rr808

I dont like Costco, it epitomizes American over-consumption. Parking lot overflowing with oversized SUVs with people loading up oversized trolleys with food from food corporations to take back to their oversized fridges and storage basements.

Compared to LA even NZ looks cheap

> Senior management routinely seem baffled that they could announce redundancies or hiring freezes, yet technology costs would continue to rise.

I dont think they're baffled, they just trying to show they're attempting to keep costs under control.

The last few companies have all had desktops in datacenters with the local PC just a virtual terminal.

Yes that is another reason, high healthcare costs for employing workers means higher construction costs in the USA.

Even states like Mississippi and Iowa have low housing costs and wages much higher than Spain.

A lot of the price difference between Europe and USA now are wages. US wages for construction workers in NYC or SF are 2 or 3 times that of Madrid. Lots of things are cheap just for this reason alone.

My office has a big grad program so there are hundreds of interns and people under 25 in the office. Is really fun for them, I think its a real benefit that people look for now.

I know its not an acceptable view in 2026, but if women had to leave school at 16 and thus couldn't have a professional career I'd think many more women would have multiple children, like 5+ would be normal.

One issue is that the wealthiest most advanced countries are having the fewest people, while the poorest countries have a the fastest growing populations. Pakistan or Nigeria alone will have more people than the whole of Europe. They may become wealthier but more realistically there will be an even tiny minority of people living well with most of the world in slums.

There ended up being 4 lines between the two cities. Hard to believe such a thing was possible in this day and age. I guess if there were no cars trains would be much more popular.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool%E2%80%93Manchester_l...

Or as Arthur Brooks puts it - the shower now is the only place where you dont have your phone on you.

lol yeah I'm not a poet.

Their business model is more like make a lot of noise about high tech, then hire h1bs to do routine IT work their corporate customers do.

I have Opus 4.7 at work at 15x. Burns through tokens like water. It feels like one of these new mega datacenters is just for me. I'd love to know what the bill is, but we're just encouraged to do as much AI as possible.

One reason I like Go is the fast compile. Rust really slows you down. Esp in days of AI when agents are building/testing in cycles.

As someone working on a Sunday on a rainy memorial day weekend. Bring back the 5 day week!

Agreed, the biggest boom towns have been in the South where restrictions are low and profits high, leaving some really ugly suburbs.

There are millions of homes that are super cheap and no one wants to live there. I think we missed a real opportunity for WFH to allow people to move where things are more affordable, rather than having everyone live in mega cities and complain of high prices.

I have 3 laptops, a PC and a PC at work and 2 phones. Passkeys still confuse me and I'm not 60 yet.

I quite like the new trend where you can login just by entering the 2fa on SMS or email. Skip the whole username/password.

I still remember those $3 uber rides.

I'm still on 23H2, windows update fails every time I try. This summer I'm switching to Linux.

I work in big financials. Everything used to be built on Excel. A lot still is but Python/Jupyterhub or custom applications has taken over a lot of the complex stuff. Excel isn't really essential any more.

I switched from C++ to Java/Python 20 years ago. I never really fit in, I just dont understand when people talk about the complicated frameworks to avoid multithreading/mutexes etc when basic C++ multi threading is much simpler than rxjava or async/await or whatever is flavor of the month.

But C++ projects are usually really boring. I want to go back but glad I left. Has anyone found a place where C++ style programming is in fashion but isn't quite C++? I hope that makes sense.

Me too, I figured I spent more time on the computer than taking pics. Now I shoot jpg and if I have some spare time I go out and shoot. If I take a good pic I share it with basic editing if any instead of waiting to get it "perfect".

Yeah I started with that. Eventually did an electronics engineering degree. Now I just write python and CI config.

Still having your own hardware seems so much cheaper. Maybe even just for dev/uat environments?

Every big corporate I have worked at has lower cost of capital than Amazon, and yet they want to move to AWS. I just dont understand it.

Nice, I didn't think of that. I love the fanless trend in Apple macbook airs.

Back then I didn't foresee the 22GB image our jupyter/ML is in 2026. There must be a better way.