3,914 karma · joined June 16, 2021
Indeed, welcome to enterprise software.
As bad as the Soviet Union was, what came next for Russia was far far worse. The Soviets at least had party rule; Russia is now an absolute autocracy ruled with an iron grip of one man who is now liquidating 30,000 people a month in a pointless war. Orders of magnitude more people have died in the last four years of Ukraine than in every direct Soviet military action combined post-WW2. Remember that Afghanistan was their most infamous blunder, leading directly to the dissolution, and only killed half of what they are losing monthly now.
Yeah. Words matter. I do indeed wish we were back to a time where that was the case. America has always been flawed and contradictory, but our greatness came from a shared sense of some higher ideals that we strived for, regardless of the messy reality. That's been lost, and it's sad.
No. Democracy good, autocracy bad. America is speed-running toward the latter at this point.
Ling's Cars would like a word with you: https://museum.lingscars.com/
I'd bet my life conversions tanked with the new redesign last year after he retired.
I think about this a lot. I'll have to explain to my kids some day that there was long period of time where you couldn't just talk to a computer and have it talk back to you, and that communicating with one required special skills that took years of study to master. It's going to be completely impossible for them to even remotely understand what that was like. Sort of like the pre-electricity days for us, but even more-so.
...Which was a perfectly valid choice in 2005. It was that or Ruby, more or less. Java, ASP, and ColdFusion were a thing for enterprise, otherwise it was Perl CGI, Python, or some crazy custom C++ stuff.
They were never not grindfests. EQ, Lineage 1/2, FFXI, and most of that era were almost entirely about the grind. The difference is that you were forced to grind with friends. FFXI in particular was physically impossible to progress without a full party at all times, and there were no ingame mechanics to facilitate that. You had to talk to people and form relationships. Individual servers were real communities with long running rivalries, alliances, reputations, and prestige. That's the heart and soul of the genre that made those games unforgettable, and was lost when WoW took over and introduced dungeon finder and server sharding.
The key is making them one frame at a time, rather than asking for the whole sheet. Adherence frame-to-frame with a reference image is really good, so just prompt with the previous + direction. I finally got Nano Banana to make fairly decent fluid animations that way.
Existing in a large org over the long term becomes a game of survival. It's very much similar to the "dark forest" or the Eye of Sauron. Your number one goal as an IC is to complete the tasks directly assigned to you by a supervisor and avoid at all costs any kind of "hey you" assignments that have zero upside and plenty of possibility for downside. It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where individual initiative mattered and was rewarded, but it doesn't. It becomes "why haven't you delivered XYZ", and the vague ephemeral reasoning of "well A, B and C for team D needed fixing" is not an excuse, and now you can't pay your mortgage anymore.
Awareness is not necessary at all to create great harm. Biological viruses know nothing of what they do, yet destroy whole populations. I suspect the first truly damaging AI incidents will be similar; agent swarms locked into a self reinforcing reasoning loop that has no "intent" but is destructive nonetheless.
I'm pretty sure that's the dream goal of any plumber. No one "plumbs for fun". No one wants to truly do the actual thing, they want the money that allows them to do whatever they want. It's just that doing the actual thing is the only way you can get the money at first. And being good at doing the actual thing and enjoying doing the actual thing makes doing the actual thing bareable or even fun while reaching your actual goal (the money). As soon as you can free yourself from that you will.
You dont become Tim Curry unless you live for the attention. I highly doubt it was against his will. Shatner is still out there doing the theater circuit right now at nearly 100. Those generations in general (Silents and GIs) just had the mindset of "I'll stop working when I'm dead". It was the later Boomers really that latched onto the concept of retirement.
I say this with the utmost respect, and not trying to put you down here, but serious skiers are literally just getting warmed up for the season at 13 days, even if the snow is crap.
Skiing has always has been the prototypal "rich person" vacation because it is and always has been prohibitively expensive to casual folks for whom it competes with other vacation options. But the developments in the industry over the last 30 years from capital improvements funded by them have been an absolute godsend to locals who live the lifestyle.
Skiing more than 3 days a year. Pass prices are trivial at that point. The entire business model of the resorts is based around the family that goes once a year for 3-5 days, so if you're in that group it kind of just is what it is; an expensive luxury vacation.
That's exactly my point. If you take a 3 day family ski vacation once a year, you are the demographic whose money keeps the whole industry afloat, and allows the $600 season passes to exist.
>I also don't see how the product is superior to what was offered prior
Lifts today are a completely different thing from the 70s. You were talking single speed doubles and T-poles back then for basically everything, and there was nowhere near as much terrain developed. Getting six digit vertical days was completely unheard of. Now you take a high-speed detachable quad from base to the top, and have vastly more terrain available. Practically every major ski area has expanded massively since then.