I most places I worked in (all in Europe), Junior Devs are generally hired as an investment, since their productivity sucks until they become more experienced so the idea is to teach them until they become more senior.

You can’t really replace such Junior Devs with LLMs because the LLMs don’t learn (at best they’ll somewhat follow past guidelines still in their context until those guidelines are push out as the context fills over time).

Maybe in the US (were job security is a joke) there’s more a tendency to hire Junior Devs as cheap manpower.

Grand Theft Auto driving data.

They voted for somebody just like them who only cares about himself.

modern Internet

isn’t just the OSI stack all the way to IP.

Yeah, that was kinda the point I was making.

PS: And CERN is actually an international project, rather than just Swiss, though located in Switzerland.

Doing some of the work developing the modern Internet isn’t the same as doing all the work developing the modern internet.

The Web was born in that well known American institution, CERN, invented by that well known American citizen, Tim Berners-Lee.

One wonders why the application “used for everything related to authentication with government services” runs on a Private Sector cloud.

I mean, it’s not as if a Digital Cloud is any more than a bunch of servers running somewhere with a direct connection to the Internet.

Then again, this is The Netherlands, which is has been ruled by a very Neoliberal right-wing party (in various coalitions) for over a decade so it makes sense that the government there would have even essential software for interacting with Public Services be operated by the Private Sector.

Well, a quick check of my Mini-PC which has a bit more software than Lubuntu and Kodi but not by much (so, also stuff like Firefox and qbittorrent) shows a bit over 20GB used for everything but the mount to were the qbittorrent is downloading files, so even in this day and age of stupidly expensive storage all the storage you need is still going to be about €20 or less (that’s the price of a new 64GB SATA SSD from AliExpress, which should fit the same connectors as your HDDs unless those PCs are so ancient they still use PATA instead of SATA).

I expect a dedicate distro for just a TV box like LibreELEC should be even smaller.

Mind you, I have the storage for the videos I watch in Kodi outside in the form of portable mobile HDDs since its a much better price per GB for bulk storage and the speed of even mobile HDDs is fine for playing h264 and h265 compressed stuff, so that’s of course not counted in those 20GB.

Upgrading an old PCs with a 64GB SATA SSD should be reasonable cheap and more than enough to run either LibreELEC or Lubuntu with Kodi plus a bunch of extra stuff.

That said, the benefit of a Mini-PC like the one I got (with an N100 processor or similar) is that it uses very little power (unlike old desktop PCs or even notebooks) so it’s cheap to just leave running all the time and it’s quiet.

When my really old TV box was in it’s last legs I tried 2 different Android TV boxes, which whilst not in TV Stick format like that, have very similar hardware specs.

These things were around €50 from AliExpress.

They were frustrating, one was actually sluggish, the other not exactly fast (it really boils down to the version of the cheap ARM CPU in your device and the processor names don’t exactly make clear which ones are more or less powerful), and ran Android TV isn’t all that great at customizing it and comes with pre-installed crap and Google spyware.

Replaced them with an N100 Mini-PC running Lubuntu and with Kodi always on top. That thing runs circles around those 2, not even reaching 10% CPU usage when playing 1080p h256 videos.

Now, I also use the Mini-PC as a home server, hence Lubuntu makes sense, but for the stupidly simple solution just install LibreELEC which is a distro pre-configured to just run Kodi.

You can get a wireless remote for it, at which point it’s pretty much the same sofa experience as a TV Box or TV Stick except for the ON/OFF button (because it only works to turn the Mini-PC OFF, not to turn it back ON).

That said, that Mini-PC with 8GB memory and a 128 GB SSD was about €130 over a year ago and now it’s about €240.

I believe the Shield and Apple TV are actually more expensive and you don’t fully control what’s running in that hardware, what it does with your personal data and even if it will end up enshittified or not, unlike with a Mini-PC were you installed Linux.

In my experience that’s not at all a brag in Europe, quite the contrary.

Branded anything!

The “see, I can afford branded stuff” flex of being better because having money for it right alongside the “easier to just walk around with ‘I’m stupid’ tatooed on my forehead” because of being dumb enough to spend 5x more money just for a label.

It’s maybe the biggest poor/low-middle-class person’s “look, I have money” flex there is.

(It’s even more hilarious when one actually knows people from Old Money: those with lots of money and who were born into it actually wear simple but high quality stuff with no visible labels, whilst the ones trying to flaunt their wealth are either not wealthy at all or are Nouveau Riche and hence feel to need to flaunt their wealth whilst not being experienced enough at having lots of money to use it the way old wealth does)

Just about everything to do with how strongly they believe in a specific Religious sect OR how strongly they think all Religion is bullshit.

Not claiming any of them is right or wrong, just point out that going around talking about one’s Religious or anti-Religion beliefs is a weird flex anchored on a feeling of personal superiority.

It’s literally less than a cent (euro or dollar) for a whole bottle of tap water.

Out of curiosity I checked the price I pay for tap water in Portugal and 1 m³ (1000 l) costs around €0.5, so a 2l bottle of tap water contains all of 0.01 euro cents worth of it.

They’ll listen to the lobbyists peddling them with hookers and blow (and promises of future non-executive board memberships and and millionaire speech circuit fees).

That’s all the expertise they care about.

Having been chronically overworked for a while in my profession, the last thing I want is my life in the hands of somebody chronically overworked.

At least in my profession the mistakes I made because of being so tired did not kill anybody or handicapped somebody for life.

The guy is a proper hacker in the original meaning of the word of somebody who grabs something and changes it to make it do something else it was never meant to do.

And as any proper hacker knows (and his obviously in the interview he too feels), actually succeeding and ending up with this crazy actually working thing that you invented yourself and nobody else has is immensely pleasurable.

It’s a cool hobbyist project but was spun into a “way to save on gas” in the news report.

Surely an electric scooter would be just as cheap to run (though probably not to make, even by converting an old scooter).

Ideally the thing should be broken into a “Camera captures images and makes it available in an open format” side and an “Application for Linux/Windows/Mac/iOS/Android/whatever reads said open format data and shows it to the use/records it in local hardware”, so that if one’s chosen provider for one of the sides enshittifies you can easily replace it, but I can understand the tendency to make and launch the whole thing fully integrated as one non-interoperable big bundle from a single provider given that in practice “do it and they’ll come” projects that just provide data in an open format in the expectation that other people will make the software that uses it, almost always fail.