEnum()).construct().getGravitationalConstant().value()
      * body1.getRelativisticContext(SystemConfig.getRelativisticEnum()).mass().value() 
      * body2.getRelativisticContext(SystemConfig.getRelativisticEnum()).mass().value() 
      / SystemConfig.getRelativisticContext(SystemConfig.getRelativisticEnum()).distanceTo(body1, body2).value() \* PlatformUnsignedInt(PlatformMinMaxAwareUnsignedInt(2).value()).getUnsignedInt().value()
    )*

Software engineer after 15 years:

# Newton's law of universal gravitation is well within wanted margin of error

F = G * m1 * m2 / r*2

It would be nice if the rules for 2 wheeled vehicles could be refined as well.

Here (not France) you can drive an EU moped (45km/h) on a car license, which could (and should!) be a great alternative to a smaller car. The problem is that it's difficult to get to and through the city without touching the highways, which are strictly off limits for the mopeds for obvious reasons.

What's needed is something in between a full sized MC and a moped that can be driven on a car license and that can reach at least 80km/h to keep up with inner city highway speeds.

> Before iphone was launched someone could have made the same point about Nokia's smartphones.

For my question the phone-equivalent would be someone asking today in 2024 what is the difference between a Nokia of 2006 and an iPhone of 2024, when only knowing that you can make calls with both of them.

I genuinely didn't know that the modern 737s are so much of a hack to get around regulations and save cost on R&D, and thought they were just good aircraft that were worth iterating on.

Huh, I see. So keeping it around for so long was mostly for avoiding expensive R&D and pilot re-training, and not so much for the 737 being the perfect platform to keep iterating on.

Interesting.

And this is what I'm curious about.

I can't imagine much of the original design would be left in the aircraft except for the overall shape of it. I'm guessing (remember now, basically zero aircraft development knowledge) that most tech has been updated to modern equivalents. Engines, controls, computers, ...?

So what would be changed in a complete overhaul of the aircraft?