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Back in the later 70s a Chicago three-letter AM radio station used to speed up songs so they could stuff in more commercials. And the DJ would do the parent’s talking when there’s no lyrics, even to the point of talking through the entire Love Unlimited Orchestra’s Love’s Theme instrumental.


I never understood the business reason for doing this. Do they really think listeners will switch away if they go 500 milliseconds without hearing a human voice?


It’s the opposite, they do it to fit in more commercials, because apparently people don’t switch away when they talk over songs.


I still prefer my pre-2016 Intel Mac since I can do more things that I want to do on it than my newer M4.


As John Scalzi once said, "The failure mode of clever is asshole." [1]

That has prevented me from posting what I thought was a clever or cheeky response in case it didn't come across the way I wanted.

---

[1] https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/16/the-failure-state-of-...


The irony is that Scott Adam's himself wouldn't have been in favour of policing one's own thoughts. /tongue-firmly-in-cheek


That's a great quote; over the years I've internalized something similar which is why I try to be less clever on the internet than in person.


I love that guy. Never having been an avid reader, I’m trying to read more, and my mission now is to read through most of his books.


thanks for sharing, I think I needed to read this


-100%. With this looming Shiny Toy plus other sub-optimizations at my last place of work, I decided to retire. Didn't want to deal with it.


Sounds like it's +100%, assuming you are now doing things that provide beyond food and shelter security...

I would say +110% to remind you of the effort your childhood coaches almost assuredly requested of you, but didn't want to trigger the quibblers who would point out that's impossible (not that there's anything wrong with that)


My output as a software engineer is now zero (I'm even letting my JetBrains personal subscription lapse). True, I am now reaping the rewards of having been a software engineer, but all that is past effort. My LoC since I retired is zero.


One of the biggest reasons I left a company was because the CTO and his toady, both coming from company X, made a unilateral decision to switch to X's proprietary and expensive framework above senior developers' objections because, in his words, if people leave the company, we can always go back to company X to support the application written in X's proprietary framework. Um, yup. Never mind that framework was totally inappropriate for the application, or that the UI looked like a refugee from 2000. Oh, and never mind that the biggest customer had nothing but trouble in another application written in said expensive proprietary framework.

That mindset plus a dash of RTO equaled me out the door.

Edit: spelling


The company I worked for, a not-for-profit, didn't want to hire juniors because after training them in modern software development techniques, etc., that they didn't get in their undergrad, they'd leave after about three or four years since they were no longer junior, and the for-profit sector paid better. Admittedly it wasn't sexy or used bleeding edge techstacks. From what I've heard, that's still the case there.

Instead they went after burnt-out for-profit veterans who wanted a better life balance and good benefits who'd already made their numbers and needed medical.


> after training them in modern software development techniques, etc., that they didn't get in their undergrad, they'd leave after about three or four years since they were no longer junior

Isn't 3-4 years kind of a standard length of employment time in software engineering?

> burnt-out for-profit veterans who wanted a better life balance and good benefits

... are y'all still hiring?


(commenting late in the game, so the point may have been made already)

I personally believe that "AI" is mostly marketing for the current shiny LLM thing that will end up finding some sort of actual useful niche (or two) once the dust has settled. But for now, it's more of a solution being carpet-bombed for problems, most of them inappropriate IMHO (e.g, replacing HR).

For now there'll be collateral damage as carbon-based lifeforms are displaced, with an inevitable shortage of pesky humans to do cleanup once the limitations of "AI" are realized. Any the humans will probably be contract/gig at half their previous rates to do the cleanup.


> most of them inappropriate IMHO (e.g, replacing HR)

What is HR and why is replacing HR with LLM inappropriate? Is there some level of assistance that a person doing HR can gain from using an LLM?


My $0.02 with 708 comments ahead of me.

I currently use Windows, 10 to be exact, to play games, and in a VM to run an income tax fat app (since the online version is so much more expensive). My game machine cannot upgrade to 11. A mobo upgrade won't be that expensive for the game machine, but instead I'll covert it to a Linux box and run the few games that work on Linux.

I believe my Windows days are over as of, say, October 14 this year.


FYI "the few games that work" is most of them these days, including newer games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring and older ridiculous towers of cards like my heavily modded Skyrim setup. I think it's mostly things that use invasive anti-cheat software that struggle. I use a mix of Steam and Heroic Games Launcher and haven't run into anything I've been playing recently that doesn't work except my PSVR2 to PC adapter in Steam, which I haven't taken any time to troubleshoot.


I love that you've got something like, "upgrade to Linux" in your calendar :)

However, I recommend at least testing it on your hardware before that date. Put Ventoy on a USB drive and play with some live distros. Just to make sure everything works the way you expect.

You never know, you may have that one piece of hardware that doesn't work :shrug:


FYI - that is the publicly announced date that MSFT will be officially dropping support for Win10.


If you make your Windows 11 USB with Rufus you can disable the TPM 2.0 and other hardware requirement checks. You totally should try a Linux install first though!


I had a somewhat repugnant second-level boss whose philosophy was to give people a little more work than they thought they could do to get the best performance out of them, and I believe he was right since, at least for me, I worked harder to make the earlier deadline and/or did more than I thought I could. He must have known Parkinson's.

That only went so far, since piling yet more work onto someone who made an earlier deadline may get them to the point where they don't perform.

Which is why I appreciated a not-for-profit company where they'd actually ask me if I needed more time, since quality was of utmost importance. At that point at that company I knew the codebase, so I'd consistently over-estimate and deliver early, since there was still a chance of hidden impacts/requirements.


It'd be nice if something similar were available to traverse, say, directories of writings in Markdown, Word, LibreOffice, etc., and output a single text file so I have all my writings in one place. Plus allow plug-ins to extract from more exotic file types not originally included.


seems fairly trivial to chain together something with find, pandoc (https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html) and cat.


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