I’ve been in the tech industry for 20 years. I undertook an IT degree in 2004 (for microprocessor architecture) and another in 2014 (for software engineering).

Both times I observed three distinct styles of student. The first were those who heard they could make big money in IT. They didn’t have any interest in the field, knew little to nothing about computers, and massively underestimated the difficulty of the course work. Very few of these made it past first year.

The second group were the “enthusiasts”, the kind of people who ran their group’s local LAN party every month and own an ethernet hub. The kind who reformat their PC every 6 weeks to keep it running fast. They built their own PC when they were 16. These kind think first year is a breeze, and don’t even read the text book, but are quickly out of their depth in second year.

Finally are the autists. These are the ones who you can just tell they have a deep special interest in the field. You ask them a question about metaprogramming in Python, or database denormalization and they talk your ear off for an hour. These people read the whole textbook in the first week of class. They correct the professor when he gets something wrong (but politely, by email, after class).

My point is, in my experience, there are always some percentage of neurotypicals and those who are motivated by the money in every year, and has been for more than 20 years. I don’t think it’s getting more prevalent. Maybe now due to higher levels of diagnosis and increasing social awareness, it’s easier to spot the autists, and perhaps due to the AI boom, the money chasers are easier to spot too.

2015: The cloud is just someone else’s computer.

2025: That bird is the cloud. He’s getting away, hey he’s flying! Get back here you little runt! Give me back my ISOs!

+1 for Forgejo

Do you have any favourite PWAs you use for work or at home?

I generally prefer native local applications wherever possible, and for a long time I was against the movement to web based tools. That is until one thing changed. I moved to a different department at work. In this different department, I am issued with a Windows 11 laptop that is extremely locked down. It cannot run any executables aside from those whitelisted. I cannot run anything as administrator. If I need anything new whitelisted, I need to write a full page justification, get an endorsement from my manager, and then it can take over a year to get approved (but most likely will be immediately denied).

Obviously one thing it can run is MS Edge. All of the company tools and systems are webapps on the intranet, accessed via Edge. Now I’m grateful there are so many high quality browser based webapps around.

This is a fun question to ponder, and you’ll get a thousand different answers from a thousand different people.

I think the more important question (and much harder to find an answer for) is What’s the meaning of the universe? Why does the universe exist? How was it created? Why was it created? What was before the universe was created? What comes after the universe?

And you can join those two questions together. Are the two related? Is the universe’s purpose to create life? Is life’s purpose to experience the universe? Would the universe exist if there was not life to experience it?

I know your Star Wars comparison was to reinforce your point, but that does sound like a plausible plot for a legit Star Wars movie that I’d watch.

I like FriendlyJordies, appreciate his humour and admire the work he is doing to expose corruption in Australian government. But man, I cannot stand his voice, and his affectation and his mannerisms. I can’t watch his videos anymore, it’s like nails on a chalkboard to me.

Do you mean hdf5? I extensively used COGs (cloud optimised geotiffs) and NetCDF4 (based on hdf5) at work over the last 10 years. Both have their pros and cons.

The main limitation with geotiff is its pretty much only usable for layered 2D raster data.

NetCDF4 (hdf5) can set up frames of any dimensionality, you can have datetime axes, time series data, 100d ensemble data, etc.

What’s the compatibility like? If someone visits your site using IE 11 does it work? How about Firefox 4.0, or Safari 6.1?

The place I used to work had those compatibility requirements. But they were also still mandating the use of IE 11 for all their corporate software. If you’re designing and developing for IE 11, you often get Firefox 4.0 and Safari 6.1 compatibility for free.

Still, it’s nothing like when I was in uni we needed to design websites with IE 6 compatibility, that will make you question your career choice.

:cafe:babe: is another common one. Or :acdc:feed: .

Yeah, these days I just call them 3.5mm audio plug, or quarter inch audio plug.

Same. People age quite differently. I didn’t start puberty until I was 16. I didn’t get attracted to girls until I was 17. Much later than my friends.

I got a job at a pizza shop when I was 20, and I made friends with the 15+16yo employees there, I got along much better with them than people my own age. I can see how that’s was potentially creepy, looking back on it, but it seemed normal enough at the time, those people were my good friends.

I matured very slowly. I didn’t graduate uni until I was 29. I’m now 39, physically I look like I’m 30, mentally and psychologically I feel like I’m 30.

As others have said, tidying and cleaning are quite different things. Most cleaners will come to do the latter. If your house is untidy, it makes their job harder.

You can get a person in to tidy up for you, but it’s usually a different person than the cleaner, and that requires much more input from yourself “Where does this go? Where do you want this? Do these clothes need to be folded or washed? Is this trash or not?”.

Anyway. Yes I’ve definitely been guilty of tidying the whole house before our cleaner comes.

Ah, you mean a Deutschkompoundenwordkopf.

I’ve used many calipers with a vernier scale, but for some reason I’ve never seen the use of slots like this to simplify and highlight the reading. It’s actually a very obvious thing now I’ve seen it. Are there any commercial calipers that have it?

I had one too. Besides the screen resolution, the actual worst thing about them was the MMC storage. Literally slower than a 5400rpm HDD. Mine was the one with the slightly faster atom CPU, but it was bottlenecked by the crazy slow storage.

I’ve done something like this before, but thankfully it only impacted services that I host for my own use, didn’t affect any family and friends.

Btw, I’ve found the easiest (but not the cheapest) way to fix this is to simply buy bigger disks. Swap out each disk for a bigger one one-by-one, then resize the whole volume to fill the new disks. Resizing upwards is much faster than shrinking a volume.

I’ve never had a volume shrink operation work without errors, and yes it takes days if you have more than 4TB.

Chlorine is nature’s soap.

Yeah, I’m not proud, I needed to google it to get past that bit too on my first playthrough. It seems like this was one thing they didn’t add any in-game hints for.